Louis Henry Sullivan, FAIA

Year Awarded: 1944
Born: September 03, 1856; Boston, USA
Died: 1924; Chicago,USA

Quote
Form follows function.


Projects
• 1914: Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa
• 1908: National Farmer's Bank, Owatanna, Minn.
• 1904: Schlesinger-Mayer Building (later the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Store), Chicago
• 1895: Guaranty Building (now Prudential Building), Buffalo, N.Y.
• 1894: Stock Exchange Building, Chicago
• 1893: Transportation Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago
• 1891: Wainwright Building, St. Louis
• 1890: Auditorium Building (with Dankmar Adler), Chicago


Biography
When his parents moved from Boston to Chicago in 1872, Louis Sullivan remained behind to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he was only 16 years old. He had graduated from high school a year early and passed a series of examinations in order to skip the first two years of studies at MIT.

He left MIT after one year and moved to Philadelphia to work in the offices of Frank Furness and George Hewitt. Because of the 1873 depression, the firm had very little work, so Sullivan was let go. He moved to Chicago and worked with William LeBaron Jenney for one year. Then he moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for a year; he quit the school and returned to Chicago before he was 18 years old.

In Chicago, Sullivan worked for Jenney, participating in the building boom that came about after the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. He also worked for John Edelman as a draftsman. In 1879 he joined Dankmar Adler’s office and one year later became a partner, forming the firm that he would remain with for four more years, working on city buildings and designing skyscrapers.

After the partnership ended in 1895, Sullivan moved to working on small banks and commercial buildings in little towns throughout the Midwest. The split from Adler, as well as a change in architectural trends away from the Chicago style toward the Beaux-Arts style, led to a slow decline in Sullivan’s career.

During this period, Sullivan wrote Kindergarten Chats and Autobiography of an Idea. He advocated the need for a human connection to nature in architecture, as well as both the imaginative and functional expression he deemed necessary in good design.
Sullivan was considered the father of Modernism and a key member of the Chicago School. Largely responsible for the development of the skyscraper as the distinctive American building type, he is also known as an important mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright.