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Louis Sullivan C R E a T I N G a N E W a M E R I C a N Architecture

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Louis Sullivan C R E a T I N G a N E W a M E R I C a N Architecture Louis Sullivan C R E A T I N G A N E W A M E R I C A N ARCHITECTURE PATRICK F. CANNON Photography by JAMES CAULFIELD Reaching for the Sky Problem: How shall we hicago has long laid claim to being the birthplace of the modern skyscraper. While impart to this sterile pile, the genesis of the engineering techniques that permitted buildings to rise ever higher is a long one, there seems little doubt that they came together for the first time in the ten- this crude, harsh, brutal C story Home Insurance Building of 1885, designed by William Le Baron Jenney. agglomeration, this Jenney was a trained engineer turned architect. Despite the Home Insurance Build- stark, staring exclamation ing’s steel frame and masonry nonbearing curtain wall construction, it was just a taller of eternal strife, the version of its neighbors. No attempt was made to express its verticality; indeed, it had no graciousness of those higher fewer than four horizontal bands dividing its façade into five separate units. forms of sensibility and Many of Adler & Sullivan’s office building designs of that time and earlier weren’t unlike the Home Insurance Building. But when the firm began to exploit the new struc- culture that rest on the lower tural possibilities available with steel framing, Sullivan began to think seriously about and fierce passions? How how best to emphasize the new buildings’ most obvious feature—their height. shall we proclaim from the The late 1880s were busy years for the firm, not least because of the extreme dizzy height of this strange, demands of designing and constructing the Auditorium Building, begun in 1886 but weird, modern housetop not finished until 1889. The Auditorium had an office tower that rose to sixteen stories, the peaceful evangel of but only five floors rose above the main building, which was of masonry load-bearing construction. It was the commission for the Wainwright Building in St. Louis in 1890 sentiment, of beauty, the that was the turning point in Sullivan’s development of a true tall building aesthetic. cult of a higher life? Frank Lloyd Wright later recalled Sullivan putting a rough sketch of the building on his Louis H. Sullivan table and Sullivan’s young assistant realizing his master had solved the “problem” of the “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” skyscraper. How had he done it? While he would not have put it in these terms, he had seen the tall building as a column consisting of a base, shaft, and capital. All of his impor- tant tall buildings, except the Chicago Stock Exchange, follow this pattern: a basement for the furnace and other utilities, a two-story base for shops and similar uses, a sill, The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Louis H. Sullivan, “The and then the multistory main office section, with identically expressed bearing columns Tall Office Building Artistically and nonbearing mullions rising to the attic, often highly decorated and capped by an Considered,” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (March 1896): 403–409. equally highly decorated cornice. Typically the massive corner piers rise uninterrupted Far right: The Rothschild Building (Chicago, 1880–1881) was typical of Sullivan’s office building designs prior to the advent of steel framing. A premium was put on providing the maximum window size permitted by bear- ing walls. The building was designed before Sullivan’s name was added to the firm of Adler & Company. Photograph by Harold Allen, courtesy Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Near right: A fragment of the ornamental frieze from the cornice of the Rothschild Building. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. from the sidewalk. Spandrels separating the windows are recessed so that the columns and mullions rise uninterrupted to the cornice. The two Chicago buildings that best expressed Sullivan’s ideas—the Chicago Stock Exchange and the Schiller Building—have both been demolished, the Schiller in 1961 and the Stock Exchange in 1972. Only fragments of these great accomplishments remain in museums and private collections. Tragically, photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel died in an accident while trying to salvage some pieces of the Stock Exchange. Although the interior is much changed, the Wainwright Building in St. Louis has a largely original exterior. Also in St. Louis, the Union Trust Building of 1893 still stands but with significant changes to the base. Sullivan’s only New York City commission, the Bayard (later Bayard-Condict) Building, exists in a largely restored condition, as does the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York, perhaps Sullivan’s best tall building, restored in the 1980s. 3 The Guaranty Building (Buffalo, New York, 1895) is perhaps the most richly decorated commercial building in America. Every inch of the façade, except the glazing, is covered with terra-cotta molding. Arched forms begin above the entrance doors and are repeated just below the sill, in the sill itself, in the spandrels, and in the attic openings below the cornice. Rather than looking fussy, the combination of geometric and foliate designs helps the building soar gracefully from base to top. Opposite: The main Schlesinger & Mayer store (Chicago) was built in stages begin- ning in 1899. The last three bays to the south (right) were added as late as 1961, designed by Holabird & Root to match Sullivan’s design. 5 Sullivan designed twenty column capitals, each of a unique design, for the banquet room inside Chicago’s Auditorium Building. They were carved by Robert W. Bates. 6 Elaborately gilded electroliers hang where the ceiling beams meet. Their exposed incandescent bulbs produce a magical effect in the evening and nighttime hours, the primary times when the room would have been used. 7 Louis Sullivan CREATING A NEW AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Louis Sullivan’s designs stand today as the preeminent exemplars of Chicago school architecture. Even 192 pages, 10 x 8⅞ inches Frank Lloyd Wright, a former assistant to Sullivan, would later refer to him as his “Lieber Meister,” Smyth-sewn casebound with jacket or “beloved master.” Sullivan (American, 1856–1924) brought to his practice a conviction that More than 150 color photographs by ornamentation should arise naturally from a building’s overall design, restating, in a large or small James Caulfield way, themes expressed in the structure as a whole. Having spent much of his career in a late Victorian Includes Bibliography and Index of Buildings world that bristled with busy, fussy ornament for ornament’s sake, Sullivan refuted the fashionable $39.95 US ($45.00 Canada) style with the now famous dictum “Form follows function.” This break from tradition is perhaps most ISBN 978-0-7649-5771-0 evident in Sullivan’s strides to reimagine the commercial space—from America’s earliest skyscrapers to Catalog No. A192 the small-town banks that populated the architect’s commissions in the second half of his career. Available March 2011 In Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture, nearly two hundred photographs with descriptive captions document Sullivan’s genius for modern design. Patrick Cannon introduces Text © Patrick F. Cannon each chapter with key biographical information and discusses the influences that shaped Sullivan’s Photographs © James Caulfield illustrious career. Rare historical photographs chronicle those buildings that, sadly, have since been destroyed, while James Caulfield’s contemporary photography captures Sullivan’s existing Chicago buildings and many other structures in eastern and midwestern cities that are of equal importance in the architect’s oeuvre. PATRICK F. CANNON has had a long career as Published by a publicist, journalist, and editor. He is the author Pomegranate Communications, Inc. of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple: A Good Time Box 808022, Petaluma, CA 94975 Place, Prairie Metropolis: Chicago and the Birth of a 800 227 1428 New American Home, and Hometown Architect: The www.pomegranate.com Complete Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park Pomegranate Europe Ltd. and River Forest, Illinois, all published by Pomegranate. Unit 1, Heathcote Business Centre, Hurlbutt Road JAMES CAULFIELD has been a commercial and Warwick, Warwickshire CV34 6TD, advertising photographer for more than twenty-five UK years. His studio is a state-of-the-art natural-light [+44] 0 1926 430111 production facility in downtown Chicago. His work is [email protected] also featured in the books Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Printed in China Temple, Prairie Metropolis, and Hometown Architect. The Chicago Stock Exchange trading room, as reconstructed at the Art Institute of Chicago. .
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