Louis Sullivan - Preservation

Preservation

During the postwar era of urban renewal, Sullivan's works fell into disfavor, and many were demolished. In the 1970s growing public concern for these buildings finally resulted in many being saved. The most vocal voice was Richard Nickel, who organized protests against the demolition of architecturally significant buildings. Nickel and others sometimes rescued decorative elements from condemned buildings, sneaking in during demolition. This practice led to Nickel's death inside Sullivan's Stock Exchange building, when a floor above him collapsed. Nickel had compiled extensive research on Adler and Sullivan and their many architectural commissions, which he intended to publish in book form. Nickel's death led to the creation in 1972 of the Richard Nickel Committee, which arranged the completion of Nickel's book and its publication in 2010. The book features all 256 commissions of Adler and Sullivan. The extensive archive of photographs and research that underpinned the book was donated to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. More than 1,300 photographs are viewable on their website and more than 15,000 photograhs are part of the collection at The Art Institute of Chicago. As finally published, the book "The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan" was authored by Richard Nickel, Aaron Siskind, John Vinci and Ward Miller.

Another champion of Sullivan's legacy was the architect Crombie Taylor (1907–1991), of Crombie Taylor Associates, who, with single-minded determination, led the effort to save the Van Allen Building in Clinton, Iowa from demolition. Taylor, acting as an aesthetic consultant, had worked on the renovation of the Auditorium Building (now Roosevelt University) in Chicago. When he read an article about the planned demolition, he uprooted his family from their home in Southern California (long after he had left Chicago, after heading the famous "Institute of Design" - later known as the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) - in the 1950s and early 1960s) and moved them to Clinton. With the vision of a destination neighborhood comparable to Oak Park, Illinois, he set about creating a non-profit to save the building, and was successful in doing so. Another advocate both of Sullivan buildings and of Wright structures was Jack Randall, who led an effort to save the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri at a very critical time and then relocated his family to Buffalo, New York to save Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House from possible demolition. His efforts were successful in both St. Louis and Buffalo.