HISTORY OF ART & ARCHITECTURE III

“PHILOSOPHY OF LOUIS HENRY

SULLIVAN”

BY
SYED LAKHT-E-HAIDER D-03 AR
AR-- 25
SARA SIDDIQUI D-03 AR- 36

SUBMITTED TO:
MADAM AFSHAN ANSARI
 Louis Henri Sullivan

An American architect, called the "father of modernism". He is considered by many as the

creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School,
and was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright known for his steel framed skyscrapers and for coining
the phrase `form
form follows function' (1856-1924)

BIOGRAPHY
Louis Henri Sullivan was born on September 3, 1856 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the Son
of an ambitious Irish dancing master and his Swiss Mennonite wife. He spent some of his early
years learning about nature on his grandparents’ farm in South Reading just outside of Boston,
while commuting twenty miles to attend Rice Elementary School in the South End neighborhood
of Boston. After graduating from Rice Elementary School in 1870 he attended the Boston
English High School also in the South End neighborhood, but left there in 1872 at age 16 to enter
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study architecture under William Ware. And Eugene
Letang. After just one year he left MIT and went to live with his grandparents in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and while there went to work for architects Frank Furness and George Hewitt. He
spent the summer of 1873 in Philadelphia, and then left after a disagreement with George Hewitt.
He then went to visit his parents who had relocated to Chicago, Illinois. And while there he
obtained work with "the father of the skyscraper", William Le Baron Jenney.
In 1874 he was off to Paris, France to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but that too only lasted
for a short time. He returned to Chicago in 1875 and obtained a job as a draftsman in the office
of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman.
In 1879 Sullivan left Johnston and went to work in the office of Dankmar Adler, and by 1883 the
name of the firm became Adler & Sullivan. The firm of Adler & Sullivan designed over 180
buildings during its existence, primarily residential, and office buildings. Also included were
theaters and auditoriums along with a few burial vaults.
In 1887 a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm of Adler & Sullivan.
Sullivan immediately became Wright’s mentor and Wright referred to him as his Lieber Meister
(beloved master). It was under the inspirational and philosophical leadership of Sullivan that
Wright and his contemporaries formed the basis of the Prairie School of Architecture. His
philosophy that "form follows function" became one of the basic principles practiced by the
Prairie School architects.
In 1895 Dankmar Adler left the partnership over a dispute to hire his two sons. For a variety of
personal and professional reasons, Sullivan's career declined not in design brilliance but in his
ability to get work. After 1895, he procured mere 57 projects, of which 33 were built and only 19
remain. Seven of these were small-town Midwestern banks, the best known of which--the
National Farmers' (Owatonna, Minnesota, 1906-1908), Merchants' National (Grinnell, Iowa,
1913-1914), and the People's Savings and Loan (Sidney, Ohio, 1917)--exemplify Sullivan's
dictum, "form follows function," by expressing interior program on the exterior and by imposing
a new banking image--the strongbox--on the façade. The banks are still praised for their artistic
elegance, their excellent climate controls, and their efficient internal organization.
In 1890 Sullivan was one of the ten architects, five from the Eastern US and five from the
Western US, chosen to build a major structure for the "White City", the World's Columbian
Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Sullivan's massive Transportation Building and huge arched
"Golden Door" stood out as the only forward-looking design in a sea of Beaux-Arts historical
copies, and the only gorgeously multicolored facade in the White City. He is the first modernist.
His stripped-down, technology-driven, forward-looking designs clearly anticipate the issues and
solutions of Modernism. In his last years, Sullivan seemed willing to abandon ornament
altogether in favor of honest massing; in fact, Adolf Loos, the author of the seminal manifesto
"Ornament and Crime", had worked in Sullivan's office.

DEATH
Adler and Sullivan broke their partnership after the Gauranty Building. Afterwards Sullivan
went into a twenty-year-long financial and emotional decline, beset by alcoholism and chronic
financial problems. He was virtually broke and was forced to leave his office in the Auditorium
Building
With his health deteriorating from kidney and heart diseases, he died in his sleep on April 14,
1924.He was laid to rest next to his parents in Grace land Cemetery in Chicago on April 16,
1924, not far from the Ryerson and Getty tombs that he had designed over 30 years before
Although Sullivan died in poverty, he remained for many a "Lieber Meister," in Wright's words,
inspiring later generations with his lush ornament, his commitment to architectural consistency,
and his refusal to compromise philosophical principle.
 PHILOSPHY

Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924) was one of the most progressive, original, and influential architects
in American history.
Sullivan's philosophy that "form follows function" became one of the basic principles of
twentieth century architecture, and was one of the foundations of Prairie School style. But his
utilitarian forms are covered with imaginative, organically inspired dense designs of vegetal
patterns, and his philosophy was essentially a utopian one advocating a new humane, spiritual
architecture.
The origin of the phrase is traced back to the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, but it was
American architectural giant Louis Sullivan who adopted it and made it famous. Sullivan
actually said 'form ever follows function', but the simpler (and less emphatic) phrase is the one
usually remembered. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single "rule
that shall permit of no exception".
Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in 1900’s Chicago at the very moment
when technology, taste and economic forces converged violently and made it necessary to drop
the established styles of the past. If the shape of the building wasn't going to be chosen out of the
old pattern book, something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be
the purpose of the building. It was 'form follows function', as opposed to 'form follows
precedent'. Sullivan's assistant Frank Lloyd Wright adopted and professed the same principle in
slightly different form – perhaps because shaking off the old styles gave them more freedom and
latitude

Architect. Sullivan developed a unique system of ornament, which he applied as the first
architect to define a rational skyscraper aesthetic and bring bank design into the twentieth
century. He pioneered the attempt to remove historical reference from American architecture, the
creation of which he saw as a social as opposed to an artistic act
Sullivan is well known for his belief that a building's function should be clearly expressed in its
form and structure. Discontented with designing in the historical styles taught at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, Sullivan set out to create an architectural vocabulary that would reflect
contemporary American culture.
Sullivan is equally well known for designing lavish architectural ornament that combined
natural leaf and plant forms within an underlying geometric structure. Sullivan had a reverence
for nature that first developed when, as a child, he spent his summers studying plants and natural
forms on the farm of his grandparents in Massachusetts. Later, this love of natural forms took
shape in the leafy patterns on the facades of his buildings such as the Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co.
store and in interiors such as his Chicago Stock Trading Room, now reinstalled in the Art
Institute of Chicago. Late in Sullivan's life, he summarized his philosophy of architectural
ornament in the influential 1924 publication entitled A System of Architectural Ornament
According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers. Published the year of his death, the book stands
as one of the great treatises on architectural ornament.
He was of great importance in the evolution of modern architecture in the United States. His
dominating principle demonstrated in his writings and in his executed buildings, was that
outward form should faithfully express the function beneath. This doctrine, the accepted and
guiding one of modern architecture throughout the world, gained for Sullivan, however, few
contemporary adherents. In the face of the powerful revival of traditional classicism in the final
years of the 19th cent. little interest was focused on Sullivan's plea for the establishment of an
architecture that should be functional and also truly American
In 1890s projects, Sullivan developed a frame-expressing aesthetic that allowed the
directionally neutral network of steel members to determine façade composition, an organizing
principle still evident in much modernist work of the 1960s. Although Sullivan actually built
only seven of his twenty-five or so high-rise schemes, his influence was lasting

SELECTED PROJECTS

Buildings through 1895 are by Sullivan. & Adler

· Martin Ryerson Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago (1887)
· Auditorium Building, Chicago (1889)
· Wainwright Building, St. Louis (1890)
· Bayard Building, (now Bayard-Condict Building), 65–69 Bleecker Street, New York City
(1898). Sullivan's only building in New York, with a glazed terra cotta curtain wall
expressing the steel structure behind it.
· Carson Pirie Scott store, Chicago (1899)
· National Farmer's Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota (1908)
· Henry Adams Building, Algona, Iowa (1913)
· Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa (1914)
· Purdue State Bank, West Lafayette, Indiana (1914)
· Thrift Building (Peoples Saving and Loan Association), Sidney, Ohio (1918)
· Farmers and Merchants Bank, Columbus, Wisconsin (1919)
· Grand Opera House, Chicago. 1880–1927
· Pueblo Opera House, Pueblo, Colorado. 1890–1922. Destroyed by fire.
· Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Adler & Sullivan. 1893–1972
· Transportation Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago. Adler & Sullivan.
1893–94. An exposition building.

FAMOUS PROJECTS

· Entrance from the 1893 Stock Exchange building

· Caron Pirie Scott, downtown Chicago

· Auditorium Building
· Wainwright Building

· Transportation Building, Chicago 1889

MAJOR PROJECT

AUDITORIUM BUILDING, CHICAGO

 The Auditorium Building

The Auditorium Building in Chicago, Illinois is one of the best-known designs of Dankmar
Adler and Louis Sullivan. The building is located at 430 South Michigan Avenue. It originally
housed a large opera house, a hotel, and numerous offices. The Auditorium Theater, a National
Historic Landmark, is part of the Auditorium Building. Today the Auditorium Building is the
Home of Roosevelt University.
ORIGIN AND PURPOSE
Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago businessman, incorporated the Chicago Auditorium Association in
December 1886 to develop what he wanted to be the world's largest, grandest, most expensive
theater that would rival such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He
was said to have wanted to make high culture accessible to the working classes of Chicago.
HISTORY
On October 5, 1887, President Grover Cleveland laid the cornerstone for the Auditorium
Building. The 1888 Republican National Convention was held in a partially finished building
where Benjamin Harrison was nominated as a presidential candidate. On December 9, 1889
President Benjamin Harrison dedicated the building and Adler and Sullivan opened their offices
on the 16th and 17th floors of the Auditorium tower.
The opera company renting the accommodation moved to the Civic Opera House in 1929, and
the Auditorium Theatre closed during the Great Depression. In 1941 it was taken over by the city
of Chicago to be used as a World War II servicemen's center.
DESIGN
Adler and Sullivan designed a tall structure with load-bearing outer walls, and based the exterior
appearance partly on the design of H.H. Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse, another
Chicago landmark. The Auditorium is a heavy, impressive structure externally, and was more
striking in its day when buildings of its scale were less common. When completed, it was the
tallest building in the city.
One of the most innovative features of the building was its massive raft foundation, designed by
Sullivan in conjunction with engineer Paul Mueller. The soil beneath the Auditorium consists of
soft blue clay to a depth of over 100 feet, which made conventional foundations impossible.
Adler and Mueller designed a floating mat of crisscrossed railroad ties, topped with a double
layer of steel rails embedded in concrete, the whole assemblage coated with pitch.
The resulting raft allowed the weight of the massive outer walls to be distributed over a large
area. However, the weight of the masonry outer walls in relation to the relatively lightweight
interior deformed the raft over the course of a century, and today portions of the building have
settled as much as 29 inches. This deflection is clearly visible in the theater lobby, where the
mosaic floor takes on a distinct slope as it nears the outer walls. This settlement is not because of
poor engineering but the fact the design was changed during construction. The original plan had
the exterior covered in lightweight terra cotta, but this was changed to stone after the foundations
where under construction. Most of the settlement occurred within a decade after construction,
and at one time there was a plan to shorten the interior supports to level the floors but this was
never carried out.
In the center of the building was a 4,300-seat auditorium, originally intended primarily for
production of Grand Opera. In keeping with Peck's democratic ideals, the auditorium was
designed so that all seats would have good views and acoustics. The original plans had no box
seats at all, and when these were added to the plans they did not get the prime locations.
Housed in the building around this central space were 136 offices and a 400-room hotel, whose
purpose was to generate much of the revenue to support the opera. While the Auditorium
Building was not intended as a commercial building, Peck wanted it to be self-sufficient.
Revenue from the offices and hotel was meant to allow ticket prices to remain reasonable. In
reality, both the hotel and office block became unprofitable within a few years.