Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism".
Background
Louis was born on September 3, 1856 in Boston, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Patrick and Andrienne (List) Sullivan. In looks, manner, and name he was an Irishman, but he referred to himself as of "mongrel origin. "
He placed great store on his genealogy, however, as a partial clue to his own personality. His father was a pure-blooded Celt, who from a waif became a wandering musician, and by grim pride and ambition advanced himself to the proprietorship of an academy of dancing in London, traveled, studied dancing in Paris, and visited Geneva.
During his childhood, after a year or two with his grandparents, he spent winters with his father and mother at Boston, Newburyport, and Halifax, and summers with his grandparents at Wakefield, Massachussets, then called South Reading.
In this same year, at the age of thirteen, he determined to become an architect. Two years later, owing to the death of his grandmother and the removal to Philadelphia of old Henri List, who had been his beloved counselor and companion, his home was once more broken up, and he moved to the house of a neighbor.
Education
In Boston he attended the public schools - the Brimmer school, the Rice school, and the English High School - and in his autobiography he gives great praise to a certain Moses Woolson, teacher in the English High School, who, he says, inculcated methods of thought, study, and work on which he relied through life.
At the end of the school year he passed the entrance examinations for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in 1872 he entered the course in architecture under the tutelage of William Robert Ware and his romantic assistant, Eugene Letang, who was a graduate of the famous, almost mythical, Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, regarded by Americans, chiefly because of deeds of its distinguished sons, Henry Hobson Richardson and Richard Morris Hunt, as the miraculous fountain-head of all architectural knowledge, and the open sesame to success and renown in the practice of architecture.
Career
Sullivan sailed to Boston in 1847, opened a music and dancing academy there, and prospered. According to his son, grace, rhythm, symmetry were his watch-words, and their consideration and practice obsessed his existence.
When in 1869 his father moved to Chicago in an effort to find a climate more lenient to the health of the mother, Louis was left with his grandparents.
The study of academic architecture irked Sullivan, however, and he would desert the Greek and Roman orders to contemplate the recently completed Brattle Street Church tower in the virile and stimulating Romanesque as revived by Richardson. After a year there (1872 - 73) he decided that the Institute was no place for him, and his thoughts turned to Paris.
Going to New York in the spring, he went to see Richard M. Hunt, bluff old autocrat, America's first and most distinguished eclectic, who was very kind to the boy, slapped him on the back, and told him to go to Paris. He did finally, but via Philadelphia and Chicago.
In Philadelphia he tarried, working in the office of Furness and Hewitt. Here, as in all offices except Richardson's, the architectural vernacular was largely Victorian Gothic, which Sullivan aptly describes as "Gothic in its pantalettes. "
But the panic of 1873 left him without a job, and he betook himself to Chicago. The raw and unfinished city, rising from the ruins of the great fire, immediately captivated him. Here he stayed for a year, working principally in the office of Major William Le Baron Jenney, afterwards to become famous as the first architect to utilize in a tall building a skeleton of metal as the basic element of its construction.
At this time Sullivan's principal interest was engineering, and the Eads bridge, about to leap across the Mississippi, fired his imagination far more than any building he had seen. Still searching for the Holy Grail of his imagination, an underlying law for architecture, he set out for Paris in July 1874. Only six weeks intervened between his arrival and the examinations for entrance to the Beaux Arts. Sullivan laid out a schedule that demanded eighteen hours of study a day; at the end of a month, threatened with a collapse, he took a day off and recovered.
He wore out three tutors, but passed his examination with Eclat and then took a flying trip to Rome to verify, he says, Taine's description of Michelangelo's ceiling. A statement of his professor of mathematics kept ringing in his head, " - here our demonstrations shall be so broad as to admit of no exception!" That was what he must find for architecture - a rule that admits of no exceptions. His work at the Beaux Arts, most unfortunately, gave him no answer to his riddle, though his year in the atelier Vaudremer was filled with interesting experiences and youthful delight. In a year he had returned to Chicago.
After work in various offices, where he acquired a reputation as a remarkably skilful and rapid draftsman, in 1879 he entered the office of Dankmar Adler as a "probationary" partner; on May 1, 1881, the firm became Adler and Sullivan. The rise of the new firm was extremely rapid; in but a year or so its practice was exceeded by that of only one other in the city. The chief problem confronting the designer of large buildings in those days was to obtain more light for offices and to devise means for building ever higher, a problem essentially structural and economic which to Sullivan was of absorbing interest.
Although he asserts that such buildings as the Borden Block, built in these early days, were a radical departure from their contemporaries, there is little to be seen in them that substantiates him. He designed in the vernacular, which was bad, a strange combination of Victorian Gothic, English "Eastlake, " and French Neo-Grec.
In the early eighties Chicago rushed headlong into Richardson's Romanesque revival, Sullivan along with John Wellborn Root and the rest, although he denies it. When the Auditorium Building, Chicago, was projected, Adler and Sullivan built a trial audience room, seating over six thousand, in the old Exposition Building, demonstrated their mastery of the problem of acoustics, and thereby won the contract for designing the new building.
At the time of its building (1886 - 90), it was the city's greatest architectural monument, and the auditorium proper, only a part of a huge building devoted to the purposes of hotel and office building in addition, remains (1935) the greatest room ever built for the purpose of opera. It not only won the firm international recognition but also marked the critical crossing of the ways in the career of Louis Sullivan.
After a nervous breakdown that compelled a prolonged stay (1889 - 1900) in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, there followed a series of important buildings, designed by Sullivan in consistent adherence to the principles and peculiar forms set forth in the interior of the Auditorium, and accepting with enthusiasm the revolutionary principle of skeleton construction. Notable among these are the Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Missouri, the first complete expression of his principles of construction combined with his original decorative treatment; the Transportation Building with its "Golden Arch, " the sensation of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the formal introduction of Sullivan's new conception of architecture to the world; the Gage Building, Chicago, an almost perfect solution - structurally and architecturally - of the steel-constructed skyscraper; and the Getty Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, a singularly beautiful and original architectural tour de force.
In 1900 he returned to Chicago, but with the death of Dankmar Adler in that same year his opportunity to do work on a large scale ceased. In addition to the fact that the clients of the firm were for the most part Adler's clients, Sullivan's haughty and uncompromising attitude turned away commissions, and his irregular and nonconforming mode of life did little to inspire confidence. The last years of his life, although beset by privations and harried by the triumph of eclecticism and the apparent defeat of his principles, were yet fruitful in many ways.
The rise of Classicism or Eclecticism which followed the Chicago Exposition of 1893 was too strong, however, for Sullivan and his followers, the "Chicago School, " to combat successfully at the time. But Sullivan, whose confidence in the ultimate outcome never failed, saw the turn of the tide in the overwhelming acclaim that greeted the second-prize design of Eliel Saarinen in the Chicago Daily Tribune competition of 1924.
Sullivan's permanent place in the roster of great architects is assured. Chronologically, at least, he is the father of Modernism in architecture - the Transportation Building at the World's Columbian Exposition anticipated by five years the Art Nouveau movement in Europe.
He died in 1924.
Achievements
Louis Henri Sullivan was the founder of a school of architectural philosophy which has become almost universally accepted. He, more than any man, helped to make of the skyscraper America's greatest contribution to architecture. His original "Sullivanesque" style of architectural ornament, while too personal and complicated for popular acceptance, was yet a distinct and valuable contribution to the thesaurus of architecture, and his book, The Autobiography of an Idea, an intensely personal revelation, is a notable addition to American literature.
Sullivan produced a series of small banks brilliant in design and rich in practical innovations, beginning with the National Farmers' Bank, Owatanna, Minn. , and including the Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa, and banks at Columbus, Wisconsin, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Lafayette, Indiana. He also produced the twenty original drawings, unique in their beauty and importance, illustrating his philosophy of ornament, which were published as A System of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers (1924), and he wrote in his last days his extraordinary The Autobiography of an Idea (1924).
Quotations:
In 1896, Louis Sullivan wrote: "It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. '
Personality
Louis, the child of this Irish-French-German union, was self-willed, emotional, courageous, energetic.
Quotes from others about the person
The Wainwright Tomb located at the Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri was designed by Louis Sullivan and was described as "the most sensitive and the most graceful of Sullivan's tombs" and as "one of Sullivan's masterpieces. "
Connections
In 1852 in Boston he married Andrienne List, a beautiful, highly emotional girl, of a strong personality, who had emigrated from Geneva with her parents in 1850. Her mother was French, but her father, Henri List, was pure German - an intellectual, said to have been educated for the priesthood but to have fled the convent for Geneva, where he taught school.
On July 1, 1899, Sullivan married Margaret Hattabough of Chicago, from whom he was divorced in 1917. There were no children.
