Louis Henry Sullivan was an influential American architect born in 1856. He helped develop the Chicago School style of architecture and is considered the father of modern skyscrapers. Some of his notable works include the Wainwright Building, the Auditorium Building, and the Carson Pirie Scott Store. Sullivan pioneered tall steel-framed buildings and believed that form should follow function, a principle that became foundational to modern architecture. He had a significant influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and helped heal the schism between architecture and engineering.
2. Louis Henry Sullivan
• Louis Henry Sullivan was born in Boston,
Massachusetts in 1856.
• He studied architecture at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for
one year.
• He worked as a draughtsman for Furness
and Hewitt in Philadelphia and for William
Le Baron Jenney in Chicago.
• In July 1874, Sullivan travelled to Europe
where he studied in the Vaudremer studio
at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
• He returned to Chicago a year later.
• In 1883 Sullivan became a full partner with
Dankmar Adler.
PHILOSOPHY-
•TRIPPLE RATIONALITY-
FUNCTIONAL
TECHNICAL
SOCIOLOGICAL
•VERTICAL EMPHASIS
ORGANIC IN BROADEST
SENSE OF SYSTEM
ORGANIZED STRUCTURE.
3. The Chicago School-
• During the eighties a whole colony of buildings sprang up in Chicago to heights of
12,14,16 and 23 storeys.
• The strongest growth of Chicago school is to be found between 1883 and 1893.
• The rapid growth of this great center led to sudden enlargements of its needs and
the business center of the city came up.
• Sullivan had played a great role in Chicago school.
•The Adler and sullivan auditorium marks one of the early stages in this
development.
•The architects of the Chicago school employed a new type of construction :the iron
construction. It was also called as Chicago construction.
• They invented a new kind of foundation with the problem of the muddy ground of
Chicago: the floating foundation. They introduced horizontally elongated window: the
Chicago window.
• The importance of the school lies in the fact ;for the first time in the 19 cent. The
schism between construction and architecture ,between the engineer and the
architect was healed.
4. • Chicago’s Great Fire broke out in 1871. He saw opportunity for great
architecture in the city’s ruins.
• Sullivan was the architect who ultimately developed the most distinctive
treatment for tall buildings. He saw the problem of taking structures ever
higher as the most important challenge to architects of his era.
• Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the Sullivan’s apprentices from 1888-
1893.
• Adler left partnership in July 1895
• Ornamentation was taken in consideration in his buildings.
• He wanted his creations to remind people of their bond to nature and to
find sublime joy in that attachment.
• He also believed that internal beauty is reflected externally and is its
clear representation.
• Sullivan's designs generally involved a simple geometric form
decorated with ornamentation based on organic symbolism.
• Considered one of the most influential forces in the Chicago School, his
philosophy that form should always follow function went beyond functional
and structural expressions .
ORIGIN
5. Pictures
Arcade south side Eastern Entrance
Lobby East end View from East
Interior theatre Window Audi. Building
6. Louis Sullivan was the first architect
to find the right form for a steel high-
rise.
• The steel girder was the form for the
steel high-rise.
The steel frame allowed
•taller buildings with larger window,
•which meant more interior day
lighting,
• and more usable floor space.
STEEL FRAME & SULLIVAN
7. • The technical limits of masonry had always
imposed formal constraints; those constraints
were suddenly gone.
• None of the historical precedents were any
help, and this new freedom created a kind of
technical and stylistic crisis.
• Sullivan was the first to cope with that
crisis. He addressed it by embracing the
changes that came with the steel frame,
creating a grammar of form for the high rise
(base, shaft, and pediment), simplifying the
appearance of the building by using ornament
selectively , breaking away from historical
styles, using his own intricate flora designs, in
vertical bands, to draw the eye upwards and
emphasize the building's verticality and
relating the shape of the building to its
purpose.
8. • Louis Sullivan is widely considered
America's first truly modern architect.
Instead of imitating historic styles , he
created original forms and details. Older
architectural styles were designed for
buildings that were wide , but Sullivan
was able to create aesthetic unity in
buildings that were tall.
• Sullivan's designs often used masonry
walls with terra cotta designs. Intertwining
vines and leaves combined with crisp
geometric shapes.
• In his last years, Sullivan seemed willing
to abandon ornament altogether in favor
of honest massing.
• His stripped-down, technology-driven,
forward-looking designs clearly anticipate
the issues and solutions of Modernism.
Sullivan's legacy is contradictory.
He is the first modernist. Ornament, where it was used,
must be derived from Nature,
rejecting classical references
and the ubiquitous arches.
9. Architect - Louis H. Sullivan
Location - Chicago, Illinois
Date - 1886 to 1890 timeline
Building Type - Civic Auditorium
Construction System - Bearing
masonry
Climate - Temperate
Main features - 10 stories high,
load-bearing masonry
construction.
Auditorium Building
10. •"The Auditorium was built for a syndicate
of businessmen to house a large civic
opera house”.
•To provide an economic base it was
decided to wrap the auditorium with a hotel
and office block.
•Hence Adler & Sullivan had to plan a
complex multiple-use building.
•One of the most innovative features of the
building was its massive raft foundation,
designed by Adler, over a clayey soil
In the center of the building was a 4,300
seat auditorium, originally intended
primarily for production of Grand Opera.
Housed in the building around this central
space were 136 offices and a 400-room
hotel, whose purpose was to generate
much of the revenue to support the opera.
11. • The interior embellishment, however, is
wholly Sullivan's, and some of the
details, because of their continuous
curvilinear foliate motifs, are among the
nearest equivalents to European Art
Nouveau architecture
12. Carson Pirie Scott Store
Architect - Louis H. Sullivan
Location - Chicago, Illinois
Date - 1899 to 1904 timeline
Building Type - Department
store
Climate - Temperate
Style - Early Modern
Main feature - Tall with
rounded corner
13. •Instead of a stack of undifferentiated office
rooms, the department store required
broad horizontal open spaces where
goods could be displayed.
•At the ground floor the windows were to
be showcases highlighting selected
wares.
•Ground floor windows richly encrusted
with cast iron frames by Sullivan and his
assistant Elms lie.
14. • Thus in the finished building, constructed in two phases in 1899 and 1903-4,
the horizontal line, rather than the vertical, is dominant, with the broad
spandrel panels brought up flush with the narrow vertical piers.
• As in Burnham and Root's Reliance Building, there is a change in color,
away from the reds and browns, to glazed white terra cotta."
15. Wainwright Building
Architect - Louis H. Sullivan
Location - St. Louis, Missouri
Date - 1890 to 1891 timeline
Building Type - Early skyscraper,
commercial office
Construction System - Steel frame
clad in masonry
Climate - Temperate
Style - Early Modern
Main Features - An early tall
building (10 stories) with an all steel
frame.
16. • The eleven-storey Wainwright
Building represents Sullivan's first
attempt at a truly multi-storey format.
• The two-storey base of the
classical tripartite composition is
faced in fine red sandstone set on
a two-feet-high string course of red
Missouri granite.
17. • While the middle section
consists of red brick pilasters
with decorated terra cotta
spandrels, the top is rendered
as a deep overhanging
cornice faced in an
ornamented terra cotta skin to
match the enrichment of the
spandrels and the pilasters
below."
18. NATIONAL FARMER’S BANK
Architect - Louis H. Sullivan
Location - Owatonna, Minnesota
Date - 1907 to 1908 timeline
Building Type - Bank
Construction System - Bearing masonry
Climate - Temperate
Context - Urban, small city
Style - Early Modern
Main features - Large arch in main façade
19. • The bank is just as clearly expressed in its
parts.
• Massive and stately-68 feet broad and about
53 feet tall.
• The base is of red sandstone, with dark red
brick walls.
• Ornamentation is concentrated in panels, of
bronze-green terra cotta, with intricate cast
iron escutcheons at the corners; the cornice is
simply corbelled brick courses.
• The main banking room is a single cubical
space enclosed by a box, indicated by the
wide stained-glass lunette windows.
20. FIRST LEITER BUILDING (1879)
• Built at 280 West manroe
street for the Leiter in 1879.
• It’s a warehouse.
• It has brick pillars on its
outer walls.
• Wide glass openings.
• Cast iron columns in the
interior.
21. SECOND LEITER BUILDING (1889)
• Manhattan building by William Le
Baron Jenney.
• Highest building of pure Skeleton
structure of its time.
• Built on Dearborn street with front
400’ long. Eight storeys high, with
use of great and simple units.
• Bay windows of different forms to
catch all the lights disappear entirely
in upper stories.
• Panels are filled by plate glass.
Windows separated by fireproof
metal columns
22. IMPACT OF CHICAGO SCHOOL
THE SCHISM BETWEEN ARCHITECT
AND ENGINEER,
ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING
WAS HEALED
23. CONCLUSION
• Chicago school pioneered steel framed construction and the
use of large amount of glass in facades.
• It was a place where the first modern skyscrapers came up.
• Sullivan coined the phrase ‘form follows function’
• One of the signature element was the semi-circular arch
• Fragments of Sullivan's buildings are also held in many fine
art and design museums around the world.
