Louis Sullivan - Biography

Biography

Louis Henry Sullivan was born to an Irish-born father, Patrick Sullivan, and a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List, both of whom had immigrated to the United States in the late 1840s. He grew up living with his grandmother, Anna Mattheus List, in South Reading (now Wakefield), Massachusetts. Louis spent most of his childhood learning about nature at his grandparent’s farm. In the later years of his primary education, his experiences varied quite a bit. He would spend a lot of time by himself wandering around Boston. He explored every street looking at the surrounding buildings. This was around the time when he developed his fascination with buildings and he decided he would one day become a structural engineer/architect. While attending high school Sullivan met Moses Woolson, whose teachings made a lasting impression on him, and nurtured him until his death. After graduating from high school, Sullivan studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan entered MIT at the age of sixteen. After one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go. At that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year. Renaissance art inspired Sullivan’s mind, and he was influenced to direct his architecture to emulating Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicating the styles of earlier periods. He returned to Chicago and began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for the design of the Moody Tabernacle, with the interior decorative "fresco secco" stencils (stencil technique applied on dry plaster) designed by Sullivan. In 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan; a year later, he became a partner in the firm. This marked the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years. And it was at this firm that Sullivan would deeply influence a young designer named Frank Lloyd Wright, who came to embrace Sullivan's designs and principles as the inspiration for his own work.

Adler and Sullivan initially achieved fame as theater architects. While most of their theaters were in Chicago, their fame won commissions as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington (unbuilt). The culminating project of this phase of the firm's history was the 1889 Auditorium Building (1886-1890-opened in stages) in Chicago, an extraordinary mixed-use building which included not only a 4,200-seat theater, but also a hotel -The Auditorium Hotel and an office building with a 17-story tower, with commercial storefronts at the ground level of the building fronting Congress and Wabash Avenues. The Auditorium Building with its magnificent theater and hotel, literally put Chicago on the cultural map and raised the city's profile and helped to pave the way for the city to host the Columbian Exposition-the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Adler and Sullivan reserved the top floors of the tower for their own office. After 1889 the firm became known for their office buildings, particularly the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis, The Schiller (later Garrick) Building and theater (1890) in Chicago, along with the Chicago Stock Exchange Building (1894), the Guaranty Building (also known as the Prudential Building) of 1895-1896 in Buffalo, New York and the 1899-1904 Carson Pirie Scott Department Store by Sullivan on State Street in Chicago. Louis Sullivan is considered by many to be the first architect to fully imagine and realize a rich architectural vocabulary for a revolutionary new kind of building: the steel high-rise or tall building, with its distinct verticality and its expression, with a defined base, midsection and cornice or top.