Louis Sullivan Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) was an American architect of the Chicago School, often called the father of skyscrapers. With his partner Dankmar Adler he designed the Auditorium Building in Chicago, and in the Wainwright Building in St Louis and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo he found an expressive form for the steel-framed office tower. His phrase “form ever follows function” and his rich organic ornament influenced generations of architects, beginning with his employee Frank Lloyd Wright.

Boston, Philadelphia and Paris

Sullivan was born in Boston in 1856. He studied briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked for Frank Furness in Philadelphia and William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago, and spent a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Adler and Sullivan

In 1883 he became a partner of the engineer Dankmar Adler. Their Auditorium Building in Chicago (1889) combined a theatre, hotel and offices. The Wainwright Building in St Louis (1891) and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1896), with their continuous piers and terracotta ornament, defined the skyscraper as a tall, unified form. In his 1896 essay The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered he wrote that form ever follows function.

Later years

After the partnership ended in 1895 his commissions declined. He completed the Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago and a series of small, richly decorated banks in the Midwest, such as the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna (1908). He wrote The Autobiography of an Idea and died in Chicago in 1924. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal posthumously in 1944.