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Louis Sullivan: "Form Follows Function"

Louis Sullivan was an influential American architect known as the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modern architecture." He pioneered steel-frame construction for skyscrapers in the late 19th century, designing notable buildings like the Wainwright Building and Auditorium Building. Sullivan emphasized height and verticality in his skyscraper designs to showcase their soaring nature. He is renowned for his ornamental details and philosophy that "form follows function," though he applied it with flexibility by incorporating rich ornamentation.

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106 views13 pages

Louis Sullivan: "Form Follows Function"

Louis Sullivan was an influential American architect known as the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modern architecture." He pioneered steel-frame construction for skyscrapers in the late 19th century, designing notable buildings like the Wainwright Building and Auditorium Building. Sullivan emphasized height and verticality in his skyscraper designs to showcase their soaring nature. He is renowned for his ornamental details and philosophy that "form follows function," though he applied it with flexibility by incorporating rich ornamentation.

Uploaded by

Vijjy Vijaya Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Louis Sullivan

“Form follows function”


Louis Sullivan

• Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), American architect, whose


brilliant early designs for steel-frame skyscraper construction
led to the emergence of the skyscraper as the distinctive
American building type. His regarded as the “father of
modern architecture” or “the father of skyscrapers”
• Through his own work, especially his commercial structures,
and as the founder of what is now known as the Chicago
School of architects, he exerted an enormous influence on
20th-century American architecture. His most famous pupil
was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who acknowledged
Sullivan as his master.
Early life

• The son of a dancing teacher, Louis Henri Sullivan was born in Boston on
September 3, 1856. After studying architecture at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, he spent a year in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts
and in the office of a French architect.
• Settling in Chicago in 1875, he was employed as a draftsman, then in 1881
formed a partnership with Dankmar Adler. Together they produced more
than 100 buildings.
• Adler secured the clients and handled the engineering and acoustical
problems, while Sullivan concerned himself with the architectural designs.
• One of their earliest and most distinguished joint enterprises was the ten-
story Auditorium Building (1886-89) in Chicago. This famous showplace
incorporated a hotel, an office building, and a theater renowned for its
superb acoustics.
Prominent practice

• The Wainwright Building, also ten stories high, with a metal frame, was
completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri.
• In 1895 the Sullivan-Adler partnership was dissolved, leading to a decline in
Sullivan's practice. The Carson Pirie Scott (originally Schlesinger & Mayer)
Department Store, Chicago, regarded by many as Sullivan's masterpiece, was
completed in 1904.
• His architectural practice declined alarmingly after that; his last buildings are a
series of small banks in the Midwest. All are admired for their superb fusion of
bold architectural forms with Sullivan's characteristic sumptuous ornament.
• Outstanding are the Security Bank (originally National Farmers' Bank; 1908) in
Owatonna, Minnesota, and the People's Savings Bank (1911) in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa. Concerned with aesthetics as well as being a working architect, he
expressed his ideas in lectures and writings, including the classic
Autobiography of an Idea (1924, reprinted 1956).
The Wainwright Building
• The Wainwright Building (also known as the Wainwright State
Office Building) is a 10-story, 41 m (135 ft) terra cotta office
building at 709 Chestnut Street in downtown St. Louis, Missouri.

• The Wainwright Building is considered the first expression of


high rise as a tall building early skyscrapers.

• It was designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and built


between 1890 and 1891. It was named for local brewer, building
contractor, and financier Ellis Wainwright.

• The building, listed as a landmark both locally and nationally, is


described as "a highly influential prototype of the modern office
building" by the National Register of Historic Places.

• Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called the Wainwright Building "the


very first human expression of a tall steel office-building
as Architecture.“

• The building is currently owned by the State of Missouri and


houses state offices.

• In May 2013 it was listed by an episode of the PBS series 10 That


Changed America as one of "10 Buildings That Changed America"
because it was "the first skyscraper that truly looked the part"
with Sullivan being dubbed the "Father of Skyscrapers." [
Architecture
• Aesthetically, the Wainwright Building
exemplifies Sullivan's theories about the
tall building, which included a tripartite
(three-part) composition (base-shaft-
attic) based on the structure of the
classical column, and his desire to
emphasize the height of the building.

• He wrote: "[The skyscraper] must be


tall, every inch of it tall. The force and
power of altitude must be in it the glory
and pride of exaltation must be init. It
must be every inch a proud and soaring
thing, rising in sheer exultation that
from bottom to top it is a unit without a
single dissenting line."
• The base contained retail stores that
required wide glazed openings; Sullivan's
ornament made the supporting piers read as
pillars.
• Above it the semi-public nature of offices up
a single flight of stairs are expressed as
broad windows in the curtain wall.
• A cornice separates the second floor from
the grid of identical windows of the screen
wall, where each window is "a cell in a
honeycomb, nothing more".

• The building's windows and horizontals were


inset slightly behind columns and piers, as
part of a "vertical aesthetic" to create what
Sullivan called "a proud and soaring
thing."This perception has since been
criticized as the skyscraper was designed to
make money, not to serve as a symbol.
Ornamentation
• The ornamentation for the building includes
a wide frieze below the deep cornice, which
expresses the formalized yet naturalistic
celery-leaf foliage typical of Sullivan and
published in his System of Architectural
Ornament, decorated spandrels between the
windows on the different floors and an
elaborate door surround at the main
entrance.
• "Apart from the slender brick piers, the only
solids of the wall surface are the spandrel
panels between the windows..... They have
rich decorative patterns in low relief, varying
in design and scale with each story.“
•   The frieze is pierced by unobtrusive bull's-
eye windows that light the top-story floor,
originally containing water tanks and elevator
machinery. The building includes
embellishments of terra cotta, a building
material that was gaining popularity at the
time of construction.
Carson Pirie Scott Department Store

• The work of 20th-century American


architect Louis Sullivan was
influenced by the movement known
as Art Nouveau.
• This picture shows the front facade
of the Carson Pirie Scott
department store in Chicago (1899-
1904), designed by Sullivan.
• The elaborately decorative cast-iron
is characteristic of the architect’s
love of detail.
• Above the first two floors, the
design of the remaining twelve is a
contrast in simplicity, with
geometric windows evenly spaced
within the structural steel skelton
Quote

• His famous axiom, “Form follows function,”


became the touchstone for many in his
profession.
• Sullivan, however, did not apply it literally. He
meant that an architect should consider the
purpose of the building as a starting point, not
as a rigidly limiting structure. He himself
employed a rich vocabulary of ornament, even
on his skyscrapers. He died on April 14, 1924.

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