See other formats

Full text of "Louis Sullivan Prophet Of Modern Architecture"

720.92 S9498ra 



A-M 



Kansas city 



public library 



kansas city, msss 



Books, will be issued only 

on presentation of library card,. 
Please report lost cards and 

of residence promptly 
Card 'holders are responsible for 
all books, records,, films, pi 



MA! '..!:. ':;:' ' 

;/ " \ I '>.',:; 




3 1148 00907 6662 



LOUIS S 




I'ROPIlI'/r OF MODERN A RCIl ITKCTU RE 



BY HUGH MORRISON 



ASMS T A !S T l K < > K K S S ( > It , J) F, P A R T M K N '!' < > !' A H T A N i> A U t*. H A (: (') L C V , 

UAKTMOtrTH CO 1, 1,K<; K 



Til K M I SKI M OF MO I) KU N A |{ T 

\ * n 

\\-\\- NOKTO.N & COM I' A N V , INC. 

I' I H I. F M It K U S N K \\ V H K 



' : Copyright, 1935, by 

;NORTON & COMPANY, INC. 

70 Fifth Avenue, New York 
First Edition 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
/If?* * THE PUBLISHERS SY THE VAIL-BALLOTI PRESS 
(N\ / y^ rf^ ' DESIGNED Bt JlOBERT JOSEPHY 

DE 6 "i56 



To George Grant Elmslie 



CONTENTS 



FOREWORD xv 

I. YOUTH AND TRAINING 23 

PARENTAGE - INFANCY IN BOSTON - SUMMERS ON A FARM - 
GRAMMAR SCHOOL - EARLY INTEREST IN ARCHITECTURE - 
ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL AND MOSES WOOLSON INTEREST 
IN MUSIC -ENTERS M.I.T. SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT 
SIXTEEN - DISLIKES ACADEMIC ARCHITECTURAL TRAINING - 
LEAVES FOR PHILADELPHIA TO ENTER OFFICE OF FURNESS & 
HEWITT - GOES TO CHICAGO LATE IN 1873 - WORK IN OFFICE 
OF JENNEY - GOES TO PARIS IN 1874 - ENTRANCE EXAMINA- 
TIONS TO THE ECOLE - BEAUX ARTS TRAINING A DISAPPOINT- 
MENT - RETURNS TO CHICAGO 1876 - WORK IN VARIOUS 
OFFICES - INTEREST IN ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE - ENTERS 

ADLER'S OFFICE - PARTNERSHIP WITH ADLER 1881. 

II. EARLY WORKS 52 

ARCHITECTURAL FASHIONS CURRENT IN 1880 - PROGRESS IN 
ENGINEERING IN CHICAGO - CONVENTIONAL OFFICE-BUILDING 
DESIGN - EARLY OFFICE BUILDINGS OF ADLER & SULLIVAN 

- BORDEN BLOCK - ROTHSCHILD STORE - SULLIVAN'S EARLY 
STYLE OF ORNAMENT - INFLUENCE OF EDELMANN - OFFICE 
BUILDINGS FOR MARTIN RYERSON - TROESCHER BUILDING - 
DEXTER BUILDING THE CULMINATION OF HIS EARLY WORK - 
FACTORIES AND WAREHOUSES - THEATRES - RESIDENCES AND 
OTHER STRUCTURES - SUMMARY OF SULLIVAN'S EARLY WORK. 

III. THE AUDITORIUM 80 

THE TWO PARTNERS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP - DESCRIP- 
TIONS BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND GEORGE ELMSLIE - THE 
OFFICE FORCE - HISTORY OF THE AUDITORIUM PROJECT - 
EARLY DESIGNS - RICHARDSON'S INFLUENCE - CONSTRUCTION 
OF THE BUILDING - EXTERIOR DESIGN - THE AUDITORIUM 
HOTEL -THE GREAT THEATRE ITS SIZE - ITS ACOUSTIC DE- 
SIGN - THE "GOLDEN ARCHES" - DEVICES FOR REDUCING SEAT- 
ING CAPACITY - THE STAGE AND ITS MECHANICAL EQUIPMENT 

- DEDICATION OF THE BUILDING AND ITS SUBSEQUENT 
HISTORY. 



viii CONTENTS 

IV. YEARS OF EXPANSION 111 

FROM THE AUDITORIUM TO THE WORLD'S FAIR - SULLIVAN 

GOES TO OCEAN SPRINGS - THE COTTAGES THERE - RETURN TO 
CHICAGO ~ RICHARDSON'S INFLUENCE IN THREE BUILDINGS: 
THE STANDARD CLUB, HEATH RESIDENCE AND WALKER WARE- 
HOUSE-BUILDINGS IN THE WEST: DOOLY BLOCK, SALT LAKE 
CITY; PUEBLO OPERA HOUSE; SEATTLE OPERA HOUSE - 
REMODELLING OF MC VICKER's THEATRE - ST. NICHOLAS 
HOTEL - VICTORIA HOTEL - ANSHE MA'ARIV SYNAGOGUE - 
FACTORIES AND WAREHOUSES - RAILROAD STATION AT NEW 
ORLEANS - THREE TOMBS - RESIDENCES - THE TRANSPORTA- 
TION BUILDING AT THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 

V. GIVING FORM TO THE SKYSCRAPER 140 

EARLY TALL BUILDINGS IN AMERICA - THE DEVELOPMENT OF 
SKYSCRAPER CONSTRUCTION CHARACTERISTIC SKYSCRAPER 
STYLE IN 1890 -THE WAINWRIGHT BUILDING ~ SULHVAN\S 
APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF DESIGN - THE NATURK OF 
HIS ARCHITECTURAL THEORY - CONTRADICTIONS TO THKOHY 

OF MECHANICAL FUNCTIONALISM IN THE WAINWRIGHT DE- 
SIGN - THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL SOLUTION OF THK SKYSCRAPER 
PROBLEM -ITS INFLUENCE - THE SCHILLER BUILDING - THK 
"FRATERNITY TEMPLE" PROJECT - UNION TRUST BUILDING- 
MEYER BUILDING, A "HORIZONTAL" DESIGN - THE CHICAGO 
STOCK EXCHANGE -THE GUARANTY BUILDING IN BUFFALO- 
DISSOLUTION OF THE PARTNERSHIP OF ADLER & SULLIVAN IN 
1895 - ADLER'S LAST YEARS. 

VI. SULLIVAN ALONE 178 

SULLIVAN'S WORK FROM 1895 TO 1924 -PAUCITY OF COM- 
MISSIONS AFTER THE DISSOLUTION OF THE PARTNERSHIP - 

SULLIVAN'S BUSINESS METHODS -HIS CONCEPTION OF ARCHI- 
TECTURE OPPOSED TO THE PREDOMINANT ONE - D, H. BURN- 
HAM AS A SYMBOL OF THE NEW AGE - SULLIVAN'S INTERPRE- 
TATION OF THE WORLD'S FAIR AND ITS EFFECTS - EUROPEAN 

APPRECIATION OF SULLIVAN - THE BAYARD BUILDING, NEW 
YORK - GAGE BUILDING, CHICAGO - CARSON PIRIE SCOTT 
STORE, CHICAGO THE BABSON AND BRADLEY RESIDENCES - 
THE BANK AT OWATONNA - BUILDINGS AT CEDAR RAPIDS - 
VAN ALLEN STORE - BANKS AT GRINNELL, NEWARK, SIDNEY, 
AND COLUMBUS - SULLIVAN'S LAST WORK - ACTIVITY IN WRIT- 
ING DURING THE EARLY 19QO's - WRITING OF THE AVTH* 
BIOGRAPHY - DEATH APRIL 14, 1924. 

VII. SULLIVAN'S ARCHITECTURAL THEORY 229 

IMPORTANCE OF HIS WRITINGS - DESCRIPTION OF HIS MORE 
IMPORTANT ARTICLES AND BOOKS - SUMMARY OF SULLIVAN'S 
THEORY OF ART -THE INFINITE AND NATURE AS SOURCE OF 
ARTISTIC INSPIRATION - MAN'S PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PGW 



CONTENTS ix 

ERS AND THE ASSIMILATION OF THIS INSPIRATION - THE 
NATURE OF CREATIVE ACTIVITY - ITS DEPENDENCE ON ORIGI- 
NAL EXPERIENCE - ARCHITECTURE AS ORGANIC - DEFECTS OF 
ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION - A RULE FOR DESIGN: FORM FOL- 
LOWS FUNCTION - PRIMARY MEANING OF FUNCTIONALISM - 
ESSENTIAL OVERTONES -^ORJJAMENT IN ARCHITECTURE - THE 

SOCIAL ORDER: SULLIVAN'S DEMoc^ffFTSEAT-- ARCHITEC- 
TURE AS A SOCIAL MANIFESTATION -'STYLES' AND 'STYLE* - 
IMITATION OF PAST STYLES - SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE 
ARCHITECT. 

VIII. A CRITICAL ESTIMATE 262 

CRITICAL OPINION OF SULLIVAN DURING THE LAST GEN- 
ERATION - SULLIVAN AS A NINETEENTH-CENTURY FIGURE - 
NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE AND ROMANTICISM - REALIS- 
TIC AND ROMANTIC ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM - TWENTIETH- 
CENTURY ABSTRACTIONISM - STUOjaKAl^SJfflFLlJfENCE, ON.ARGHI- 
XE^XIJEAL,*RACTICE - THE CHICAGO SCHOOL - HIS INFLUENCE 
ON ARCHITECTURAL THEORY - VALIDITY OF HIS ATTACK ON 
ECLECTICISM - ARCHITECTURE AS A CREATIVE NOT AN IMITA- 
TIVE ART - FUNCTIONALISM A SYSTEM OF THINKING NOT A 
RULE OF DESIGN - SULLIVAN AS A GREAT TRADITIONALIST. 

APPENDIX: DANKMAR ABLER -A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 283 
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF BUILDINGS 294 

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF LOUIS SULLIVAN 306 
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 

PLATES 321 

INDEX 387 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Louis Sullivan. Frontispiece 

Figure I Sullivan at sixteen, while at M. I. T. facing p. 32 

Figure 2 Dankmar Adler in 1880 facing p. 33 

Figure 3 Chicago Opera Festival Auditorium in the Interstate Ex- 
position Building, Grant Park. 1885, 69 

Figure 4 Residences of Dila Kohn, Dankmar Adler, and Eli B. 

Felsenthal, Chicago. 1885-86. 75 

Figure 5 Auditorium Building, Chicago. Longitudinal section 91 

Figure 6 Design for Seattle Opera House. 1890 119 

Figure 7 Design for a hotel, Chicago. 1891 123 

Figure 8 Illinois Central Railroad Station, New Orleans. 1892 127 

Figure 9 Three residences built for Victor Falkenau, Chicago. 

1890 131 

Figure 10 Wainwright Building, St. Louis. Plans of the first and 

sixth floors 149 

Figure 11 Schiller Building, Chicago. Plans of the first and ninth 

floors 161 

Figure 12 Union Trust Building, St. Louis. 1892-93 167 

Figure 13 Dankmar Adler in 1898 facing p. 176 

Figure 14 Louis Sullivan in 1904. facing p. 177 

Figure 15 Plan of National Farmers" Bank, Owatonna, Minn. 211 

Figure 16 Plan of St. Paul's Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 215 



x ii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Plate 1 Rothschild Store, Chicago. 1880-81. 321 

Plate 2 Revell Building, Chicago. 1881-83. 322 

Plate 3 Ryerson Building, Chicago. 1884. 323 

Plate 4 Troescher Building, Chicago. 1884. 324 

Plate 5 Dexter Building, Chicago. 1887. 324 

Plate 6 Knisely Building, Chicago. 1884. 325 

Plate 7 Selz Schwab Company Factory, Chicago. 1880-87. 325 

Plate 8 Borden Residence, Chicago. 1880. 326 

Plate 9 Bloomenfeld Residence, Chicago. 1883. 326 

Plate 10 Three residences, Chicago. 1883. 327 

Plate 11 West Chicago Club, Chicago. 1886. 327 

Plate 12 Auditorium, Chicago. Preliminary design, 1836. 328 

Plate 13 Auditorium, Chicago. Preliminary design, 1886. 328 

Plate 14 Auditorium, Chicago. Exterior from East. 320 

Plate 15 Auditorium, Chicago. Exterior from Southwest. 329 

Plate 16 Auditorium Hotel, Chicago. Lobby. 330 

Plate 17 Auditorium Hotel, Chicago. Restaurant and bar. 330 

Plate 18 Auditorium Hotel, Chicago. Main dining-room. 3H1 

Plate 19 Auditorium Hotel, Chicago. Main dining-room, detail. 331 

Plate 20 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago. View toward stage. 332 

Plate 21 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago. Orchestra and balcony, 333 

Plate 22 Cottage, Ocean Springs, Mississippi. 1890. 331 

Plate 23 Stables, Ocean Springs, Mississippi. 1890. 334 

Plate 24 Standard Club, Chicago. 1887-B9. 333 

Plate 25 Heath Residence, Chicago. 1889. 335 

Plate 26 Standard Club, Chicago. Addition, 1893. 336 

Plate 27 Walker Warehouse, Chicago. 1888-89. 3,1? 

Plate 28 Marshall Field Wholesale Building, Chicago, by H. H, 

Richardson. 1885-87. 338 

Plate 29 Dooly Block, Salt Lake City. 1890-91. 338 

Plate 30 Opera House Block, Pueblo, Colorado. 1890 330 

Plate 31 Victoria Hotel, Chicago Heights, Illinois. 1 892-03. 33*) 

Plate 32 McVicker's Theatre, Chicago. Proscenium wing and hoxe*. 

1890-91. 340 



ILLUSTRATIONS . xiii 

Plate 33 St. Nicholas Hotel, St. Louis. 1892-93. 341 

Plate 34 Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue, Chicago. Preliminary design. 342 

Plate 35 Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue, Chicago. Exterior. 1890-91. 342 

Plate 36 Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue, Chicago. Interior. 343 

Plate 37 Chicago Cold Storage Exchange Warehouse. 1891. 344 

Plate 38 Ryerson Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. 1889 345 

Plate 39 Getty Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. 1890. 345 

Plate 40 Getty Tomb, Chicago. Door. 346 

Plate 41 Wainwright Tomb, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis. 

1892. 347 

Plate 42 Charnley Residence, Chicago. 1892. 348 

Plate 43 Albert Sullivan Residence, Chicago. 1892. 349 

Plate 44 Transportation Building, World's Columbian Exposition, 

Chicago. 1893. 350 

Plate 45 The "Golden Door" of the Transportation Building. 351 

Plate 46 New York World Building, New York, by George B. Post. 

1890 352 

47 New York Life Insurance Building, Kansas City, by 

McKim, Mead & White. 1890. 352 

48 Woman's Temple, Chicago, by Burnham & Root. 1891 353 

49 Wainwright Building, St. Louis. 1890-91. 354 

-Plate 50 Schiller Building, Chicago. 1891-92. Borden Block 

' (1879-80) in foreground. 355 

^Plate 51 Design for Fraternity Temple, Chicago. 1891 356 

Plate 52 Design for Trust & Savings Bank Building, St. Louis. 

1893. 357 



53 Meyer Building, Chicago. 1893. 358 

54 Stock Exchange Building, Chicago. 1893-94. 359 

55 Guaranty Building, Buffalo. 1894r-95. 360 

56 Guaranty Building, Buffalo. Lower stories and corner. 361 
C^ Plate 57 Guaranty Building, Buffalo. Elevator lobby. 362 

58 Bayard Building, New York. 1897-98. 363 

59 Gage Building, Chicago (at right). 1898-99. 364 
OPlate 60 Carson Pirie Scott Store, Chicago. 1899-1904. 365 

Plate 61 Carson Pirie Scott Store, Chicago. Detail of facade 366 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

Plate 62 Carson Pirie Scott Store, Chicago. Entrance on Madison 

Street 367 

Plate 63 Crane Company Building, Chicago. 1903-04 368 

Plate 64 Felsenthal Store, Chicago. 1905. 368 

Plate 65 Babson Residence, Riverside, 111. 1907. 369 

Plate 66 Babson Residence, Riverside, 111. Garden facade. 369 

Plate 67 Bradley Residence, Madison, Wisconsin. 1909 370 

Plate 68 Bradley Residence, Madison, Wisconsin. Balcony. 370 

Plate 69 Bradley Residence, Madison, Wisconsin. Entrance hall 371 

Plate 70 National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, Minn. 1907-08 372 

Plate 71 National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, Minn. Detail of 

cornice. 373 

Plate 72 National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, Minn. Interior 374 

Plate 73 National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, Minn. Detail of 

arches. 375 

Plate 74 National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, Minn. Teller's 

wicket. 375 

Plate 75 People's Savings Bank, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 1911. 376 

Plate 16 St. Paul's Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 1913-14. 376 

Plate 77 Van Allen Store, Clinton, Iowa. 1913-15. 377 

Plate 78 Adams Building, Algona, Iowa. 1913. 377 

Plate 79 Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa. 1914. 378 

Plate 80 Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa. Interior 379 

Plate 81 Home Building Association Bank, Newark, Ohio. 1914 380 

Plate 82 Home Building Association Bank, Newark, Ohio. Interior 380 

Plate 83 People's Savings & Loan Association Bank, Sidney, Ohio. 

1917-18. 381 

Plate 84 People's Savings & Loan Association Bank, Sidney, Ohio. 

Interior. 382 

Plate 85 People's Savings & Loan Association Bank, Sidney, Ohio. 

Lounge. 383 

Plate 86 Farmers' & Merchants' Union Bank, Columbus, Wisconsin. 

1919. 384 

Plate 87 Farmers' & Merchants' Union Bank, Columbus, Wisconsin. 

Interior. 384 



FOREWORD 



AT an architects' dinner in the early 1890's, an acute critic re- 
marked: "American architecture is the art of covering one thing 
with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, 
would not be desirable." He might have gone much further; 
he was talking about contemporary architecture, but he might 
have included most of the architecture of the nineteenth century ; 
he confined his indictment to America when he might as justly have 
included Europe; and if he had been a prophet, he could have 
applied it to the greater part of the architecture of the first genera- 
tion of the twentieth century. 

The besetting architectural sin of the nineteenth century was 
the imitation of historic styles. Today we are again beginning to 
regard style as something always changing and always modern. 
When Louis IX instructed his architect to design the Sainte Chapelle 
he doubtless said nothing about the "Gothic" style since the term 
had not been invented nor indeed about any "style." He probably 
said: "Build me a good modern chapel." All architecture during 
Greek an$ medieval times was modern architecture. Certainly it 
did not imitate the Egyptian style, and least of all did it build one 
building in Egyptian, one in Assyrian, one in Minoan, and one in 
Neolithic, as we do today. Eclecticism is a distinctly modern phe- 
nomenon, and when viewed in the whole panorama of the history of 
architecture it appears but a momentary aberration, caused, most 
probably, by the failure to realize sound values based on a discern- 



xvi FOREWORD 

ing study of the experience of the past. The trouble, paradoxically, 

was not too much history, hut not enough. 

This confusion of values began more than a century ago. It 
may be placed at about the time when the last great architectural 
style died its destined death, and when at almost the same moment 
the dominant forces of democracy and industrialism, as signalized 
in the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, began to 
control the character of modern life. At that time we might have 
expected the birth of a modern architecture. And indeed, tech- 
nically, the nativity occurred. An iron frame for the support of 
seven floors in a cotton factory in Manchester, England, was built 
in 1801. And before many years factories and warehouses and 
lofts began to assume an appearance which has hardly changed 
until today. 

But the impact of the new forces was too sudden to be absorbed, 
and nineteenth-century culture entered into a strange dualism. 
Science and technique controlled the intellectual and material 
phases of life; romanticism and religion controlled the imaginative 
and spiritual phases; and the gulf between the two ever widened. 
Architecture was split into two uncongenial halves, utility and 
beauty, and we have the strange combination of a railroad station 
decorated by Gothic pinnacles, or an iron shop-front adorned by 
Greek columns. 

Architects concerned themselves more and more only with 
beauty, and since there was no genuine new beauty, this could 
only resolve itself into an imitation of past standards of beauty. 
Thus eclecticism. Meanwhile, there were those who advocated a 
frankly utilitarian and mechanistic architecture, such as Viollet- 
le-Duc. But no union could be effected. The two attitudes were 
diametrically opposed. How combine the sense of practical truth 
of science with the sense of emotional truth of romanticism? How 



FOREWORD xvii 

reintegrate engineering and architecture? The conflict had con- 
founded the century; it had made impossible any genuine cultural 
expression of modern life as a whole. 

In the field of architecture, I believe, it remained for Louis Sul- 
livan to integrate romanticism and realism, to achieve a synthesis 
both in theory and in practice completely expressive of modern 
life, and to make possible the renewal of architecture as a creative 
art based on those fundamentals that have always existed in the 
great architecture of the past. In this sense he was the first modern 
architect. Lewis Mumford has said of him: "Sullivan's was per- 
haps the first mind in American architecture that had come to know 
itself with any fullness in relation to its soil, its period, its civiliza- 
tion, and had been able to absorb fully all the many lessons of the 
century." l Sullivan was in actual practice a very great architect, 
but his greatest achievement was in his emancipation of architec- 
tural thinking from the dead forms of the past and his demonstra- 
tion of the possibility of the development of new forms directly out 
of the nature of the problems at hand. 

Sullivan died in 1924. During his own lifetime his importance 
was never widely recognized. To be sure, some of his work was 
enthusiastically hailed during the nineties many articles praised 
his buildings and his thinking as heralding a new movement in 
architecture but it would be too much to expect that any complete 
estimate of his achievement could be made at such an early date. 
The opinions were, for the most part, expressions of hope for the 
future. Two decades later the tone of criticism had changed. Archi- 
tecture had in the meantime made immense strides or so it was 
believed in a direction quite different from that pointed out by 
Sullivan: the Woolworth Building had raised its terra cotta pinna- 
cles and gargoyles to the sky for many years; a revived medieval- 

1 Lewis Mumford: The Brown Decades, p. 143. 



xviii FOREWORD 

ism far more accurate than the quaint misunderstandings of nine- 
teenth-century Gothic had been crowned in such masterpieces as 
the Harkness Quadrangles at Yale and St. Thomas' Church on 
Fifth Avenue; the glory that was Greece had achieved its final aura 
of perfection in 'the most beautiful classic building of modern 
times,' the Lincoln Memorial; and architecture in all its branches 
had shown such immense progress that architects, critics, and pub- 
lic celebrated it in mutual felicitations. 

It was easily seen now that Sullivan had been a failure a very 
interesting failure, to be sure; undoubtedly an eccentric and a 
genius, a kind of romantic Don Quixote who had tilted against the 
windmills of imaginary evils in a most admirable way; but after 
all, a man who had little or no sense of practical realities. He was 
viewed with charity, in the patronizing and complacent way with 
which mediocrity regards genius which has been proven to be 
wrong. Other views were more magnanimous: Sullivan was all 
right in his day and his way indeed, perhaps a great architect 
but that day was past; we had progressed to a new and better archi- 
tecture, and instead of being the forerunner of a new century, Sulli- 
van was the last great leader of the old ; within his lifetime he was 
shelved as an Old Master. 

As late as 1927 a popular history of American architecture ap- 
peared with a chapter entitled "Louis Sullivan and the Lost Cause." 
The author, Mr. Thomas Tallmadge, has lived to say that if he 
were writing the book today, the chapter would be called "Louis 
Sullivan and the Cause Triumphant." Within the last five years 
critical opinion of Sullivan has changed amazingly. The develop- 
ment of the modern style of architecture has been so striking that 
we may fairly say that the general public has become aware of it 
as an accomplished fact. Book after book has appeared on the 
"new architecture," and "functionalism" has become a by-word in 



FOREWORD xix 

architectural parlance. Beginning with Lewis Mumford, and con- 
tinuing in the writings of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Sheldon Che- 
ney, Bruno Taut and others, Sullivan has been viewed more and 
more as the great forerunner of modern architecture. But although 
recognized as a unique personal force, and often as the prophet of 
the modern style, no single book on him was written. Such maga- 
zine articles as were published often suffered from errors in fact 
about his buildings or incomplete interpretation of his thinking, 
and there were large lacunae on certain phases of his work because 
of lack of information. 

I became interested in Sullivan five years ago while teaching at 
the University of Chicago. In attempting to discover more about 
him I found that most of the office records had been destroyed by 
fire many years ago; there were very few available photographs; 
there was no list of buildings which he had designed; and he had 
left no family to preserve personal effects which might have aided 
in piecing out the story. For these reasons the task of reconstructing 
the story of his life and work was difficult, and the account is not 
yet complete. 

Sullivan's youth and training is, fortunately, well known through 
his Autobiography of an Idea. This account of his life, however, 
says very little about his buildings done in partnership with Adler, 
and virtually nothing of his work after 1893. My chief source of 
information on this and other phases of Sullivan's life has been 
Mr. George Grant Elmslie, who worked with Sullivan for the 
twenty years between 1889 and 1909, and who has carefully pre- 
served not only all available records but an invaluable store of 
memories. It is not too much to say that without Mr. Elmslie's rev- 
erent preservation of material records and his sympathetic under- 
standing and admiration no adequate account of Louis Sullivan 
could have been written. 



xx FOREWORD 

My debt to published articles is sufficiently indicated in the foot- 
notes and bibliography. A great part of my information, however, 
came from letters and personal interviews ; these were so numerous 
that it would be impossible to recognize all my obligations here. I 
wish to express my appreciation, however, for the uniform courtesy 
with which my requests for information, both verbal and written, 
were met. In the early stages of the investigation I had much valued 
assistance from preliminary studies on Sullivan by Miss Lucile 
Smith and by H. Stewart Leonard. Their scholarly work afforded a 
nucleus of material which has proven of immense aid, and Mr. Leon- 
ard was kind enough to read several chapters of the manuscript. 
Mrs. Julius Weil, daughter of Dankmar Adler, was most helpful in 
the rediscovery of many of the early buildings of Adler & Sullivan 
about which few or no records existed, and particularly in contribut- 
ing information on the life of her father. Adler's great importance 
in the work of the firm has never been adequately recognized, and 
although I have attempted to suggest this in the text, I deeply regret 
that exigencies of publication preclude a more complete account of 
his life and personality. 

As to photographs, the largest extant collection of negatives of 
Sullivan's buildings is in the possession of Henry Fuermann & 
Sons, Chicago. Mr. Fuermann was a personal friend of Sullivan 
and I am obligated to him for the work which he did and his per- 
sonal interest in aiding the project. There remained, however, some 
seventy or eighty buildings of which no photographs existed. Get- 
ting a record of these, incidentally, involved several thousand miles 
of travel throughout Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, 
and Ohio, not to mention innumerable expeditions in and about 
Chicago. I was fortunate in having as companion on these architec- 
tural pilgrimages Mr. Joseph Barron, whose excellent photography, 
no less than his knowledge of the history of American architecture, 



FOREWORD xxi 

was invaluable. The Barren collection of negatives includes several 
score on Sullivan's buildings. 

Sullivan manuscripts in the Burnham Library of the Art Insti- 
tute of Chicago were placed at my disposal by Miss Etheldred Ab- 
bot, whose interest and help were unfailing. For personal inter- 
views I am most indebted to the late Paul Mueller, engineer in the 
office of Adler & Sullivan for many years, Mr. Arthur Woltersdorf, 
Mr. Richard E. Schmidt, and Mr. Irving K. Pond. Professor Henry- 
Russell Hitchcock was kind enough to go over the entire manuscript 
with me and I owe many helpful suggestions to him. 

Finally I should like to express my very warm gratitude to the 
Museum of Modern Art, which through financial aid made the large 
number of illustrations possible, and to Mr. W. W. Norton, whose 
sympathetic cooperation in the preparation of the book has been 
most sincerely appreciated. 

HUGH MORRISON 
Dartmouth College, August, 1935 



I. YOUTH AND TRAINING 



PATRICK SULLIVAN, need it be said, was Irish. Born on Christmas 
Day of the year 1818, he made his own way in life from the age 
of twelve. His mother had died when he was an infant; his father, 
a landscape painter of mediocre achievements, disappeared com- 
pletely from his life when the two lost each other in the hurly-burly 
of a county fair. At first an itinerant fiddler, Patrick later became 
interested in dancing, found his way to Loiidon where he took les- 
sons, and eventually established a dancing academy of his own. 
On July 22, 1847, he took steerage passage on the ship Unicorn 
from London to Boston. At the age of thirty he set up a dancing 
academy in Boston. His son Louis describes him quite candidly: 
"His medium size, his too-sloping shoulders, his excessive Irish 
face, his small repulsive eyes the eyes of a pig of nondescript 
color and no flash, sunk into his head under rough brows, all seemed 
unpromising enough in themselves until it is remembered that be- 
hind that same mask resided the grim will, the instinctive ambi- 
tion that had brought him, alone and unaided, out of a childhood 
of poverty ... he was of highly virile and sensitive powers, he 
wrote and spoke English in a polite way, and had acquired an 
excruciating French. . . . He was moderate of habit; drank a 
little wine, smoked an occasional cigar, and was an enthusiast 
regarding hygiene." l Three years after his arrival he met in Boston 
the girl whom he was to marry. 

Andrienne Frangoise List was born in Geneva in 1835. Her 



23 



24 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

father, Henri List, was German; her mother, Anna Mattheus List, 
was Swiss-French. The Lists were well-to-do, but they lost money 
in speculation, and came to America in 1850 in search of better 
fortune. Andrienne was a skilled piano player "her sense of 
rhythm, of sweep, of accent, of the dance-cadence with its reinforce- 
ments and languishments, the tempo rubato was genius itself." 
Patrick Sullivan met Andrienne List in Boston, was attracted by 
her grace of manner and her musical sense, they became engaged, 
and were married on August 14, 1852. 

The Sullivans lived at first at 22 South Bennett Street, Boston. 
The older son, Albert Walter Sullivan, was born September 17, 
1854; the younger son, Louis Henry Sullivan, was born Septem- 
ber 3, 1856. There were no other children. Louis was never formally 
christened, and although he later called himself "Louis Henry," 
his mother and his grandmother preferred to call him "Louis 
Henri," out of respect to his grandfather, and he himself always 
gallicized the "Louis" in pronunciation. 

When Louis was four years old he was sent to the district 
grammar school. Of this he had only dreary recollections. He 
learned his letters, he followed the routine, but the school seemed 
to dull his faculties, slacken his eagerness, and completely ignore 
his lively imagination and his abundant sympathies. In the early 
summer of 1862, when he was five, he went to visit his grand- 
parents at a twenty-four-acre farm about a mile from the village 
of South Reading. From then until he was fourteen he spent all his 
summers on the farm, an experience which aided greatly in de- 
veloping his independence and self-reliance, and doubtless bred into 
him during the formative years of his youth the almost ecstatic 
love of nature and the strong individualism which characterized 
his later years. 

The Civil War did not affect him greatly, but he was sufficiently 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 25 

interested in it to make a "Monitor" out of a piece of lath and 
the bung of a flour-barrel, and to set it against a "Merrimac" in 
a wash-tub of water. At this time he was "abundantly freckled, 
and in a measure toothless; hatless, barefooted, and unkempt 
with activity, he was a stout, stocky, miniature ruffian, let loose 
upon a helpless world." But he had many moments of poignant 
delight in the beauties of nature, moments which left him in a 
quiet, self-contained mood, little able to share his experiences 
with the older people about him. His grandfather was disturbed 
by these dreamy interludes, fearing an undue precocity, but was 
reassured by the fact that the boy, between spells, was "ridiculously 
practical." Much of his time he spent alone in his "domain," a 
marshy tract surrounded by rolling meadows and clumps of trees, 
where he built dams in the brook, waded, and otherwise amused 
himself. Sometimes he sought out other boys to play with; more 
often he went on long trips of exploration by himself. Or he would 
visit the stove-foundry man, in town, or the cobbler, who would 
delight him by "extinguishing the life of a fly on the opposite wall 
with an unerring squirt of tobacco juice." Evenings, he would 
get Julia, the robust hired girl, to tell him Irish fairy tales, which 
he found enchanting and entirely credible. 

In the summer of 1863 Patrick Sullivan took Louis away from 
his grandparents for a time to Newburyport, where he had estab- 
lished a summer school of dancing. He set about to counteract the 
tendency of Louis' fond grandparents to spoil him by endeavoring 
to instill a stronger sense of obedience, discipline and respect. 
Being an enthusiast regarding health, he put Louis through a 
regular course of physical training rise at five, a cold wash at 
the town pump opposite the hotel, a run "to establish circulation," 
swimming, vaulting, throwing stones, through the day. Under this 
regime he built up a strong and supple physique, which in later 



26 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

years always stood him in good stead. Shortly after returning to 
Boston that September the family went to Halifax for six months, 
where Patrick opened a dancing academy. Louis recalled little 
but the severe cold of the Nova Scotia" winter. In the spring his 
mother had an attack of diphtheria which compelled the family 
to return to Boston. Louis, to his great joy, was sent out to South 
Reading to live with his grandparents until the ensuing fall. 

By this time he was becoming quite a youth, proud, ambitious, 
and with a growing sense of power. His grandfather did not worry 
greatly about his education, realizing that Louis was acquiring his 
own kind of education very rapidly. His grandmother, thinking 
that he needed more polish, started to teach him French, but Louis, 
as always, rebelled at formal education. "He became oppressed 
by the inanities of the grammar-book, and the imbecilities of a 
sort of first reader in which a wax-work father takes his wax chil- 
dren on daily promenades, explaining to them as they go, in terms 
of unctuous morality, the works of the Creator, and drawing there- 
from, as from a spool, an endless thread of pious banalities." So 
the study was discontinued. Although his grandmother loved him, 
she could little realize that he was a vigorous young animal with 
thoughts and an impetuous will of his own. 

In September, 1864, he had to go back to his parents in Boston, 
and was sent to school. The effect of the big city on him was, to 
say the least, shatteringly discouraging. Acutely sensitive to his 
surroundings, the crooked streets, the crowded houses, the throngs 
of wagons and people hurrying here and there with apparent aim- 
lessness, confused and overwhelmed him. He was bewildered and 
grieved, and withdrew into himself. He was sent to the Brimmer 
School, on Common Street, and found it a gloomy prison. His 
father took up his rigorous training of cold baths, outdoor exercise 
long walks to Roxbury, to Dorchester, even to Brookline but 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 27 

it was a long, discouraging winter. The spring in the city had 
nothing of the joy which he had experienced on the farm. When 
the vacation came he again went eagerly to his grandparents at 
South Reading, and regained his former joy in life during the 
summer. 

But again in September he had to go back to Boston. This time 
he was now nine years old he entered the Rice School, on 
Washington Street, where he was to spend the next three years of 
his primary education. His lessons seemed to him as dull and 
mechanical as ever, but he was much excited about Beadle's Dime 
Novels, which he obtained at a nearby bookstore. In school he 
picked up, "in addition to a bit of Geography and Arithmetic, every 
form of profanity, every bit of slang, and every particle of verbal 
garbage that he could assimilate." In 1868 the Rice School ac- 
quired a new building, on made land in the Back Bay district. 
When Louis was transferred there, in September, the lightness 
and brightness and cleanliness put him suddenly into a better 
humor for his lessons. For the first time he became interested in 
books he discovered books; he became an earnest student, al- 
most a recluse. He was fascinated by grammar, "took it at one 
dose." Once an idea had broken upon him, he foresaw consequences 
with extreme rapidity, and his imagination far outsped any possi- 
bility of reasonable accomplishment. 

During the latter years of his primary education, his activities 
spread over an ever-widening field. Always inquisitive and curious, 
he investigated every street, alley, and wharf from end to end 
of Boston. Wandering about by himself, he became interested in 
looking at buildings he especially admired the Masonic Temple 
at the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets. One day when he 
was about twelve he was wandering along Commonwealth Avenue, 
and, according to his own account, "saw a large man of dignified 



28 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

bearing, with beard, top hat, and frock coat, come out of a nearby 
building, enter his carriage and signal the coachman to drive on. 
The dignity was unmistakable, all men of station in Boston were 
dignified; sometimes insistently so, but Louis wished to know 
who and what was behind the dignity." So he asked one of the 
workmen, who explained that the dignified man was an architect, 
a man who designed buildings. Having always taken buildings 
for granted, Louis was much impressed by the revelation that a 
man could make up a building out of his head. Then and there he 
made up his mind to become an architect. He confided his new 
desire to his father, who was greatly pleased that his son's ambi- 
tion was centering on something definite. He suggested as a counter- 
proposal that Louis should study at an agricultural college and 
become a scientific farmer. Louis, although greatly tempted by 
his love of the outdoors, reflected at length and then said, "No, 
I have made up my mind." So it was agreed that he should become 
an architect, and that after he had finished his general education 
he should go to a technical school, and after that, perhaps, abroad. 

That winter Louis' mother suffered another attack of diphtheria, 
and barely survived it. Since the Boston climate seemed so bad 
for her Patrick Sullivan decided to move inland, and in the sum- 
mer of 1869 moved to Chicago, leaving Louis behind to live with 
his grandparents and to continue his education. During the ensuing 
year, his last in the grammar school, he lived at South Reading, 
coming into Boston daily for school. In June, 1870, he graduated 
with honors, and "there he received in pride, as a scholar, his first 
and last diploma" an interesting fact for a man who went on to 
study in high school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
and finally the Ecole des Beaux Arts. 

In September, 1870, at fourteen years of age, Louis passed the 
entrance examinations and was admitted to the English High 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 29 

School. The English and the Latin High were then housed in a 
single building, rather old and dingy, merely a partition wall 
separating them. Louis chanced to be one of forty-odd pupils 
assigned to a room presided over by one Moses Woolson. It was 
thus in his first year in high school that he came under the influence 
of a personality which was to serve as an inspiration for the rest 
of his life. Moses Woolson was a schoolmaster. He greeted his 
new pupils with remarks in substance as follows: "You are here 
as wards in my charge; I accept that charge as sacred; I accept 
the responsibility involved as a high exacting duty I owe to myself 
and equally to you. I will give to you all that I have, you shall 
give to me all that you have." He insisted throughout his training 
on silence, strict attention, alertness, accurate listening, observa- 
tion, reflection, discrimination. Louis rose to the challenge. Under 
Woolson's influence he became interested in things intellectual 
for their own sake. He disciplined himself as he had never done 
before. He rapidly acquired a good grounding and an interest 
in Algebra, Geometry, Botany, Mineralogy, English Literature, 
and French. Geometry particularly delighted him because of its 
nicety and exactitude. Sullivan's tribute to Woolson is worth quot- 
ing from the Autobiography: 

"Impartial in judgment, fertile in illustration and expedient, 
clear in statement, he opened to view a new world. ... By the 
end of the school year he had brought order out of disorder, defini- 
tion out of what was vague, superb alertness out of mere boyish 
ardor; had nurtured and concentrated all that was best in the 
boy; had made him consciously courageous and independent; 
had focussed his powers of thought, feeling and action; had con- 
firmed Louis' love of the great out of doors, as a source of inspira- 
tion; and had climaxed all by parting a great veil which opened 
to the view of this same boy the wonderland of Poetry. . . . There 



30 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

may have been teachers and teachers, but for Louis Sullivan there 
was and could be only one. And now, in all too feeble utterance 
he pleads this token, remembrance, to the memory of one long 
since passed on." 

Toward the end of his first year in high school, Louis was left 
alone at South Reading. In April, 1871, his grandmother died 
and his grandfather and his uncle Jules broke up their home on 
the farm and went to live in Philadelphia. For the next two years 
Louis made his home with a next-door-neighbor at South Reading, 
John A. Thompson. He continued to go into Boston daily for his 
classes under Moses Woolson, and, during his second year, under 
a schoolmaster named Hale, whom he describes as "a scholar and 
a gentleman, a shining light of conscientious, conventional, virtu- 
ous routine." He seems to have acquired rather more in the way 
of education in his adopted home. John A. Thompson was a culti- 
vated gentleman, whose dinner-table conversations were a liberal 
education in themselves. Louis felt that he had now definitely 
entered the cultural world. In particular, it was during this time 
that his taste for music developed and became a source of enjoy- 
ment for all his later years. "Thus he learned concerning chords, 
that the one in particular that had overwhelmed him with a sort 
of gorgeous sorrow was called the dominant seventh, and another 
that seemed eerie and that gave him a peculiar nervous thrill and 
chill was named the augmented fifth." He became exceedingly 
curious about modulations, modes, diatonic and chromatic scales, 
and other technicalities and names. He heard symphony concerts, 
soloists, and light concert music of all kinds in Boston. Especially 
he learned much about oratorios. He became a skilled pianist.! 
Many years later, a catalogue of his library listed fourteen vol- 
umes of oratorios, as well as several books on musical analysis,, 
harmony, etc. 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 31 

George Thompson, the son, was slightly older than Louis, and 
was studying railroad engineering at the Massachusetts Institute/ 
of Technology. Through him Louis became interested in going to 
"Tech" for his architectural education. At George Thompson's 
instance he essayed the entrance examinations at the end of his 
second year in the English High School, passed them with ease, 
and accordingly entered M.I.T. in September, 1872, at the age of ; 
sixteen, to take the course in architecture. 

The school was in Rogers Hall, near the corner of Boylston 
and Berkeley Streets, with pleasant study-rooms, a long drafting- 
room, library, and lecture-room. It was the first architectural school 
to be established in this country, and was comparatively new at 
the time, having been opened in 1865. It was directed by Professor 
William Ware, of the firm of Ware & Van Brunt. Professor Ware, 
in Louis' description, was "a gentleman of the old school; a 
bachelor, of good height, slender, bearded in the English fashion, 
and turning gray. He had his small affectations, harmless enough. 
His voice was somewhat husky, his polite bearing impeccable and 
kind. He had a precious sense of quiet humor, and common sense 
seemed to have a strong hold on him. Withal he was worthy of 
personal respect and affection. His attainments were moderate in 
scope and soundly cultural as of the day ; his judgments were clear 
and just. The words amiability and quiet common sense sum up his 
personality; he was not imaginative enough to be ardent. . . . 
The misfortune was that in his lectures on the history of architec- 
ture he never looked his pupils in the eye, but by preference 
addressed an audience in his beard, in a low and confidential tone, 
ignoring a game of spitball under way. Yet a word or a phrase 
reached the open now and then concerning styles, construction, 
and so forth, and at times he went to the blackboard and drew this 
and that very neatly." 



32 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

His assistant was Eugene Letang, a recent graduate of the atelier 
Vaudremer of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and winner of 
the Grand Prix de Rome. He was about thirty, sallow and earnest, 
with a long and lean face and no professional air, but patient, and 
a student among the students. Of the latter, there were about thirty, 
all told some already university graduates, almost all older and 
more worldly wise than Louis. He found among them agreeable 
companions, however, and thoroughly enjoyed the space and the 
freedom of the drafting-room intercourse. Under their influence he 
"began to put on a bit of swagger, to wear smart clothes, to shave 
away the down and to agitate a propaganda for inch-long side 
whiskers. A photograph of that date (Fig. 1) shows him as a clean- 
cut young man, with a rather intelligent expression, a heavy mop 
of black hair neatly parted for the occasion, a pearl stud set in 
immaculate white, and a suit up to the minute in material and 
cut." 

Early in his career at "Tech" Louis saw from its very begin- 
nings the famous Boston fire of November, 1872. His description 
of it bears repetition. It began with a small flame "curling from 
the wooden cornice of a building on the north side of Summer 
Street. There were perhaps a half a dozen persons present at the 
time. The street was night-still. It was early. No fire engine 
came. . . . All was quiet as the small flame grew into a whorl 
and sparks shot upward from a glow behind ; the windows became 
lighted from within. A few more people gathered, but no engine 
came. Then began a gentle purring roar. The few became a crowd, 
but no engine came. Glass crackled and crashed, flames burst forth 
madly from all windows, and the lambent dark flames behind them 
soared high, casting multitudes of sparks and embers abroad, as 
they cracked and wheezed. The roof fell, the floors collapsed. A 
hand-drawn engine came, but too late. The front wall tottered, 




Figure 1. Sullivan at sixteen, while 
at M.I.T. 




Figure 2. Dankmar Adler in 1880. 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 33 

swayed and crumbled to the pavement, exposing to view a roaring 
furnace. It was too late. The city seemed doomed. Louis followed 
its ravages all night long. It was a magnificent but terrible pageant 
of wrathful fire before whose onslaught row after row of regi- 
mented buildings melted away. . . ." For two nights after the 
fire Louis served as a guard in the M.I.T. volunteer battalion. He 
was thus not unacquainted with the disorder and desolation caused 
by a great conflagration when he went to Chicago the next year. 

The architectural training given at "Tech" was quite according 
to rule. Louis learned how to draw expertly for him, we can 
imagine, an easy task. He learned the classic orders as the funda- 
mentals of architectural design. He learned the historic styles. 
Architecture, he could see, was neatly pigeonholed in the files of 
the past. The classic style was something that had columns and 
pediments; the Gothic style had pinnacles and crockets; all of the 
styles were considered as vocabularies of detail rather than as/ 
modes of building. All of the styles, too, he found, were sacrosanct; 
it was only through them that architectural beauty could be 
achieved in the present. "Louis learned about diameters, modules, 
minutes, entablatures, columns, pediments, and so forth and so 
forth, with the associated minute measurements and copious vo- 
cabulary, all of which items he supposed at the time were intended 
to be received in unquestioning faith, as eternal verities. . . . 
Thus passed the days, the weeks, the months, in a sort of misch- 
masch of architectural theology, and Louis came to see that it was 
not upon the spirit but upon the word that stress was laid. . . . 
But the sanctity of the orders Louis considered quaint; the orders 
were really fairy tales of long ago, now by the learned made rigid, 
mechanical and inane in the books he was pursuing, wherein they 
were stultified, for lack of common sense and human feeling. . . . 
He began to feel a vacancy in himself, the need of something more 



34 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

nutritious to the mind than a play of marionettes. He f^lt the need 
and the lack of a red-blooded explanation, of a valiant idea thai 
should bring life to arouse this cemetery of orders and of 
styles. . . . Moreover, as the time passed he began to discover 
that this school was but a pale reflection of the Ecole des Beaux 
Arts; and he thought it high time that he go to headquarters to 
learn if what was preached there as a gospel really signified glad 
tidings." 

Louis made up his mind that he would leave M.I.T. at the end 
of his first year. He was aggressive and impatient; he knew what 
he wanted. He determined at that time to go to the Ecole, but before 
this he wanted a year or so of actual experience in an architect's 
office to investigate the practice as well as the theory of archi- 
tecture. This decision was a very important one, as it gave him a 
certain hard-headed knowledge of building that stood him in good 
stead when he later encountered the glamour and the superficial 
brilliance of the Ecole training. 

Louis said good-bye to "Tech" at the end of his first year, and 
headed for Philadelphia to live with his grandfather and uncle. 
On his way he stopped off in New York for a few days. He met 
Richard Morris Hunt, then in his middle forties but already suc- 
cessful. Hunt, first of American architects to study in Paris, told 
Louis stories of life at the Ecole in the good old days of 1845, 
and of his work in the atelier libre of Hector Lefuel, and later of 
the great work on the New Louvre in which he had assisted Lefuel. 
Hunt patted the enterprising youth of sixteen on the back, and 
encouraged him in his aspirations. Louis went on to Philadelphia. 

Once established at his grandfather's, he went out to look for 
work in his own way. It was not his method to comb the archi- 
tects' offices to see which one would take him. Rather he combed 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 35 

the street^ looking at the work of architects to see which office he 
would take. It was characteristic of his taste that the building which 
most appealed to him a large residence being completed on South 
Broad Street was by one of the freest and most original architects 
of Philadelphia in that day, Frank Furness. Louis accordingly 
presented himself at the office the next day, and informed Mr. Fur- 
ness that he had come to enter his employ. Mr. Furness inquired 
as to his experience, and when informed that Louis had just come 
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exploded, blowing 
up in fragments all the schools in the land and scattering the 
professors headless and limbless to the four quarters of earth and 
hell. Louis, he said, was a fool; a fool and an idiot to have wasted 
his time in a place where one was filled with sawdust, like a doll, 
and became a prig, a snob, and an ass. Louis was warmed by this 
fire ; to hear his own sentiments so eloquently expressed reinforced 
his determination to work for this Frank Furness. He agreed that 
he knew little or nothing, but said that he was capable of learning, 
told of his discovery of the house on Broad Street and how he had 
followed "from the nugget to the solid vein," said that here he 
could learn, that here he was, and that here he would remain. By 
this time Louis was capable of something of a Celtic eloquence 
himself, and it ended in his being taken on at ten dollars a week.: 
"Come tomorrow morning for a trial," said Furness, "but I 
prophesy you won't outlast a week." Louis entered the office. At 
the end of the week Furness said, "You may stay another week," 
and at the end of that week he said, "You may stay as long as you 
like." His first job was to retrace a set of plans for a Savings Insti- 
tution to be erected on Chestnut Street. 

"Frank Furness was a curious character. He affected the Eng- 
lish in fashion. He wore loud plaids, and a scowl, and from his 



36 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

face depended fan-like a marvellous red beard, beautiful in tone 
with each separate hair delicately crinkled from beginning to end. 
Moreover, his face was snarled and homely as an English bull- 
dog's. . . . The other member of the firm was George Hewitt, a 
slender, mustached person, pale and reserved, who seldom re- 
laxed from his pose. It was he who did the Victorian Gothic in its 
pantalettes, when a church building or something of the sort was 
on the boards. With precision, as though he held his elements by 
pincers, he worked out these decorous sublimities of inanity, as 
per the English current magazines and other English sources. . . , 
Louis regarded him with admiration as a draftsman, and with mild 
contempt as a man who kept his nose in the books. Frank Furness 
'made buildings out of his head.' That suited Louis better. And 
Furness as a freehand draftsman was extraordinary. He had Louis 
hypnotized, especially when he drew and swore at the same time.'* 
John Hewitt, George's younger brother, helped Louis a great 
deal with his draftsmanship. Louis worked hard day and night. 
At first he lived with his grandfather and uncle in West Philadel- 
phia, but soon moved into town to be nearer the office. The summer 
was hot, and he frequently walked through Fairmount Park (be- 
fore it was landscaped for the Centennial Exhibition) and up the 
small valley of the Wissahickon of a Sunday. The offices of Furness 
& Hewitt were on the top floor of a four-story brick building at the 
corner of Third Street and Chestnut From this vantage point, on 
a hot September day, Louis looked down into the streets on the 
mob scenes attendant on the closing of Jay Cooke & Company's 
office, a few doors down the street, that inaugurated the bank runs 
and historic panic of 1873. His first architectural experience was 
to be short-lived. Furness & Hewitt, like every other firm, was 
hit by the depression. They finished up commissions already under- 
taken, but in November work was running dry, and since Louis 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 37 

had been the last to be taken on, he was the first to be released. 
He left the office with the regrets and warm best wishes of Frank 
Furness. 

Within a week Louis took the train for Chicago to join his 
parents. He arrived through miles of disheartening shanties and 
the dirty ruins of the Great Fire. It was the day before Thanks- 
giving, 1873. The city was still largely in ashes, but the ambition 
of recovery was in the air. Building was extremely active. In the 
first years after the fire, 1872 and 1873, the output of the more 
important architects' offices was actually measured by the mile. 
John M. Van Osdel designed over 8,000 feet of "first class" front 
during the eighteen months after the fire; Carter, Drake & Wight 
did five miles; W. W. Boyington over three. Less important then, 
but to become big names in the world of architecture during the 
next generation, were the firms of Jenney, Schermerhorn & Bogart 
(William LeBaron Jenney began practice in Chicago in 1868); 
Burling & Adler (established 1871); and the promising young 
firm of Burnham & Root (established 1873). 

The seventeen-year-old youth was fascinated by the city. "Louis 
thought it all magnificent and wild: a crude extravaganza, an 
intoxicating rawness, a sense of big things to be done. . . . The 
elevated wooden sidewalks in the business district, with steps a I 
each street corner, seemed shabby and grotesque; but when Louis 
learned that this meant that the city had determined to raise itself 
three feet more out of the mud, his soul declared that this resolve 
meant high courage; that the idea was big; that there must be big 
men here. The shabby walks now became a symbol of stout 
hearts. . . . The pavements were vile, because hastily laid; they 
erupted here and there and everywhere in ooze. Most of the build- 
ings, too, were paltry. . . . But in spite of the panic, there was 
stir; an energy that made him tingle to be in the game/' 



38 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

Louis followed his Philadelphia procedure in looking for a job. 
In the course of his explorations, he especially admired the Port- 
land Block, a new building at the southeast corner of Dearborn 
and Washington Streets. He inquired as to the architect, and was 
given the name of Major William LeBaron Jenney. He forthwith 
applied at the Major's office, and was taken on immediately, as 
more help was needed. During his six months in Major Jenney 's 
office, Louis formed his first acquaintance with the many interest- 
ing personalities of the architectural world in Chicago. Major 
Jenney was the first of these, and Louis has left a classic descrip- 
tion of him. "The Major was a free-and-easy cultured gentleman, 
but not an architect except by courtesy of terms. His true profession 
was that of engineer. He received his training at the Ecole Poly- 
technique in France, and had served through the Civil War as 
Major of Engineers. He had been with Sherman on the march 
to the sea. He spoke French with an accent so atrocious that it 
jarred Louis' teeth, while his English speech jerked about as though 
it had St. Vitus' dance. He was monstrously pop-eyed, with hang- 
ing mobile features, sensuous lips, and he disposed of matters 
easily in the manner of a war veteran who believed he knew what 
was what. Louis soon found out that the Major was not, really, 
in his heart, an engineer at all, but by nature and in toto, a bon 
vivant, a gourmet. He lived at Riverside, a suburb, and Louis often 
smiled to see him carry home by their naked feet, with all plum- 
age, a brace or two of choice wild ducks, or other game birds, or a 
rare and odorous cheese from abroad. And the Major knew his 
vintages, every one, and his sauces, every one; he was also a master 
of the chafing dish and the charcoal grille. All in all the Major was 
effusive; a hail fellow well met, an officer of the Loyal Legion, 
a welcome guest anywhere, but by preference a host. He was also 
an excellent raconteur, with a lively sense of humor and a certain 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 39 

piquancy of fancy that seemed Gallic. In his stories or his mono- 
logues, his unique vocal mannerisms or gyrations or gymnastics 
were a rich asset, as he squeaked or blew, or lost his voice, or ran 
in arpeggio from deep bass to harmonics, or took octaves, or fifths, 
or sevenths, or ninths in spasmodic splendor. His audience roared, 
for his stories were choice, and his voice as one caught bits of it, 
was plastic, rich and sweet, and these bits, in sequence and collec- 
tively had a warming effect." 

Many stories attest to the kindliness and generosity of the Major, 
and his abilities as a teacher are indicated by a list of some of 
the men who got their start in his office. Besides Louis Sullivan, 
there were, at one time or another, Martin Roche, William A. 
Holabird, John Edelmann, Irving K. Pond, Howard Van Doren 
Shaw, James Gamble Rogers, and Alfred Granger. If the Major 
liked a student in his office, or a draftsman, he would stop his 
work and spend an hour or two teaching, instructing, explaining. 

At the time Louis entered the office John Edelmann was fore- 
man. They became close friends, and Louis conceived an admira- 
tion for John which lasted the rest of his life. Edelmann was twenty- 
four at the time, "brawny, bearded, unkempt, careless, his voice 
rich, sonorous, modulant, his vocabulary an overflowing reser- 
voir. ... By nature indolent, by vanity and practice very rapid. 
He was a profound thinker, a man of immense range of reading, 
a brain of extraordinary keenness, strong, vivid, that ranged in 
its operations from saturnine intelligence concerning men and their 
motives to the highest transcendentalisms of German metaphysics. 

"There was enough work in the office to keep five men and a 
boy busy, provided they took intervals of rest, which they did. 
In the Major's absences, which were frequent and long, bedlam 
reigned. John Edelmann would mount a drawing table and make 
a howling stump speech on greenback currency, or single tax, 



40 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

while at the same time Louis, at the top of his voice, sang selections 
from oratorios, beginning with his favorite, 'Why Do the Nations 
So Furiously Rage Together?'; and so all the force furiously raged 
together in joyous deviltry and bang-bang-bang. ... The office- 
rat suddenly appears: 'Cheese it, Cullies; the Boss!' . . . Sudden 
silence, sudden industry, intense concentration. The Major enters 
and announces his pleasure in something less than three octaves. 
Thus the day's work comes out fairly even. ..." 

With John Edelmann Louis went every Sunday afternoon 
through that winter to hear Hans Balatka and his orchestra play 
Wagner in Turner Hall, on the North Side. Wagner was the first 
of his great enthusiasms. He saw in him a mighty personality, a 
great free spirit, who had created a domain of his own out of his 
imagination and his will. He responded to the power in Wagner 
as he later responded to the unbounded power of Michelangelo. 
Louis and John Edelmann also frequented the gymnasium together, 
and in the spring lived for a time in the latter' s boat-house in the 
preserves of the "Lotus Club," on the Calumet River. 

As the spring months wore on Louis decided that his experience 
in the offices of Furness & Hewitt and of Jenney had given him 
that taste of architecture as it is practiced which he had desired 
as a part of his training, and that it was now time for him to fulfil 
his resolve to go to the fountain-head of architectural education 
the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He took the train East,' and on July 10, 
1874, sailed from New York on the Britannic. The boat called at 
Queenstown, where Louis got a glimpse of the high hills of the 
coastline, his only view of Ireland, and landed at Liverpool. He 
remained in Liverpool a day or two, and in London two weeks, 
then took the Dover-Dieppe Channel boat for France. He arrived 
in Paris after nightfall, and went to the Hotel St. Honore. After 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 41 

a few days there he found himself permanent quarters on the 
seventh floor of a rooming hotel at the corner of the Rue Monsieur 
le Prince and the Rue Racine, in the Latin Quarter, 

Louis had six weeks in which to prepare himself for the search- 
ing entrance examinations of the Ecole. During this time he had 
to become proficient in spoken French, and brush up on a wide 
range of subjects, especially Mathematics and History. He was 
in good physical condition, and he planned to work eighteen hours 
a day, allotting one hour a day for gymnasium to keep himself in 
trim. His high-school French, he found, was woefully inadequate. 
He intended to work several hours a day and to learn colloquial 
French. He engaged a tutor to come every day, was not satisfied, 
and selected a second who was soon worn out. The third one stuck. 
"He saw into Louis' plan and it amused him greatly, so much so 
that he joined in jovially, and made a play of it. A petit verre 
started him off nicely. He possessed a rare art of conversation, was 
full of anecdote, personal incident and reminiscence, knew his 
Paris, had the sense of comedy to a degree, looked upon life as 
a huge joke, upon all persons as jokes, and upon Louis as such in 
particular he would amuse himself with this frantic person. At 
once he spoke to Louis en camarade, vieux copain> as one French- 
man to another. He made running comments on the news of the 
day, explained all sorts of things Louis was beginning to note in 
Paris life, put him in the running. He had a gift of mimicry, would 
imitate the provincial dialects and peasant jargon, with fitting 
tone and gesture, and, taking a given topic or incident, would re- 
late it in terms and impersonations ranging in series from garnin to 
Academician. ... He was well built, well under middle age, 
seldom sat for long, but paced the floor, or lolled here and there 
by moments. His voice was suave, his manner frank and free. He 



42 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

had an air, was well bred. He was either an unconscious or a crafty 
teacher, a rara avis, he knew how to get results. The daily lesson 
lasted one hour, and Louis plowed on at high tension." 

At the American Legation he was referred to a Monsieur Clopet 
as an excellent tutor in Mathematics. He lost no time in calling, 
and was greeted by a small dark man. The preliminaries over, 
M. Clopet asked: "And what are the books you have under your 
arm?" Louis replied, "Books I was told at the American Legation 
I would need." He took the books, selected a large work on Descrip- 
tive Geometry, and began to turn the pages. "Now observe: Here 
is a problem with five exceptions or special cases; here is a theorem, 
three special cases; another nine, and so on and on, a procession 
of exceptions and special cases. I suggest you place the book in 
the waste basket; we shall not have need of it here; for here our 
demonstrations shall be so broad as to admit of no exception." 
The phrase flashed through Louis' rnind. Here, perhaps, was born 
his life's aim in the field of architecture: to make a "Clopet demon- 
stration" for architecture to formulate a rule so broad as to admit 
of no exceptions. 

Louis joined the Mathematics class, consisting of some twenty 
young men, but no other English or Americans. "At M. Clopet' s 
class all were hard put to it to keep up their notes as a lecture 
progressed. M. Clopet was gentle, polished, forceful. 4 0ne must 
work; that is what one is here for/ As a drill master he was a 
potent driver, as an expounder he made good his word to Louis 
in a method and a, manner, revealing, inspiriting, as he calmly un- 
folded, step by step, a well reasoned process in his demonstra- 
tions, which were so simple, so inclusive, so completely rounded as 
to preclude exception; and there was not a book in sight. . . . 
Louis was especially pleased at the novelty of saying je dis 
'I say' at the beginning of a demonstration. It humanized mat- 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 43 

ters, brought them home, close up, a sort of challenge. How much 
more intelligent and lively to begin: 'I say that the sum of the 
angles of any triangle equals two right angles' than the formal 
impersonal statement: 'The sum of the angles of any triangle equals 
two right angles.' The latter statement one may take or leave. The 
former is a personal assertion and implies C I will show you.' In 
fact, it was this '1 say' and this 'I will show you' that made up the 
charm of M. Clopet's teaching method. ... At the end of the 
first half-hour M. Clopet always called a recess. From his pocket 
he drew forth his pouch and his little book of rice papers; so did 
the others. There was sauntering, spectacular smoking and con- 
versation. The cigarette finished, work was resumed. . . . After 
recess the students were put through their paces at the blackboard 
for the final half-hour." 

At the earnest urging of his fellow students, Louis discarded 
his flannel suit and white canvas shoes, to appear in a tall silk hat, 
an infant beard, long tail coat, dark trousers, polished shoes, kid 
gloves, and a jaunty cane a student among the students. Every 
night he studied by candle-light in his small room on the seventh 
floor arranged his Mathematics notes, studied French vocabu- 
lary, read History by the hour. And so the six weeks passed; the 
examinations, early in October, had arrived. 

The examinations were written, drawn, and oral, covering a 
period of three weeks. The free-hand drawing, the mechanical 
drawing, and a simple architectural project were easy for Louis. 
More difficult were the oral examinations, which were conducted 
in little amphitheatres, with a professor presiding, and all aspirants 
free to come and go as they wished. Louis faced his inquisitor in 
Mathematics for over an hour of steady questioning. The examina- 
tion was designed to test, not his memory, but his ability to think 
in mathematical terms. At the end of the examination the professor 



44 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

shook his hand and said: "I felicitate you, Monsieur Sullivan; 
you have the mathematical imagination which is rather rare. I 
wish you well." The examination in History included only three 
questions, but each of these involved an hour and a half of constant 
talking. The three questions were: "Monsieur, will you be kind 
enough to tell me the story of the Hebrew people?"; "I would like 
an account of ten emperors of Rome"; and "Give me an intimate 
account of the times of Francis I." The latter question interested 
Louis especially, as he had studied the period carefully, and the 
time and its people, its manners and customs and thoughts stood 
out before him as a very present picture. He passed the examina- 
tion with the highest rating. These examinations gave Louis an in- 
sight into the quality and reach of French thought its richness, 
its solidity, and above all the severity of its discipline beneath so 
smooth a surface. 

The examinations passed successfully, Louis was entered as a 
member of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and elected to study in the 
atelier libre of M. Emil Vaudremer. M. Vaudremer was a practic- 
ing architect of middle age, considered a distinguished member of 
his profession. The first problem was a three-months' projet, for 
which the twenty-four-hour sketches were made en loge and filed as 
briefs. The esquisse-en-loge served as a kind of outline, a thesis, 
which must be adhered to closely in the development of the com- 
plete conception. This, it seemed to Louis, was discipline of an 
inspired sort, as it permitted free play to the individual creative 
imagination in establishing the essentials of a problem, then a firm 
adherence to those essentials in working out its ramifications and 
details. Once the projet was given out all the students in the atelier 
vanished, to work out the details wherever and however they 
wished. Many of them left the city. Louis felt the need of relaxa- 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 45 

tion after the stress of preparing for the examinations, and decided 
to take a short trip to Italy. 

He went first to Rome. He spent only three days there two 
of them in the Sistine Chapel. Needless to say, it was Michelangelo's 
great ceiling paintings which held him. Michelangelo became for 
him another and a greater than Wagner. "Here Louis communed 
in silence with a Super-Man. Here he felt and saw a great Free 
Spirit. Here he was filled with the awe that stills. . . . Here was 
power, as he had seen it in the mountains, here was power as he had 
seen it in the prairies, in the open sky, in the great lake stretching 
like a floor toward the horizon, here was the power of the forest 
primeval. Here was the power of the open of the free spirit of 
man striding abroad in the open. Here was the living presence of 
a man who had done things in the beneficence of power." This 
enthusiasm for Michelangelo when a boy of eighteen remained 
with him the rest of his life, and he always kept as a prized posses- 
sion a little folio of reproductions of the paintings of the Sistine 
Ceiling. Next, he journeyed to Florence, where he stayed six weeks, 
but nothing there seemed to have impressed him as much as did 
Michelangelo. He returned along the Riviera to Nice, and thence 
to Paris. 

Louis went back to his old rooms at the corner of the Rue Mon- 
sieur le Prince and the Rue Racine, and took up again his work 
in the atelier. The quarters were not palatial. "The atelier . . . 
was at the ground level, a rough affair, like a carpenter's shop, 
large enough to accommodate about twenty young ruffians. Here 
it was the work was done amid a cross-fire of insults, and it was 
also here that Monsieur Emil Vaudremer came to make his 'criti- 
cisms/ He was one of the dark Frenchmen, of medium size, who 
carried a fine air of native distinction; a man toward whom one's 



46 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

heart instantly went out in respectful esteem bordering on pride 
and affection. His personality was calm, deliberate yet magnetic, 
a sustained, quiet dignity bespeaking a finished product. His 'criti- 
cisms' were, therefore, just what one might expect them to be, clear, 
clean-cut, constructive, and personal to each student in each case 
with that peculiar sympathy with the young which comes from 
remembrance of one's own youth. Always, however, he was a dis- 
ciplinarian, and one felt the steady pressure." 

Louis went to work to carry out his projet, entering heart and 
soul into the serious yet occasionally tumultuous life of the atelier. 
At first, like all the nouveaux, the neophytes, he was required by 
the older students to carry wood for the stove, or clean the draw- 
ing boards. But his ready command of French and the sprinkling 
of thieves' slang which he had picked up from his tutor and used 
effectively on occasions soon raised his status to that of an ancien. 
The intimate contacts, the free commingling of younger and older 
students, the discussions about the work, seemed invaluable to him. 
* Louis remained in Paris about two years. 2 He studied carefully 
all the monuments and museums of Paris, followed all the archi- 
tectural exhibitions at the Ecole, and thoroughly familiarized him- 
self with the theory of its training. But like the architectural school 
at M.I.T., he soon found it merely academic. The problems it set 
were not the real problems of architecture. How could they teach 
creation in a vacuum? To Sullivan in his later years there could 
be no real creation in architecture without the stimulus of a definite 
and actual problem that had to be solved, a need that had to be 
filled. The problems set at the Ecole were not such as would be met 
with in actual architectural practice, and because they were not 
real problems they failed to achieve the general value and signifi- 
cance that they might have had. In Louis' mind, the theory of the 
school "settled down to a theory of plan, yielding results of extraor- 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 47 

dinary brilliancy, but which, after all, was not the reality he sought, 
but an abstraction, a method, a state of mind, that was local and 
specific; not universal. Intellectual and aesthetic, it beautifully 
set forth a sense of order, of function, of highly skilled manipula- 
tion. Yet there was for him a fatal residuum of artificiality, which 
gave him a secret sense of misery where he wished but too tenderly 
to be happy." 

It was not that Louis disliked the history of architecture, which 
he studied intensively. It was the tendency of the Ecole to study 
the history of architecture as a series of crystallizations called 
"styles" that seemed artificial to him. He preferred to study the 
history of architecture "not merely as a fixation here and there in 
time and place, but as a continuous outpouring never to end, from 
the infinite fertility of man's imagination, evoked by his changing 
needs." There came to him the conviction that the Ecole, perfect 
as it was within the limits of its theory of education, lacked "the 
profound animus of a primal inspiration." "Thus crept over him 
the certitude Jthat the book was about to close; that he was becom- 
ing solitary in his thoughts and heart-hungry, that he must go his 
way alone, that the Paris of his delight must and should remain 
the dream of his delight, that the pang of inevitable parting was at 
hand." 

Louis returned to Chicago. When he arrived the effects of the 
panic of_187^had not wholly passed, and the building industry 
was inactive. He found no immediate employment, and to put in his 
time he made a systematic reconnaissance of the city. Daily he 
made twenty miles or more on foot. Thus he discovered and knew 
the whole city. After a time he obtained a minor position in an 
architect's office, and after this a series of brief engagements in 
other offices, until he had nearly covered the field. Most of his 
employers were men of the older generation, of homely make-up 



48 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

and homely ways, who had little respect for Louis' new-fangled 
foreign education, and for whom he felt much sympathy. He found 
them very human, and enjoyed their shop-talk, which was that of 
the graduate carpenter. During the course of the year 1877 build- 
ing conditions were improving and his engagements in offices grew 
longer. He came to have the reputation of a hard worker and a 
clever draftsman, and he increased his salary somewhat with each 
move. But still he was not satisfied to remain a draftsman. His 
intention was to enter the office of an older architect with an estab- 
lished practice, provided he could find the right man, and to work 
up as rapidly as his industry and his talents would permit to the 
position of a partner in the firm. But the desired opportunity did 
not appear at once. For some three years after his return from 
Paris Louis was a rolling stone. 

Although not definitely located professionally, he used his 
evenings to try to locate himself intellectually. He was consciously 
trying to work out a "Clopet demonstration" for architecture. At 
first he swung to pure engineering. He often saw Frederick Bau- 
mann, an able engineer who had published a paper on A Theory 
of Isolated Pier Foundations in 1873, which was to become the 
basis for standard practice during the eighties and nineties. To- 
gether they discussed engineering problems. Louis made Traut- 
wine's Engineer's Pocket Book his bible, and spent long hours 
with it. The engineering journals kept him in close touch with cur- 
rent doings; he followed every detail of the construction of the 
Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis, and the Kentucky 
River Bridge. The chief engineers became his new heroes, and as 
he went into the subject he began to feel that the engineers of the 
day were the only builders who faced a problem squarely. He even 
dreamed for a while of becoming an engineer. 

But his interest in the science of engineering soon developed 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 49 

into a larger interest in science in general. He read much of Dar- 
win, Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall. In them he found an enormous 
new world opening before him. The scientific method appealed 
to him as a weapon of thought for him to master and apply to the 
solution of his problems in architecture. 

One day his old friend John Edelmann returned from Iowa, 
where he had had a spell of farming during the dull period, and 
found a position in the office of the firm of Burling & Adler. Louis 
met him in Kinsley's restaurant, where the draftsmen from various 
architects' offices habitually lunched and talked shop. Edelmann 
suggested that Louis go over to his office to meet Adler. This was 
the first meeting between Dankmar Adler and his future partner. 
Edelmann and Sullivan "entered the large bare room, drawing 
tables scattered about it; in the center were two plain desks . . . 
both partners were present and busy. Burling was slouched in a 
swivel chair, his long legs covering the desk top; he wiggled a 
chewed cigar as he talked to a caller, and spat into a square box. 
He was an incredible, long and bulky nosed Yankee, perceptibly 
aging fast, and of manifestly weakening will one of the passing 
generation who had done a huge business after the fire but whom 
the panic had hit hard. . . . Further away stood Adler at a drafts- 
man's table. . . . He was a heavy-set short-nosed Jew, well- 
bearded, with a magnificent domed forehead which stopped sud- 
denly at a solid mass of black hair. (Fig. 2 is a photograph of 
Adler taken about 1880.) He was a picture of sturdy strength, 
physical and mental. . . . His broad, serious face, and kindly 
brown, efficient eyes joined in a rich smile of open welcome. It 
did not take many ticks of the clock to note that Adler's brain was 
intensely active and ambitious, his mind open, broad, receptive, 
and of an unusually high order. . . . The talk was brief and 
lively; Adler said nice things, questioned Louis as to his stay at 



50 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

the Beaux Arts. The little talk ended, Louis left; John remained 
in his preserve. This was the last Louis saw of Adler for many 
moons. He was pleased to have met him and to have reason heartily 
to respect his vigorous personality. But he was no part of Louis' 
program, hence he soon faded from view, and became almost com- 
pletely forgotten." 

It was not until about a year later that the two men came together 
again. John Edelmann had in the meantime established a partner- 
ship with George H. Johnson, a pioneer in the use of tile for fire- 
proofing buildings, but he kept in touch with his former employers. 
One day early in 1879 Edelmann sought Louis out to tell him 
that Adler had dissolved his partnership with Burling, and had set 
up independently. Adler had put through the important new 
Central Music Hall, then under construction, and had other jobs 
in the office. Edelmann urged that this was Louis' opportunity. 
Adler, he knew, would welcome a competent designer. 

"So they made a second call on Adler. There ensued a mutual 
sizing-up at close range, very friendly indeed. And it was then 
and there agreed that Louis was to take charge of Adler's office, was 
to have a free hand, and, if all went well for a period and they 
should get along well together, there was something tangible in 
the background. Louis took hold and made things hum. Soon there 
came into the office three large orders; a six-story high grade office 
building the Borden Block; an up-to-date theatre, and a large 
substantial residence. Louis put through the work with the effi- 
ciency of combined Moses Woolson and Beaux Arts training. It 
was his first fine opportunity. He used it. He found in Adler a 
most congenial co-worker, open-minded, generous-minded, quick 
to perceive, thorough-going, warm in his enthusiasms, opening to 
Louis every opportunity to go ahead on his own responsibility, 
posting him on matters of building technique of which he had a 



YOUTH AND TRAINING 51 

complete grasp, and all in all treating Louis as a prize pet. . . . 
Thus they became warm, friends. Adler said one day 'How would 
you like to take me into partnership?' Louis laughed. 6 A11 right/ 
said Adler, 'draw up a contract for five years, beginning first of 
May. First year you one-third, after that even.' Louis drew up a 
brief memorandum on a sheet of office stationery, which Adler 
read over once and signed. On the first day of May, 1880, D. Adler 
and Co. moved into a fine suite of offices on the top floor of the 
Borden Block aforesaid. On the first day of May, 1881, the firm 
of Adler & Sullivan, Architects, had its name on the entrance 
door." Thus after architectural training and experience of nearly 
nine years, Sullivan became at the age of twenty-four a full partner 
in one of the important architectural firms of Chicago. 



1 This and subsequent quotations in this chapter are drawn from The 
Autobiography of an Idea. 

2 Sullivan does not state in The Autobiography of an Idea how long he 
remained at the Ecole, and no other definite source of information on this 
point has been uncovered. Mr. George Elmslie, who worked with him later 
for some twenty years, asserts that he was in Paris "short of two years," 
which would have meant that he came back to Chicago before July, 1876. 



II. EARLY WORKS 



BY 1880 architecture in Chicago and the Middle West generally 
had reached its nadir. The earlier Greek Revival tradition, which 
had produced a reasonably satisfactory vernacular architecture, 
died away shortly after the Civil War. In its place there was no 
tradition, only a clamor of discordant fashions ranging from what 
EL Stewart Leonard has termed "carpenter's frenzy," a St. Vitas' 
dance of spindly lathe-work and jig-saw scrolls, to the slightly 
recognizable "styles" of the professional architects; all were pre- 
tentious, all were romantically historical in intention, and all 
were completely and irremediably bad. Although architects and 
carpenter-builders professed to be designing in historical styles, 
there were none in Chicago with even the scholarship of Richard 
Morris Hunt, whose Vanderbilt House in New York (1879-81) 
in the Early French Renaissance manner at least set a new stand- 
ard of imitation in the East. Nor was there such a powerful creative 
figure as H. H. Richardson. Richardson's "Romanesque" was by 
this time beginning to be a vogue in the East; his Trinity Church 
in Boston had been finished in 1877 and was proving a potent in- 
fluence. But his style had not yet reached Chicago. To be sure, his 
American Merchants' Union Express Building in Chicago, built 
in 1872, had used some Romanesque forms, but it was by no means 
typical of his developed style, which did not reach Chicago until 
he built there in the middle eighties. 

The popular "styles" in Chicago in 1880 were those which give 

52 



EARLY WORKS 53 

the epithets "The Gilded Age" and "The Reign of Terror" their 
justification. Most fashionable, perhaps, was the mansarded French 
Second Empire, a style much corrupted in transmission from the 
Paris of Baron Haussmann. It was a comparatively recent im- 
portation to Chicago, its first important exemplar there (and one 
of the most elaborate in America) being the Palmer House, built 
after the fire by John M. Van Osdel, and famous throughout the 
Middle West for its sumptuous elegance and the silver dollars 
imbedded in the barber-shop floor. Van Osdel had not at that time 
been to Europe, but he easily found every last detail in the monu- 
mental tomes of Cesar Daly's Architecture privee du XIX e siecle, 
published in 1864. His position as the dean of Chicago architects 
(he had been the first professional architect in the city and had 
enjoyed a long and honorable practice there for thirty-five years) 
established the new style as fashionable, and in 1880 it was still 
the cachet of wealth and a position in society. 

The only serious rival was the Victorian Gothic, inherited from 
Pugin's and Scott's revivals of the Gothic in England, confused 
by Butterfield's velleity for Italian polychromy, Italian Gothic 
arches, picturesque roof-lines, pinnacles, chimney-buttresses, and 
other "Gothic" paraphernalia. The Victorian Gothic was perhaps 
the most widespread of any single style, lending itself to all types 
of buildings, public and private. Another style, best known to 
Chicagoans in the Potter Palmer "castle" on the Lake Shore Drive 
(1884) and in the quaint old Water Tower (1869) rising in the 
middle of North Michigan Avenue, is commonly referred to as 
"Castellated Gothic," and properly known as "pure Norman" 
according to the architects who employed it. With rough, quarry- 
faced masonry, rugged walls pierced by small and irregularly- 
placed windows, donjon-tower accents and battlemented parapets, 
the style was fairly popular, especially in penitentiary and armory 



54 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

architecture. Then there was a host of other "styles," such as the 
miraculous Byzantine of Boyington's gaudy Board of Trade Build- 
ing, or the Flemish guild-hall effect of the old Dearborn Street 
Station. Perhaps the quintessence of romantic eclecticism had 
been reached in the previous generation in the Crosby Opera 
House (1865), which an account of 1891 describes as "an Italo- 
Byzantine French Venetian structure with Norman windows," 
adding that it was "the finest building in Chicago in its day." There 
was indeed a babel of tongues. 

On the side of engineering, however, Chicago architecture was 
leading the country. The circumstances of the Great Fire of 1871 
and the difficult soil-conditions combined to force experiments in 
new methods of fireproofing and foundation construction. George 
H. Johnson designed, in the Kendall Building in 1872, the first 
fireproof hollow tile floor construction in the country, and the 
Montauk Building, built by Burnham & Root in 1880-81, was 
the first office building entirely fireproofed in the modern manner, 
with all iron framework sheathed. The difficult problem of making 
foundations strong enough to support high buildings on a com- 
pressible soil was partially solved by Frederick Baumann's in- 
vention of isolated spread-footing foundations in 1873. Burnham 
& Root still further improved foundations for high buildings by 
devising the steel-grillage imbedded in concrete in 1884. Mean- 
time, Major William LeBaron Jenney was making the series of 
experiments in the use of an iron frame which resulted in the epoch- 
making invention of skyscraper construction in the Home Insurance 
Building of 1884. 1 

Chicago had fully recovered from the depression of 1873, and 
the building industry was booming. The offices of Burnham & Root, 
Van Osdel, Jenney, and Boyington were full of commissions, and 
the Loop section of the city was being completely transformed. 



EARLY WORKS 55 

There were still thousands of houses to be built to replace those 
destroyed in the fire, and to accommodate the expanding popula- 
tion of the city. The spirit of growth was in the air. 

It was into this melange of high ambition, practical sense, and 
aesthetic confusion that Sullivan stepped when he began practice 
with Adler in 1880. From the time of their first joint work to the 
undertaking of the Auditorium, they designed some sixty-five 
structures of various types office buildings, factories, theatres, 
residences, etc. 

It was in the office buildings that the most signal advances in 
construction and design were achieved. The engineering problems 
were more difficult than those of residential building, and the op- 
portunities for improvement in design more apparent, to a man 
like Sullivan, than those of either residential or theatre architec- 
ture. The multi-story office building was new; it called for new 
functional arrangements of the interior and for new structural 
methods. What more stimulating than the problem of evolving a 
suitable design to express these new facts? Sullivan writes: "The 
building business was again under full swing, and a series of 
important mercantile structures came into the office, each one of 
which he (Sullivan) treated experimentally, feeling his way 
toward a basic process, a grammar of his own. The immediate 
problem was daylight, the maximum of daylight. This led him to 
use slender piers, tending toward a masonry and iron combination, 
the beginnings of a vertical system. . . . Into the work was slowly 
infiltrated a corresponding system of artistic expression, which ap- 
peared in these structures as novel, and, to some, repellent in its 
total disregard of accepted notions." 2 

The "accepted notions" of office-building design in 1880 may 
be briefly set forth, as it is only thus that the innovations made by 
Adler & Sullivan may be understood. Office buildings at that time 



56 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

were ordinarily three or four stories high. Their walls rested on a 
continuous foundation of considerable weight and depth in 
Chicago, usually extending several feet down to hardpan. Above 
the street level, the wall at the base might be about two and a half 
feet thick for a three-story building, three feet thick for a four- 
story building, somewhat more for a five-story building, and so 
on. The wall of the tallest masonry building in Chicago, the sixteen- 
story Monadnock Block built as late as 1891, is about twelve feet 
thick at the base, Thus for buildings over six or seven stories, a 
great deal of the lot-area was taken up by thick walls, and potential 
space for renting was lost. The floors were usually supported in- 
side the walls by a framework of cast-iron and wrought-iron posts, 
girders, and beams, carrying hollow tile floor arches. The outside 
ends of the floor beams were carried by the brick wall, which might 
be thickened into piers at the points of support. Cast-iron posts 
were sometimes used to reinforce these piers. This type of wall 
construction meant that only relatively small windows could be 
used, and even then the reveals were so deep that much light was 
lost. 

Architecturally,, the building was an envelope, the exterior of 
which was treated in any way that pleased the architect or his 
client. Since the multi-story building was a new problem in design, 
for which there were no satisfactory historical precedents, its 
height became an embarrassment rather than an advantage. Archi- 
tects usually cut it up horizontally by string courses or cornices into 
units of one or two stories, using every device to make a high build- 
ing look like a low one. At the top they capped it with a large 
cornice of galvanized iron of the cheapest construction compatible 
with aesthetic decency, or else a mansard or pitched roof such as 
might be found on a residence. 

Adler & Sullivan did not solve all the problems of construction 



EARLY WORKS 57 

and design in the office building at once. In fact, their best solution 
of the problem did not come until ten years later. But it is interest- 
ing to see how far beyond the standard of the day they advanced in 
the first office building they put up the Borden Block in Chicago. 
(PL 50) It was built 1879-80, completed before May 1, 1880, as 
on that date the firm of D. Adler & Co. moved into a suite of offices 
on its top floor. Adler doubtless accomplished the business arrange- 
ments and supervised the structural engineering, while Sullivan 
did the designing. He was chief draftsman in Adler' s office at the 
time. 

The Borden Block embodied several structural innovations. 
Adler & Sullivan realized that the primary need in office-building 
design was to lighten the walls and to open more window space. 
They accomplished this by strengthening the brick weight-bearing 
piers, thus dividing the wall into a series of bays, reducing the 
thickness of the wall in these bays. The two windows in each bay 
were separated by a cast-iron mullion, giving more light and 
strength than a masonry pier between them would have permitted. 
The lintels over the windows were cast-iron I-beams imbedded in 
the masonry of the piers, carrying spandrel panels of carved stone. 
The structural system of intermittent weight-bearing piers logically 
called for a departure from the old-fashioned continuous founda- 
tion, and the wall-piers were carried on isolated foundations of 
stone carried to a depth of about nine feet. This may have been 
the first example of the use of isolated spread-footings for wall 
support. The late Mr. Paul Mueller, structural engineer who 
worked for years in Adler & Sullivan's office, stated that the Borden 
Block was the first building in Chicago to break away from the 
solid-wall principle, although the first Leiter Building, built by 
William LeBaron Jenney in the same year, may be a rival claim- 
ant, as it is essentially of the same construction. 



58 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

The exterior architectural treatment was quite novel in its day. 
The piers were faced by pilaster-strips 3 carried from bottom to 
top, which served to emphasize the vertical effect of the design. 
Each bay was topped by a semicircular lunette, richly carved, a 
common stylism in Sullivan's buildings of the eighties. The 
spandrels, the entablature over the second story, and panels under 
the top cornice were also carved. The details of Sullivan's early 
ornament can be better studied in later examples, but it will be 
observed that the disposition on non-structural parts, the clear 
bounding of the panels, and the flat surface quality of the orna- 
ment are entirely architectural in governance and feeling. Sullivan 
showed himself still influenced by conventional design in dividing 
the building horizontally into three groups of two stories each by 
the entablature over the second story and the cornice over the 
fourth. These detract from the feeling of vertical continuity that 
the building might have had. The top cornice was simple and of 
no great projection. In comparison with other "high grade" office 
buildings of the day, the Borden Block was dignified and reticent. 

The next building was the Rothschild Store, (PL 1) on West 
Monroe Street, Chicago, built in 1880-81. There is a marked in- 
crease in the amount of window-space in the fagade. In the whole 
width of fifty feet there are only three weight-bearing masonry 
piers, dividing the fagade into two wide bays. Each bay has three 
large windows, and the slender mullions separating them, as well 
as the spandrels between floors, are of cast-iron. Except for the 
three piers, it is entirely a cast-iron front The "beginnings of a 
vertical system" are here clearly apparent: the window mullions 
have unbroken vertical continuity from the second floor to the top. 
The floor-levels are marked on the piers, however, by applied 
ornament. 

The efflorescence of cast-iron ornament at the top is arresting, 



EARLY WORKS 59 

It is totally unlike Sullivan's later ornament in buildings from the 
Auditorium on, and rather difficult to analyze. It is not in any 
sense historical ornament, but it seems derived from the Egyptian 
style more closely than anything else. There are reminiscences of 
the lotus and the palmette, and small wheel-like projections re- 
sembling the seed-pod of the lotus. There are corrugated spirals not 
unlike certain sea-shells, and other shell-like and flower-like forms. 
The general appearance is rather brittle and spiky, and certain de- 
tails project strongly. The growth of one motive into another at the 
top of the piers in a continuous development is worthy of note. 
This type of ornament occurs in most of Sullivan's buildings of the 
early eighties, dying out after 1884. Its origin may be sought in 
his friendship with John Edelmann, begun eight years before in 
Jenney's office, and ripened after his return from Paris. Sullivan 
was twenty-four now; Edelmann thirty-two. That Edelmann had a 
somewhat romantic flair for the Egyptian we can guess from his 
giving the name "Lotus Club" to his summer-outing retreat on the 
Calumet River; certainly his ornament, such as that on the stair rails 
and elevator grilles in the Pullman Building in Chicago (done 
when he was a draftsman in S. S. Beman's office) employs Egyp- 
toid forms, and although it is less brittle than Sullivan's, there 
seems little doubt that Edelmann influenced Sullivan considerably 
during these early years. 

From 1881 to 1886 Adler & Sullivan designed four office build- 
ings in Chicago for Martin Ryerson. Three of these are still stand- 
ing; the fourth, built in 1886, was demolished several years ago. 
The first of the series, at Wabash Avenue and Adams Street, was 
for years occupied by the Alexander H. Revell Furniture Com- 
pany, and is commonly known as the Revell Building. (PL 2) It 
was begun in 1881 and finished in 1883. The two lower stories were 
completely modernized in 1929. It was a large, solidly built, fire- 



60 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

proof structure, and the biggest commission obtained by the firm 
before the Auditorium, costing over $320,000. The interior con- 
struction was of iron columns and girders sheathed in a new fire- 
proof building material obtained from Peter B. Wight. According 
to Sullivan, the fireproofing of the structure added between 
$60,000 and $75,000 to the cost. 4 The exterior design shows no 
marked changes from the scheme of the Rothschild Store. Since it 
has a wider frontage, it is divided into more units. Vertical lines of 
windows are embraced by projecting piers of brick and stone, and 
between them are bays of triple-windows, slightly recessed, the 
spandrels and mullions being of cast-iron, a partial anticipation of 
skyscraper construction. The south fagade, being wider than the 
west, has a somewhat more complex division. The ornamental de- 
tail of the attic is similar to that of the Rothschild Store, but more 
clearly confined in panels. The small pediments and fan-like pro- 
jections against the skyline are unusual features. The fagade as a 
whole is original in its details, and the one-one-three-one disposi- 
tion of the stories suggests the later development into a base-shaft- 
capital ordinance, but the vertical division into projecting pavilions 
and receding bays shows the influence of conventional design. 

A second structure built for Martin Ryerson, in 1881-82, is 
known as the "Jewelers' Building." It is much smaller than the 
Revell Building, with five stories and a frontage of only sixty feet, 
but is essentially the same in its interior iron construction and its 
exterior design. The decorative panels of the attic and the top 
cornice are much more sober and restrained than in the Revell 
Building. 

The third extant structure built for Martin Ryerson is a six-story 
office building on East Randolph Street, built in 1884. (PL 3) 
The front is divided into three bays by masonry piers, carrying an 
armature of iron and glass. Although the organization is logical, 



EARLY WORKS 61 

and a great deal of light is admitted into the interior by the expanse 
of glass, it is the least successful of Sullivan's attempts to evolve a 
new grammar of ornament. The forms are the Egyptoid motives 
employed on the Rothschild Store and other early buildings, but 
are unskilful and redundant. There is a curious exotic quality, 
notably in the heavy squat pillars of the lower story which suggest 
an Aztec origin, and in the flare of the masonry piers as they spread 
into the window-space of the fifth story. The decoration of the cen- 
tral piers and of the heavy flat lintel under the top story, the strange 
baluster-like mullions separating the top windows, and the cor- 
rugation of the fagade through the projecting oriels all contribute 
to a flickering disruption of the surface which endows it with an 
impressionistic texture but robs it of surface continuity. 

The Troescher Building in Chicago (now the Daily Times Build- 
ing) is much more direct and successful. (PI. 4) Built the same 
year as the Ryerson Building on Randolph Street, and of compar- 
able size and cost, it offers an interesting contrast in treatment. 
Instead of the clumsy columns at the lower story, the fagade is 
carried on small rectangular piers with simple capitals and four 
semi-elliptical arches of slightly rusticated brownstone. Rising 
from this as a base are five slender piers of brick, undecorated, and 
uninterrupted through the four middle stories. Their projection 
emphasizes the verticality. Three windows in each bay, separated 
only by iron mullions, admit the maximum amount of light, 
equivalent to the amount of window-space possible in metal-skele- 
ton construction. In fact, the use of eight-inch iron I-beams as 
lintels resting from pier to pier to support the spandrels over these 
windows constitutes the essential element in skyscraper construc- 
tion, here not complete because there are no iron supporting 
columns in the piers. Only the spandrels between the second and 
third stories are decorated with terra cotta panels. The top story is 



62 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

distinguished from the uniform treatment of the others by the use 
of colonet-forms as mullions, and lunettes embellished with terra 
cotta reliefs. It is noteworthy that although the same ornamental 
motives are employed, they are given less individual prominence 
and are woven into more geometrical compositions than in the 
Ryerson Building, and are more clearly subjected to the aim of 
architectonic clarity. The Troescher Building was the most concise 
solution of the office-building problem achieved by Adler & Sulli- 
van through the middle eighties, and still has an air of unity and 
directness which contrasts strongly with its contemporary neighbors 
on Market Street. The transom windows at the top of the two middle 
bays increase the amount of available light in a top-story drafting- 
room, also lighted by skylights. 

In 1886 two office buildings were erected by Adler & Sullivan: 
a small and inexpensive five-story structure built for Ferdinand 
W. Peck at the corner of LaSalle and Water Streets, demolished 
when the Wacker Drive development was put through; and a larger 
office building at 318 West Adams for Martin Ryerson, which for 
years served as the Martin Ryerson Charities Trust Building, but 
which was eventually demolished for the erection of a larger sky- 
scraper. 

The next office building, and the last both chronologically and 
stylistically before the era of the Auditorium, was the Dexter 
Building on South Wabash Avenue. (PL 5) It was a six-story 
structure built in 1887. A logical outgrowth of the Troescher Build- 
ing, with which it may be closely compared, the Dexter Building 
represents the end-point of the style-development of the early and 
middle eighties. Entirely different from the Auditorium, which 
was under way during the year in which this was completed, it 
shows no trace of Richardson's influence, nor of the characteristic 
leaf-ornament which Sullivan developed during the next decade. 



EARLY WORKS 63 

On the other hand, it is an entirely mature work, rigorously thought 
through. Sullivan has here finally eliminated the Egyptoid orna- 
mental forms of the earlier buildings, and attained a new simplic- 
ity and monumentally growing directly out of the problems of the 
commercial office building. Doubtless he was influenced toward 
simplicity by his experience in factory designing in the preceding 
years, but also by the clarification of his ideas and the beginnings 
of the formation of his architectural credo, which may be placed 
at about 1885 or 1886. The conflict between realistic structure and 
romantic ornament is here eliminated through the virtual abandon- 
ment of ornament, and the growth in its place of a purely structural 
monumentally. This represents a clear-cut step beyond which 
Sullivan, if he had possessed less creative fertility, might never 
have progressed, and indeed a step beyond which most of his lesser 
contemporaries never went. During the next decade, however, 
stimulated by the difference in structural nature between the 
masonry and the metal skeleton building, and by the growth of a 
new conception of ornament, Sullivan progressed toward new and 
entirely different achievements in his mature style. The Dexter 
Building represents both the culmination of the old and the wiping 
clean of the slate in preparation for the new, and is thus a signifi- 
cant monument in Sullivan's development. 

Like other Chicago architects of the eighties, Adler & Sullivan 
were called upon to, do almost as many factories and warehouses 
as office buildings. The expansion of the city was industrial as well 
as commercial, and although the usual practice was to hire an 
engineer to design an industrial building, commissions were often 
given to architects accustomed to a more polite practice. There 
was, perhaps, less distinction between the architect and the engineer 
in those days than at present, and this was especially true in the 



64 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

boom days after the fire in Chicago. Although the disparaging 
critic might point out that monumental architecture was often no 
better than industrial building, the comparison works both ways, 
and it is worth remarking that the distinguishing quality of Chicago 
architecture during the eighties and nineties was a forthright 
simplicity and bareness which may be attributed largely to its close 
relationship to industrial architecture. Structures such as the 
Monadnock Building, of 1891, mark the dawn of an "engineer's 
aesthetic" long before Le Corbusier thought of the phrase, and 
critics as different as Montgomery Schuyler and Paul Bourget were 
quick to remark on the superiority of Chicago's achievements over 
those of New York in advancing toward a truly modern architec- 
ture. 

Of the ten or a dozen factory structures designed by Adler & 
Sullivan in the eighties, none is of especial note, with the single 
exception of the Walker Warehouse built in 1888-89, after the 
Auditorium. Their average cost was less than six cents a cubic foot, 
and although some of them have a dignified simplicity, it was 
doubtless a simplicity of necessity rather than of choice. They do 
not seem to have influenced the design of other types of buildings, 
with the possible exception of the Dexter Building, mentioned 
above. Although it is commonly believed that Sullivan's whole 
philosophy of architecture was a kind of mechanistic functional- 
ism, he actually insisted on the infusion of a degree of emotional 
expression which was quite impossible in these factory buildings, 
and certainly his taste for ornament was incapable of satisfaction 
in brick boxes costing less than six cents a cubic foot. For these 
reasons the factory buildings and warehouses of Adler & Sullivan, 
although often impressive, do not seem of great significance in the 
formation of Sullivan's style. 

The Kniseley Building in Chicago, built in 1884, may be taken 



EARLY WORKS 65 

as an example. (PL 6) The plain brick wall is given variety and 
vertical emphasis by the projecting piers between the windows, and 
the recessing of the arched central bay creates an effective accent. 
Without the exterior fire-escape and the partial top story, added 
after the original construction, the fagade must have been a very 
satisfactory one. 

*The most impressive factory building designed by Adler & 
Sullivan is the first unit of the large Selz, Schwab & Company Shoe 
Factory in Chicago, built in 1886-87. (PI. 7) Built at a cost of five 
and a half cents a cubic foot, it is utterly simple, and achieves its 
effectiveness through its very economy. The scheme followed is the 
same as that of the Kniseley Building, with the bays widened to 
include two windows each, and the piers between windows both 
wider and deeper. The verticals of the piers dominate the composi- 
tion, being carried unbroken from bottom to top, and there is not 
even a projecting cornice. The horizontal floor lines are clearly 
indicated by the white stone sills of the windows, but these are 
suppressed behind the piers. The stark angularity of the building is 
relieved by the graceful tapering of the piers. The structure of the 
building calls for thicker walls at the base than at the top, and this 
thickening is accomplished in the exterior piers rather than inside; 
the projection of the piers is greatest at the bottom, and the reveals 
are gradually diminished in the upper stories. The window-head- 
ings, instead of being hard horizontal lines, are slightly curved 
segmental arches. These features give the building a movement and 
grace which somewhat mitigate its austerity, and the result is quite 
comparable to the more lofty Monadnock Building built four years 
later by Burnham & Rooty/ 

In the special field of theatre design Adler & Sullivan early ac- 
quired a reputation. Some ten theatres were designed during the 



66 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

years from 1880 to 1891, the greatest of which was the Auditorium. 
The reputation of the firm was based largely on Adler's unique 
knowledge of acoustics, his talent in engineering, and his ability 
in planning an efficient complex of seats, corridors, and public 
spaces. The Central Music Hall, built by Adler in 1879, was a 
great success and it brought other commissions to the firm in the 
following years, several of which were for remodelling older 
theatres. 

The first of these was the remodelling of the Grand Opera House 
for William Borden in 1880. The remodelling, which cost $55,000, 
was completed in September. Although Adler was responsible for 
the general lay-out, undoubtedly Sullivan did much of the design- 
ing. There is no available information on the appearance of the 
proscenium and stage after this remodelling, but an old photograph 
of the auditorium shows two curved balconies and a species of 
coved ceiling similar in general arrangement to that of the Central 
Music Hall. The sight-lines and acoustics of the building were 
much admired, and the general plan remained in effect through 
many later remodellings of entrances, stage boxes, and decora- 
tions. Sullivan writes: "The Grand Opera House was immediately 
a great success. It was quite a luxurious theatre for that day, and 
quite a wonder in its architecture." 5 

Adler & Sullivan remodelled "Hooley's Theatre," Chicago, in 
1884-85. Both the Grand Opera House and Hooley's Theatre have 
been known under several other names, and there has consequently 
been much confusion in accounts of these two buildings, but since 
the former was completely rebuilt in 1925, and the latter de- 
molished in 1923, this need not concern us greatly. No photographs 
of Adler & Sullivan's work on Hooley's Theatre have been found, 
but from descriptions we know that the proscenium boxes were 
made of cast-iron, decorated in gold and bronze colors. 



EARLY WORKS 67 

A third remodelling job was done by Adler & Sullivan on the 
McVicker's Theatre in 1885. The building dated from 1872, and 
this work, on which $95,000 was spent, was almost entirely de- 
stroyed in a serious fire in 1890, despite the supposedly fire- 
resistant construction. Sullivan wrote of it many years later. "At 
that time, I believe, was made the first decorative use of the electric 
lamp. It was a little innovation of my own, that of placing the 
lamps in a decoration instead of clustering them in fixtures, but 
even then the installation of an electric lighting system was primi- 
tive to the last degree. The wires were bedded in plaster; the light- 
ing conduit not being known. The dynamos were run by little 
primitive engines." The decorative use of the electric lamp is of 
interest, as Sullivan developed this motive very successfully in the 
Auditorium a few years later. 

The great forerunner of the Auditorium, however, was the 
temporary opera house built within the huge barn-like Interstate 
Exposition Building in Grant Park. The Exposition Building, 
built in 1873 by W. W. Boyington, was used for fairs and exhibi- 
tions, and had housed the Republican Conventions in 1880 and 
1884. It was standing empty, and in the winter of 1885 Messrs. 
N. K. Fairbank and Ferdinand W. Peck, two of the city's most 
influential citizens, conceived the idea of remodelling it for an 
opera festival. Ferdinand Peck approached Adler for assistance 
on the architectural problem. It was decided that a temporary 
structure of wood, housed within the extant building, could be 
built at a reasonable cost. But since the opera festival was sched- 
uled to last only two weeks, an enormous number of seats had to 
be provided. A vast auditorium, to seat 6,200 persons, was planned 
to fit within the shell of the old building. Work was begun in 
February, with armies of men employed to shovel away huge banks 
of snow and to team in great quantities of lumber; carpenters and 



68 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

decorators swarmed through the noisy interior, and by April 1st 
the new Grand Opera House was ready. (Fig. 3) 

The auditorium was fan-shaped in plan, with aisles radiating 
out from the proscenium. Nearest the stage was the parquet, seat- 
ing 2,238 persons; back of this and elevated slightly above it was 
the dress-circle, seating 1,486, curving backward in the center. 
Projecting over it some twenty-five feet was the main balcony, for 
1,824 persons, with a rise of thirty feet toward the rear. From 
the proscenium two lines of boxes on each side, with bowed-out 
fronts, and each with its own entrance from a lobby, extended out- 
ward to meet small dress balconies extending back to the main 
balcony; boxes and dress balconies seating 652 persons. This made 
a total of 6,200 seats, about 2,000 more than were later provided 
for in the permanent structure of the Auditorium Theatre. 

The stage at the north end of the building, eighty feet deep and 
one hundred and twenty feet wide, was one of the largest in the 
country. It was completely fitted out for scene-shifting, with a 
rigging-loft sixty feet above the floor, numerous fly-galleries and 
traps. Dressing-rooms were provided on each side, a musicians' 
room beneath it, and rooms for the chorus in the rear. The stage 
opening was sixty feet wide, topped by an arch curving up to a 
height of forty feet. The stage floor projected twenty feet in front 
of the curtain line, and above it a sloping ceiling, expanding out- 
ward and extending eighty feet over the auditorium, formed an 
immense sounding-board, which afforded such perfect acoustic 
properties that the singing could be heard in full volume and 
purity from every seat in the immense house. "The effect was thrill- 
ing. An audience of 6,200 persons saw and heard; saw in a clear 
line of vision; heard, even to the faintest pianissimo. No reverbera- 
tion, no echo the clear untarnished tone, of voice and instrument, 
reached all." T 



70 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

In addition to the stage and auditorium, the necessary lobbies, 
corridors, dressing-rooms, promenades, salons, and carriage en- 
trances were provided for. The auditorium and stage were bril- 
liantly lighted by seven thousand gas jets. An article in the Chicago 
Tribune of March 1st, 1885, says: "The grand promenade will be 
beautifully adorned with evergreens, plants, pictures, statuary, 
mirrors, etc. The grand salon will be elegantly arranged, and the 
audience will be privileged to leave the seats between acts and 
enjoy the relief of promenading, refreshments, and social inter- 
course." The advertisements of the opera festival are amusing 
reflections of the era: "April 6 Two Weeks Only! First Chicago 
Grand Opera Festival. Under the Auspices of the Chicago Opera 
Festival Association. The Greatest Musical Event in the History of 
Chicago! Special Notice: The Grand Opera Hall will be thoroughly 
warmed by Steam, furnished with Elegant Opera Chairs by the 
American Store Stool Company, and brilliantly lighted. Madame 
Adelina Patti's Farewell Appearance in America, with many other 
notables, including tenori, baritoni, and bassi. The repertoire will 
include the following favorite operas, presenting a pleasing variety 
from the German, Italian, and French Masters to gratify all tastes: 
Lohengrin, Der Freischutz, A'ida, Mirella (first time), Luida di 
Chamouni, PAfricaine, Semiramide, Faust, Martha, I Puritani, 
Lucia di Lammermoor, and La Traviata." 

The opera festival was a great success. It demonstrated that the 
Chicago public was interested in grand opera, that it was possible 
to seat a huge audience so that all might see and hear, and it gave 
birth to Ferdinand Peck's dream of a great permanent opera house 
for Chicago. The very great similarity in the general lay-out of the 
Exposition Opera Hall and the later Auditorium Theatre indicates 
that the experience of Adler & Sullivan in designing the temporary 
structure stood them in good stead in their greatest commission, 



EARLY WORKS 71 

and undoubtedly was the chief reason for their selection as the 
architects of the Auditorium. The old Exposition Building was 
demolished in 1892, and* the present Art Institute erected on the 
site. 

Almost half the total number of buildings designed by Adler & 
Sullivan between 1880 and 1887 were residences. The building list 
given in the appendix names thirty. On the whole, the residences 
show less difference from the contemporary average than do the 
office buildings. Perhaps this may be explained by the fact that 
they offered a less novel problem, a problem in which functional 
and structural articulations were traditionally established, and 
therefore afforded less striking need for changes in design. Of 
course the style of Adler & Sullivan houses is readily distinguish- 
able from that of other contemporary architects, as the ornamental 
motives are quite unique. But the use of ornament and the general 
composition is entirely in accord with the aesthetic of the early 
eighties. The picturesque is increasingly the dominant quality. 
Fagades are broken by oriels and bays, roofs have pavilions or 
cupolas, and the skyline silhouette is often quite fantastic. Orna- 
ment in cast-iron or terra cotta is freely used in panels or along 
cornice lines. The general effect is of broken surfaces, rich texture, 
and irregular outline, impressionistic in character. 

The first residence by the firm was built for John Borden on 

j \ 

Lake Park Avenue in Chicago in 1880. (PL 8) This is probably 
the "large substantial residence" mentioned by Sullivan 8 as one 
of the three commissions which came into the office shortly after his 
arrival. The house' is a three-story structure, soundly built, and is 
still standing. It might be almost any solid residence of the day, 
with the tall, narrow windows, the prominent chimneys, the color 
contrast of red brick and white stone trim, and the mansard roof 



72 LOUIS SULLIVAN 

popular in Chicago in 1880. But the inset panels above the second- 
story windows, and an astonishing efflorescence of Sullivanesque 
ornament on a pavilion roof in the middle of the south side, betray 
the individuality of the architect. The slight projection and simple 
treatment of the dormers, and the subtly tapered tops of the high 
chimneys do much to create a feeling of compact density in the 
mass as a whole. 

Quite in contrast to the dignified solidity of the Borden house, a 
very small house on West Chicago Avenue (PL 9) shows the only 
instance of an apparent effort on Sullivan's part to carry over the 
open construction and vertical design of the early office buildings 
into domestic architecture. It is highly original, and without the 
"Cozy Hand Laundry" now installed in a basement addition, must 
have been highly effective. The wall-surface is plaster, grooved to 
simulate masonry. This smooth surface is broken by incised orna- 
mental patterns and the projecting piers topped by spreading 
lotus-flower caps. The lunettes of the top-story windows are left 
bare. The most arresting feature of the fagade is the triple window 
bay extending through the two lower stories. The windows are 
separated by slender iron mullions like double reeds, and recessed 
spandrel panels, also of iron. This is clearly an adaptation of the 
scheme of the Rothschild Store to a smaller building, and its suc- 
cess makes one wonder why Sullivan never attempted it in another 
residence. The calculated asymmetry of the fagade is worthy of 
note. 

Adler & Sullivan did several small and inexpensive residences 
and flat-buildings for Mr. Max M. Rothschild during the early 
eighties. Of these, the most interesting is a three-family house on 
Indiana Avenue, Chicago, built in 1883. (PL 10) Although cer- 
tainly not distinguished, its effect is gained solely through archi- 
tectural forms rather than ornamental details. The grouping of 



EARLY WORKS 73 

three stories of windows under large arches reminds one of the 
later Walker Warehouse, except that here there is no suggestion 
of a structural articulation of the fagade: it is merely a flat surface 
pattern. The smooth surface, the proportions of the openings, and 
the cornice all suggest a carry-over into Sullivan's work o