Louis Henry Sullivan, proponent of an American architecture who was in the vanguard of the Modern Movement. As a boy, Sullivan discovered the power and mystery of life in Boston and on family farms. A year in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1872-3) was followed by several months in draughting jobs with Furness and Hewitt in Philadelphia, and a similar short employment with William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago. In July 1874 Sullivan embarked on his only trip to Europe. He studied in the Vaudremer studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and one year later returned to Chicago, where he worked in a variety of situations. In 1883 the announcement of Adler and Sullivan confirmed his full partnership with Dankmar Adler (1844-1900), a productive arrangement which lasted until 1895, when Adler withdrew Based on Sullivan’s comment that “Adler was essentially a technician, an engineer, a conscientious administrator…”, the usual assumption is that he was the skilled engineer to complement Sullivan’s flair as designer and theorist. But Adler’s work “shows a strength, simplicity and straight forwardness together with a certain refinement which reveals the true architect”, according to John Root, another premier and famous architect of the Chicago School. The Auditorium Building, Chicago (1887-90), was the partnership’s first major triumph and the city’s tallest building. The soaring and delicate auditorium, which seated 4,200, was embedded in a robust multipurpose speculative office block and a 400-room hotel. In contrast, the same cubic power with more refined decorative surfaces is evident in the tiny Getty Tomb (1890). The partners’ two most familiar skyscrapers (usually credited only to Sullivan), the Wainwright Building, St Louis (1890-91), and the more vertical Guaranty Building, Buffalo (1894-6), verify Sullivan’s essay, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (1896); each is “a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation… from bottom to top…without a single dissenting line”. Sullivan’s most important prot?g?, Frank Lloyd WRIGHT, was an apprentice in the office between 1888 and 1893. Yet Sullivan’s solo swansong, the Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store (now Carson Pirie Scott), Chicago (1898-1904), is a handsome modern white block based on the horizontal proportions of the steel frame and the Chicago Window. Its urbane presence was achieved through a series of remodellings and additions so the store was always kept open. Sullivan’s late works, primarily a series of isolated small town banks such as Owatonna, Minnesota (1906-8), and Grinnell, Iowa (1916-18), repeat the theme of his Transportation Building (1891-2) for the Chicago World’s Fair: a robust block is penetrated by a great decorated semicircular entrance and window arch. His restless and intricate ornamentation is always contained by the simplest architectural geometries. Sullivan’s seminal demonstration of a virile and indigenous architecture with a native expression was paralleled by his active participation in professionalism. Both as an organizer and director of various architectural groups as well as a formal theorist on aes?thetics, he propounded “the spirit of the time” and “the genius of the people”. Sullivan as both philosopher and con?science became the most influential force in the concurrent Chicago School with its birth of the skyscraper in “commercial style”. But Sullivan’s “form ever follows function” always went beyond direct functional or structural expression. Sullivan’s commitment to the organic, evident in the stylized nature forms of often lush ornamented surfaces, characterized his creative artistry and lively dedication to architecture as art, and nature as source: “…the complexity of Nature… is steadily revealing a unitary impulse underlying all men and all things”. Sullivan died destitute in a Chicago hotel shortly after seeing the first copies of The Autobiography of an Idea and A System of Architectural Ornament. His obituary in the New York Times called him “the Dean of American architects”.

Louis Henry Sullivan
b. Boston, Mass., 1856;
d. Chicago, Illinois, 1924.

List of major buildings / works:
Adler and Sullivan: Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1887-90;
Wainwright Building, St Louis, 1890-91;
Guaranty Building, Buffalo, 1894-6.
Sullivan: Transportation Building, Chicago, 1891-2;
Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store (Carson Pine Scott Store), Chicago, 1898-1904.

Bibliography:
Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, Lippzncotts Magazine, 57, 1896; Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, New York, 1918, 1934, 1947;
Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, 1924, London, 1956;
Louis Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament, New York, 1924.
H. Morrison, Louts Sullivan - Prophet of Modern Architecture, New York, 1935, 1952.
S. Paul, Louts Sullivan - An Architect in American Thought, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962.
H. Duncan, Culture and Democracy, Totowa, NJ, 1965.
R. Twombly, Louis Sullivan, Chicago, 1986.