Louis Sullivan
Louis Sullivan gave the skyscraper a form of its own, with unbroken piers and rich terracotta ornament. He coined the idea that form follows function and was the teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Louis Henry Sullivan was born in 1856 in Boston. He studied briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but left both. He worked for the architect Frank Furness in Philadelphia and for William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago, where the first generation of tall buildings went up after the fire of 1871. From 1879 he worked with the engineer Dankmar Adler, and in 1883 they formed the firm of Adler & Sullivan.
Adler & Sullivan built the Auditorium Building in Chicago in 1886–1889, with a theatre famed for its acoustics. The Wainwright Building in St Louis, 1890–1891, became the model for how a tall building could be designed: with unbroken piers emphasising height and a crown of rich ornament. The Guaranty Building in Buffalo followed the same principle. After the partnership dissolved in 1895 Sullivan built the Carson, Pirie, Scott store in Chicago and a series of small banks in the Midwest. In the 1896 essay The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered he wrote that form ever follows function.
Sullivan received fewer commissions after 1900, when the classical style shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 came into fashion. He died poor in Chicago in 1924. His pupil Frank Lloyd Wright called him his lieber Meister, and the idea that form follows function became one of modernism’s most quoted mottos, even though Sullivan himself loved ornament. He is regarded today as one of the founders of American architecture and of the skyscraper’s formal language.