Shortly thereafter, Sullivan was in Chicago, a draftsman for William Le Baron Jenney , an architect who was devising new ways to construct fire-resistant, tall buildings framed with a new material called steel. After a year in France, Sullivan returned to Chicago in , still a very young man, and began his long relationship with his future business partner, Dankmar Adler. The firm of Adler and Sullivan is one of the most important partnerships in American architectural history.
Louis Sullivan partnered with engineer Dankmar Adler from approximately until It is widely believed that Adler oversaw business and construction aspects of each project while Sullivan's focus was on architectural design.
Along with a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright , the team realized many architecturally significant buildings. The firm's first real success was the Auditorium Building in Chicago, a massive multi-use opera house whose exterior design was influenced by the Romanesque Revival work of architect H.
Richardson and whose interiors were largely the work of Sullivan's young draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, however, where the tall building gained its own exterior design, a style that became known as Sullivanesque.
In the Wainwright Building, one of America's most historic skyscrapers, Sullivan extended the structural height with exterior visual demarcations using a three-part system of composition — the lower floors devoted to selling merchandise should look different from the offices on the middle floors, and the top attic floors should be set apart by their unique interior functions.
This is to say that the "form" on the outside of a tall building should change as the "function" of what goes on inside a building changes. Professor Paul E. Sprague calls Sullivan "the first architect anywhere to give aesthetic unity to the tall building. Residential architecture like the Bradley House in Wisconsin blurs the design line between Sullivan and his protege Frank Lloyd Wright.
After the firm's success with the Auditorium building, Wright played a larger role in the smaller, residential business.
This is where Wright learned architecture. The best-known mingling of architectural minds can be found in the Charnley-Norwood House, a vacation cottage in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. With that success, Charnley asked the pair to design his Chicago residence, today known as the Charnley-Persky house. Sullivan and Wright were inventing a new type of residence, the modern American home. Sullivan's designs often used masonry walls with terra cotta designs. Intertwining vines and leaves combined with crisp geometric shapes, as displayed in the terra cotta detailing of the Guaranty Building.
This Sullivanesque style was imitated by other architects, and Sullivan's later work formed the foundation for many of the ideas of his student, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Sullivan's personal life unraveled as he got older. As Wright's stardom ascended, Sullivan's notoriety declined, and he died virtually penniless and alone on April 14, in Chicago. The structure housed a theatre, hotel and offices, with the entrance to the auditorium on the south side; this auditorium, fronting onto Michigan Avenue, was surrounded by offices and a room hotel, arranged into a uniform ten-storey building.
This was embellished with a square tower, with an additional eight storeys, above the entrance to the auditorium, offering views over Lake Michigan. The Chicago Auditorium was particularly striking, externally, when buildings of this size were uncommon. It made a strong visual impression through the heaviness of the rough stone and through its ordered symmetry, with the height emphasized through the unembellished arches above the windows.
Inside, the arch motif is repeated in the theatre's proscenium arch and ceiling, which is highly ornate, and the barrel-vault of the hotel's restaurant. This project was a collaboration between Sullivan and Adler, with the assistance of engineer Paul Mueller. The building is based on H. Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse, which adapted the Romanesque style to suit a modern commercial building, but sets itself apart through innovative engineering and interior embellishment.
The foundation of the building operated like a raft, built from crisscrossed railroad ties with a double layer of steel rails embedded in concrete, allowing the building to stand on a site where soft blue clay made conventional foundations impossible.
This raft also served to distribute the weight of the load-bearing outer walls over a large area. His French training is also clear, with the curvilinear motifs throughout the theatre's interior providing an American equivalent to the plant-based decorative systems developing as Art Nouveau in Europe at this time.
This, the most significant of the three, was commissioned by Henry Harrison Getty after the death of his wife, Carrie Eliza Getty, and intended to serve as a tomb for the pair. The tomb stands on a triangular plot and takes the form of a square prism. The structure is composed of limestone, which are arranged in large, regular blocks on the lower half of the tomb. The upper half is more decorative, with a regular pattern of octagons, each of which contains a starburst design. The cornice features a band of smooth limestone above another with an intricate spiral pattern and the roof above is flat.
Approaching the tomb, the visitor's focus is drawn by the ornate bronze gates at the center, over which is a semi-circular arch composed of wedge-shaped voussoirs with bands of ornament and engraved letters spelling 'GETTY. This structure rejects the figurative sculpture and gothic features that distinguished nineteenth-century tombs, instead embracing pared back decoration that consists largely of geometric forms. Sullivan's use of a limited palette clearly articulates the structure of the tomb, with the bronze entrance drawing the visitor's focus, connected to the stone walls above through the repetition of the starburst motif on the gates.
Sullivan's use of curvilinear forms, particularly on the gates, can be linked to Art Nouveau, but the use of simple, geometric decoration in order to accentuate form, rather than obscuring or embellishing it, proved influential in movements including the Prairie School and, later, Interwar Classicism. The base of the structure contains retail stores with wide windows; above the second floor is a simple cornice that separates the lower floors from the grid of identical windows above.
The supporting piers are designed to appear as pillars, drawing the eye upward and emphasizing the verticality of the structure. While the terracotta at street level is plain, the windows above the second floor are separated by carved inset terracotta panels and the building finishes with a frieze, carved with celery leaf patterning, and overhanging cornice, beyond which is a flat roof.
While the Wainwright Building was not the first skyscraper to be built, it was the first to define the form, creating a modern visual language for the new building type. Prior to this, skyscrapers were designed following Beaux-Arts rules, with an aesthetic emphasis on horizontal bands rather than unified vertical facades.
The Wainwright building is dominated by its vertical lines, with windows and horizontal panels inset so as to make the piers leading upward more pronounced. Sullivan's overall conception of the building is similarly based on the structure of a classical column, with a simple yet weighty base giving way to a plain shaft and ending with an ornate attic, though the specifics of his detailing is resolutely modern, with plain terracotta on the lower floors and the celery leaf used as the basis for the decoration of the frieze.
Sullivan's insistence on a vertical aesthetic drew from his tenet, "form follows function," which would come to dominate modern architectural approaches. In Chicago, particularly, Sullivan's approach was widely adopted, resulting in a skyline that appeared uniform and coherent when seen from a distance.
The Transportation Building was a temporary pavilion, housing locomotives, railway cars and other transport exhibits, designed by Louis Sullivan for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, in The structure, which faced the Court of Honor, was an eighteen-acre shed lined with arcades and lit through clerestory windows and a cupola at the center of the roof which could be reached via an exhibit of elevators.
The central entrance, painted pea-green with silver leaf embellishment, came to be known as the "Golden Door. The arches were framed by a large rectangular border.
The nature of the event meant that the structure had to be cheap and quick to produce, capable of rapid construction and decoration, whilst making a strong visual impact on visitors and enclosing a vast amount of interior space for display. Other architects working at the World's Columbian Exposition had largely responded to the brief with ivory buildings that drew from classical precedents, for which the event would come to be known as the "White City," but Sullivan instead drew inspiration from both the Romanesque and from nineteenth-century European industrial architecture, creating a building that stood out at the fair.
While the classical structures had a strong impact on the American Renaissance Revival, Sullivan's Transportation Building offered an alternate direction in which architecture could move. His unique style is recognizable, particularly in the portal, which echoes the interior of the Chicago Auditorium in its arches, and the building led to an exhibition of Sullivan's work in Europe, where it was popular.
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