Louis Sullivan: Skyscraper Poet

THE Chicago that Boston-born Louis Sullivan first saw as a fledgling draftsman of 17 was a vast expanse of gutted ruins, the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1871. Sidewalks were temporary wooden structures; pavements oozed mud. But for Sullivan it was love at first sight. He could foresee that up from the ruins would burgeon a new city.

Chicago was reborn during two drama-packed decades of engineering breakthroughs (hydraulic elevators, fireproof hollow tile, new foundation planning, and the first steel skeleton construction--the Home Insurance Building) that set the stage for the major U.S. contribution to architecture: the skyscraper. And in this new Chicago it was to be Louis Sullivan who first gave the soaring office building its logical and definitive form. To mark the tooth anniversary of Sullivan's birth, Chicago architects last week were sponsoring a dazzling roundup of his work in Chicago's Art Institute. Based largely on huge blowups from a photo essay by Photographer John Szarkowski (The Idea of Louis Sullivan; University of Minnesota; $10), the exhibition reaffirms the reputation of Sullivan, the man his old pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, still refers to as Lieber Meister, as the first U.S. poet of the skyscraper.

"Form Follows Function." Architect Sullivan had already put in a year at M.I.T. (he entered at 16) and two years at Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts before he was taken on in 1880 as partner by one of Chicago's top engineers, Dankmar Adler. During the 15 years-the two men worked together, they drafted plans for more than 100 buildings, including Chicago's Auditorium Building, Stock Exchange and a score of office buildings that set trends throughout the Midwest.

Sullivan's major contribution was to establish the skyscraper as an architectural form in its own right. One of his best is Buffalo's Guaranty (now Prudential) Building (left), finished in 1895 at the peak of Sullivan's powers, just before his partnership with Adler broke up. In designing it Sullivan broke away from the neoclassic-temple design that obsessed his contemporaries. Following his own maxim, "form follows function," he created instead a building that clearly expressed its own purpose: a foundation of ground display shops, a center block of identical office floors and a crowning attic with a handsome cornice.

Imperative Emotion. But for Sullivan, "function" was not bare-boned utilitarianism. Once the problem is analyzed, he insisted, "We must heed the imperative voice of emotion." This meant exalting the loftiness of the building as "the very open organ-tone of its appeal." For Sullivan, the organ-tone required its grace notes as well: the wrought-iron and terracotta decoration he lavished on his buildings, inside and out (opposite).

Sullivan's exuberant geometric and floral motifs are now long out of fashion. But for the present generation of modern architects too long imprisoned in a strait-jacket of glassy steel and aluminum purism, his concern for structure, color and decoration today places Sullivan, who died almost forgotten in 1924, once again at the center of tomorrow's architectural aspirations.

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