StruXure Builder Series Part 4
Most people have heard the phrase "form follows function." Far fewer know the man who wrote it, or that he wrote it a little differently. Louis Sullivan was the Chicago architect who taught the tall office building how to look like one, and he did it in the years after the Great Fire.
He is often called the man who invented the skyscraper, and that is not quite right. Engineers worked out the steel skeleton that let buildings climb. Sullivan gave the tall building its look, a way of making a stack of offices read as one proud, upward thing, and he set the idea down in an 1896 essay that builders and architects still quote, usually wrong.
He died in 1924 with almost nothing, and over the following decades much of his work was torn down. Of 256 commissions in the record, only around thirty still stand. The fight to save the rest helped start the historic preservation movement in America.
The Wainwright Building in St. Louis, completed in 1891, is the building historians point to first.
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Louis Sullivan was born in Boston on September 3, 1856, to an Irish father and a Swiss mother from Geneva. He went to MIT at sixteen and left after a year. In 1873 he went to work in the Philadelphia office of Frank Furness, and he lasted about five months before the financial panic of that year cost him the job. Sullivan said later that Furness taught him more than MIT and his Paris schooling combined.
In November 1873, at seventeen, he arrived in Chicago. The city was two years past the Great Fire of 1871 and in the middle of a rebuilding boom so busy that people called it Derrick Time. He worked for about six months in the office of William Le Baron Jenney, then went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1874 and 1875. He grew impatient with the formal academic training and came home, but he kept one habit from Paris for the rest of his life, the quick first sketch that sets the idea of a design before the details.
In 1879 Sullivan joined the office of Dankmar Adler, and by 1883 the two were partners. Adler was the engineer and Sullivan was the designer. For about fifteen years that split worked.
Their breakthrough was the Auditorium Building, built from 1886 to 1889. It held a 4,200-seat hall, and when it opened on December 9, 1889, it was the tallest building in Chicago. Adler and Sullivan moved their own office into its tower. A young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm around 1888 and was soon running its house work. For the rest of his life Wright called Sullivan his "Lieber Meister," his beloved master.
The Wainwright Building in St. Louis, built in 1890 and 1891, is the one that changed the conversation. Sullivan treated the whole height as a single idea, with a base, a long shaft of offices and a crown, and the ornament worked with the frame instead of hiding it. Historians call it the first tall building that looked tall on purpose.
In March 1896 he explained the thinking in an essay in Lippincott's magazine called "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." A tall building, he wrote, "must be tall, every inch of it tall," and it should be "a proud and soaring thing." The same essay holds his famous line, and the original reads "form ever follows function." Most people drop the "ever," and the line often gets credited to older thinkers Sullivan never cited. It was his.
The Guaranty Building in Buffalo, 13 stories of steel and terra cotta, was occupied on March 1, 1896, the same month the essay appeared.
In 1893 Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, and America came by the millions. Almost every major building at the fair was white and classical, in the Beaux-Arts style. Sullivan's Transportation Building was the exception, full of colour, with a gold entrance of five nested arches people called the Golden Door. The French sent it an award in 1894, but the public loved the white buildings, and the country's taste swung toward classical columns.
Sullivan never forgave the fair for it. Writing in 1924, thirty-one years later, he said the damage it did to American architecture would last half a century. Historians give the decline a longer list of causes. A depression ran from 1893 to 1897 and dried up big commissions. In 1895 Adler and Sullivan split, and Sullivan lost his engineer and his business partner at once. He was also a difficult man to work for, and there was the drinking his biographers describe. He was not entirely wrong about the classical wave, and it was not the only thing that hurt him.
The same years brought the break with Wright. In 1893 Wright was designing houses on the side against his contract. The way Wright told it decades later, Sullivan fired him on the spot. The only detailed account is Wright's own, and he may just as well have quit.
His personal life went no better. In 1899 he married a woman he knew as Margaret Hattabough. A 2002 study found that her real name was Mary Azona Hattabough and that she had hidden her age, which put her near 41 at the wedding rather than in her twenties. They divorced in 1917. By then the money was gone. In November 1909 his belongings went to auction on Wabash Avenue, including roughly 120 architecture books. He hoped for $2,000 to $2,500 and cleared $1,100. In May 1910 he sold his cottage in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for $8,500.
The work that carried him through those years came from small towns. Carl K. Bennett, a banker in Owatonna, Minnesota, read an essay Sullivan had written for The Craftsman magazine and went looking for him. Bennett commissioned a bank in the fall of 1906, and the National Farmers Bank of Owatonna was dedicated in 1908.
It was the first of eight banks Sullivan designed between 1908 and 1919. People call them the jewel boxes, and they went up in towns the big-city clients had never thought to visit. Many would say they are some of the best work of his life.
Sullivan spent roughly fifteen of his last years in the Hotel Warner, at 33rd Street and Cottage Grove in Chicago, in a room that cost about nine dollars a week. He was destitute. His friends put about $200 in his bank account, the Cliff Dwellers Club gave him meals and a desk, and the American Terra Cotta company gave him an office for free.
In 1924 he finished two books, his Autobiography of an Idea and a book of ornament drawings commissioned by the Art Institute. He died on April 14, 1924. His first biographer wrote that the first copy of the autobiography reached him just before the end.
There is a popular version of this story in which Wright erased the man who trained him, and the record runs the other way. Sometime in the mid-to-late 1910s, after roughly two decades apart, the two men reconciled. Wright helped pay for the funeral. In June 1924 he published a tribute in Western Architect titled "Louis Henry Sullivan: Beloved Master." By Wright's own account, Sullivan gave him about a hundred drawings near the end and told him they were his. Wright kept them safe for twenty-five years and published them in 1949, in a book called Genius and the Mobocracy. That loyalty also helped Wright's own legend, and it kept Sullivan's work in print all the same.
Sullivan's name is on the buildings, but he never built one alone. Dankmar Adler did the engineering for the firm's best years, including the Auditorium. When the partnership ended in 1895, Sullivan lost the person who made his designs stand up.
George Grant Elmslie is the man most tellings forget. He worked on the ironwork for the Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago, built in two stages in 1898 and 1899 and again in 1903 and 1904. The 1906 addition is Daniel Burnham's, not Sullivan's. When Sullivan died, Elmslie was one of his pallbearers, along with Adler's son. Wright was not among them.
Carl Bennett deserves a line too, as the client who took a chance on a man the big cities had stopped calling.
The record we have does not name the general contractors or the crews who set the steel and the terra cotta on these buildings. That gap is common in this trade, and this series exists to put those names back wherever the record allows.
After Sullivan died, his buildings started coming down. In early 1961 the Garrick Theater in Chicago, built as the Schiller Building, was demolished for a parking garage. A young photographer named Richard Nickel had led a campaign to save it since April 1960. He lost. But the fight drew attention, and it helped push Chicago toward its landmarks ordinance in 1968.
The Chicago Stock Exchange, built in 1893 and 1894, came down in 1972. Nickel went into the half-demolished building, and on April 13, 1972, part of it collapsed while he was inside. His body was not found until May 9. In 1977 the Exchange's Trading Room was reconstructed inside the Art Institute of Chicago, and the building's entrance arch was set up beside the museum.
A complete catalogue of Adler and Sullivan's work, published by the Nickel Committee in 2010, counts 256 known commissions. Only around thirty survive.
No. Engineers of his era worked out the steel skeleton that made tall buildings possible. Sullivan gave the tall building a unified look, with a base, a long middle and a crown, and he explained the approach in his 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered."
His 1896 essay in Lippincott's magazine reads "form ever follows function." The shortened version, "form follows function," is the one most people know, and it has often been credited to earlier thinkers whom Sullivan never cited.
Wright worked for Sullivan from around 1888 until their break in 1893, and the two reconciled roughly two decades later. Wright helped pay for Sullivan's funeral, wrote a tribute titled "Beloved Master," and kept about a hundred of Sullivan's drawings, which he published in 1949.
Sullivan put his whole thinking about tall buildings into one plain essay, and people are still quoting it more than a century later, even if they leave out a word. If you know something about how to build, write it down.
His best work came while Dankmar Adler handled the engineering, and after the split the big commissions stopped coming. Every general contractor knows a job runs on the person who keeps the numbers straight while someone else draws, so look after that person.
The jewel-box banks went up in small towns, and they rank with anything he built in Chicago. A small job can still hold great work.
Most of Sullivan's work is gone. What survives is largely there because Richard Nickel and others fought for it, and Nickel died inside a Sullivan building doing it. A good building lasts as long as somebody cares about it.
At StruXure.co, we celebrate the makers, the doers, and the teams of builders who turn steel, terra cotta and a sketch on paper into buildings people still stop to look at. We also honor the builders who construct the everyday places society needs, namely schools, hospitals, bridges, sanitation, and much more.
So the next time someone tells you the work you care about will not last, think about Sullivan in his nine-dollar room, finishing his book anyway. Write down what you know, and stand up for good buildings while they are still standing. Let's build.