The Architect of Democracy

It was 100 years ago tomorrow that Louis H. Sullivan, “father of the skyscraper,” died at the age of 67, lonely, bankrupt and alcoholic, in a broom closet at a Chicago hotel that he had converted into a living space. It’s one of art history’s great tragedies. Sullivan had been the creative force behind some of America’s loveliest structures—the Chicago Auditorium Building, Manhattan’s Bayard-Condict Building, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo—and mentor to the nation’s greatest builder, Frank Lloyd Wright. But as architectural fashions turned away from the style Sullivan pioneered—later known as the Prairie Style—toward buildings based on German, French and Roman models, Sullivan had refused to compromise. Commissions disappeared, and Sullivan became a relic, living on handouts from friends.

Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Wright and other admirers, we can once again appreciate Sullivan’s genius and his efforts to establish an architecture that, as he saw it, would be appropriate for “the great Democracy where all men are equal and free.”

Sullivan was born in Boston in 1856 to an Irish father who worked as a dance instructor and a Swiss mother who spoke French and gave her son the name Louis Henri. He became fascinated with buildings while witnessing the construction of Henry Hobson Richardson’s Trinity Church, and entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16 to study structural engineering.

He stayed only one year, however, before moving to Philadelphia to work for architect Frank Furness. Unimpressed with the upstart’s MIT background, Furness told Sullivan “You don’t know anything and are full of damnable conceit,” but hired the boy anyway, and started teaching him to draw. Sullivan recalled in his now-classic 1924 memoir, “The Autobiography of an Idea,” how he was “hypnotized” by Furness’s skill, “especially when he drew and swore at the same time.” But after just a few months, Sullivan left Furness to move to Chicago, where he took a job with architect William LeBaron Jenney.

Jenney, who later revolutionized architecture by introducing the steel skeleton frame, was then helping rebuild after Chicago’s devastating 1871 fire, and it was an exciting time to be in be in the Windy City. Chicago was one of the focal points of the capitalist revolution. Only thirty years before, it had been a frontier outpost of 4,000 souls; by 1880, it was 100 times larger—a tremendous crossroads of rail and steam shipping, of agriculture and manufacturing on a scale hitherto unimagined. Chicago “grew and flourished by virtue of pressure from without,” Sullivan wrote in his “Autobiography,” “the pressure of forest, field, and plain, the mines of copper, iron and coal, and the human pressure of those who crowded in upon it from all sides seeking fortune.” More than mere economic growth, this represented in effect a brand-new civilization, resting on mechanical and technological progress rather than manual labor, and releasing pent-up energies of creativity and imagination, all thanks to political and economic freedoms no prior generation had known. The “age-long self-repression and self-beguilement of the world of mankind” was starting to give way, Sullivan thought. “Out of the serial collapses of age-long feudalism is arising a new view of man…as free spirit—as creator.”

Jenney would help realize that new age. He was already practicing a style simpler and less imitative of old models than those of other architects, and may have helped inspire Sullivan’s thinking toward what became the latter’s famous dictum, “form follows function”—meaning that buildings should have a unified aesthetic instead of being cobbled together out of pre-fabricated ideas. But the restless Sullivan only stayed with Jenney for seven months before deciding to enroll instead in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then the world’s premiere architecture school.

Yet Sullivan was dissatisfied there, too. Although he remained with the École for a year, he was more interested in the works of Michelangelo that he saw on a visit to Italy, and in the trends that would eventually develop into “Art Nouveau,” with its sensuous curves and plant-like designs. He was put off by the École’s emphasis on memorizing architectural traditions—bored by the millionth copy of Roman or Gothic models and the “eclectic” technique of combining elements from catalogues into buildings without a core identity. What he wanted was an architecture that would express the dynamism and liveliness of post-Civil War America.

Taking inspiration from his favorite poet, Walt Whitman (Sullivan would even publish his own Whitmanesque free-verse poetry), he aimed for an architecture that would celebrate “Democracy,” a word he usually capitalized, and that to him meant “the immense growth in power of constructive imagination…the lifting of the eyelids of the World.” Sullivan defined Democracy as individualism multiplied by millions. As he put it in his idiosyncratic way:

[The] Ego—the “I am”—the unique—[is] the most precious of man’s powers, their source and summation…. It is the free spirit…the sign and symbol of man’s immense Integrity—the “I am that I am”…. It is this spiritual integrity that defines him human, that points true to his high moral power…. Our dream shall be of a civilization founded upon ideas thrillingly sane, a civilization, a social fabric squarely resting on man’s quality of virtue as a human being; created by man, the real, in the image of his fruitful powers of beneficence; created in the likeness of his aspirant emotions, in response to the power and glory of his true imagination, the power of his intelligence, his ability to inquire, to do, to make new situations befitting his needs. A civilization that shall reflect man sound to the core and kindly in the exercise of his will to choose aright. A civilization that shall be the living voice, the spring song, the saga of the power of his Ego to banish fear and fate, and in the courage of adventure and mastership to shape his destiny…. The living idea of man, the free spirit, master of his powers, shall find its form-image in a civilization which shall set forth the highest craftsmanship, the artistry of living joyously in stable equilibrium.

He thought this revolutionary flood of individual creativity rendered any architecture inherited from the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire obsolete—even pernicious, because such buildings perpetuated notions of hierarchy and authoritarianism that had no place in a free society. Thus when he returned to Chicago and, at the age of 28, took a job with engineer Dankmar Adler, a German immigrant a dozen years his senior, his mission was to create an architecture of liberty—a true American architecture.

It took a decade of designing storefronts and opera houses—now mostly demolished—before Sullivan and Adler got the opportunity to do just that, by landing the commission that would make them immortal: the Chicago Auditorium. Destined to become America’s largest building, it was a passion project by millionaire Ferdinand Peck, who decided in 1886 to build a theater in hopes of boosting Chicago’s reputation vis-à-vis its rival, New York City. Peck—whom Sullivan called “an emotionally exalted advocate of that which he, a rich man, believed in his soul to be democracy”—also hoped the building could ease tensions between rich and poor; with low admission prices and an accessible design, it might elevate Chicago’s workers by introducing them to high culture and boosting their sense of civic pride. That meant the building would have to be beautiful, but not intimidating to audiences who may never have been in a theater before.

Adler and Sullivan exceeded both hopes. On the outside, the Auditorium looks simple to the point of plainness: a cube of stone, ornamented only by a candid set of windows and doors, and the natural cut of the stone itself. One enters a modest door into a lobby that seems more like a subway station than a theater: dignified, but sparsely decorated.

But then one rises up the stairs, through a narrow passageway—and into the breathtaking main hall. Seating 4,250 people, the immense room features a giant, cantilevered balcony—an engineering breakthrough—as well as an ingenious stage system operated by hydraulic pistons that could lift pre-made sets onto the stage, reducing intermission times. It also featured an early form of air conditioning and some of the first electric lights in any Chicago building. The light, in fact, remains the room’s most stunning feature: a pervasive golden glow that fills the air with an almost mystical radiance, thanks to Sullivan’s gilded arches and elaborately detailed ornament.

It achieved the perfect balance of elegance and simplicity and was an immediate success. “The most splendid tribute to the genius of art on the American continent,” declared one newspaper. President Benjamin Harrison and Vice President Levi Morton attended its opening. When New York Senator Chauncey Depew confessed that Manhattan had nothing to rival it, the proud owners had his words carved into the wall in gold letters. The Auditorium, still in use today, was so impressive that it was largely responsible for Chicago being chosen to host the 1893 World’s Fair.

Adler and Sullivan followed that success with a series of commercial buildings, homes, and even tombs that were astounding for their blend of modernity and refinement. But their next monumental feat was the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis, the first of the buildings that gave Sullivan the title “father of the skyscraper.” Ten stories tall, and built using Jenney’s steel-frame method, the Wainwright remains startling for its handsome vertical design. Its red terra cotta is not heavily ornamented—only a band around the top features the ornate designs that would later be called “Sullivanesque.” Instead, its most striking features are its emphasized columns and piers. Like stripes on a man’s suit, they accentuate the height, serving the mission Sullivan explained in his classic essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”:

What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer: it is lofty…. [That] is its very open organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in [the architect’s] expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination. It 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 in it. 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 Wainwright’s emphatic tallness draws the eye up straight to the band of ornament at the top, where swirls of foliate forms bud forth like tree branches. This was to become a trademark of Sullivan’s designs, seen again in the Guaranty Building (1896)—notably similar to the Wainwright, but covered in exuberantly carved terra cotta—and the Bayard-Condict Building (1899), where the highlighted verticals culminate in angels, spreading protective wings over the city.

Another Sullivan calling card was the arch. In his 1901 book “Kindergarten Chats,” he explained that the arch symbolized life itself. It represented “a triumph over an abyss…. It is a form so much against Fate, that Fate, as we say, ever most relentlessly seeks its destruction. Yet does it rise in power so graciously, floating through the air from abutment to abutment, that it seems ever, to me, a symbol and epitome of our own ephemeral span.” Arches played a prominent role in many of his works, but none more noticeably than in the legendary Transportation Building that he and Adler designed for the 1893 World’s Fair.

The Fair’s organizers selected Daniel Burnham, one of the city’s most celebrated builders, to oversee the construction of the temporary “city” that would house the Fair, and Burnham, in turn, assembled a committee of colleagues to manage the aesthetics. Sullivan had never been a team player, though, and when the committee announced that the “city” would be built in Neo-Classical adaptations of Greek and Roman designs, he balked. “We have sought to demonstrate in our work that the word style really implies first a harmonious system of thinking,” he wrote Burnham. “A thought, to be expressed, should…be special for each building and peculiar to that building.” Refusing to cooperate, he and Adler unveiled a horizontal edifice with no Greco-Roman features and painted it red and yellow instead of the uniform white Burnham’s committee had decreed. It was finished with an immense gilded arch that was soon nicknamed “The Golden Doorway,” and which became one of the Fair’s biggest hits.

Thirty years later, Sullivan claimed that the Fair marked a turning point in architectural history. Faced with the choice between his own consciously democratic, purely American style on one hand, and the faux Romanism that Burnham and his allies endorsed on the other—and which Sullivan called “snobbish and alien to the land”—the architectural profession had followed Burnham, and spent the subsequent years scattering Greek-temple banks and French Empire offices over the country, instead of homegrown art. “The lofty steel frame makes a powerful appeal to the architectural imagination where there is any,” he wrote in 1924. “Where imagination is absent and its place usurped by timid pedantry, the case is hopeless.” Pedantry, he believed, had come to dominate architecture in the wake of the World’s Fair.

But in reality, Sullivan’s modernism wasn’t shunned in the years that followed. In fact, one of his greatest triumphs, the Carson-Pirie-Scott Store, was completed in 1899, on the corner of Madison and State Streets in downtown Chicago—perhaps the premiere retail site in the country. This glorious and simple building rose in white splendor to twelve stories, oriented around a circular entrance way, and ornamented at ground level with elaborate ironwork as delicate and mesmerizing as lace lingerie. There is not a trace of Greco-Roman or European influence here; the store is a masterpiece of the American commercial architecture Sullivan was championing. (Today renamed the Sullivan Center, it houses the Chicago Art Institute and what is probably the world’s most beautiful Target.)

But in spite of these successes, Sullivan’s career started to decline in the 1890s, partly because of an economic depression that struck in 1893, and partly because of the breakup of his architecture firm. Adler retired that year, and around the same time, Sullivan fired his gifted protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright, for reasons that remain unclear. Wright later said it was because Sullivan learned he had been moonlighting—designing residences on the side for extra money—but it seems unlikely that Sullivan had been unaware of Wright’s side-work, given that some of the houses were located near his own. Whatever the reason, Sullivan lost his two most gifted collaborators just when he was about to need them most.

After the Carson-Pirie-Scott Store, commissions became scarcer, and Sullivan found himself increasingly at odds with the American Institute of Architects, whose artistically conservative president, Robert Peabody, was offended by his pronouncements about the philistinism of his fellow designers. After Sullivan published an article in the Chicago Tribune denouncing other architects for “dilettantism” and insisting that the “self-evident” remedy was “a liberation of the creative impulse,” Peabody shot back in his keynote speech at the Association’s annual convention: “most of us shudder to think what our land would be if subjected to ‘a liberation of the creative impulse.’” Architects, Peabody insisted, should be proud to adhere to traditions rather than striking out on their own.

The next generation would view Peabody’s words as the perfect encapsulation of archaic, hidebound 19th-century attitudes. Practitioners of the “International Style,” like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier would adopt Sullivan’s slogan “form follows function” as a refutation of such bourgeois traditionalism. But Sullivan had used that phrase for something very different from what these builders thought. Beginning in the 1930s, the International architects would design structures that were almost ostentatious in their plainness—devoid of ornament and emphasizing their lack of individuality in a way that was alien to Sullivan’s aesthetics. By “form follows function,” Sullivan had not meant their boring, boxy structuralism; he had meant that buildings should find and express the beauty of their natural elements, as poetry finds beauty in the rhythms of speech and the color of words. Misinterpreting his meaning, Internationalists like Le Corbusier would produce instead the architectural equivalent of prose.

The 20th century proved hard on Sullivan. Between 1900 and 1909, he averaged two or three commissions a year, many never built. By 1909, he was bankrupt, and had to auction his personal possessions. Still, there was a bright spot: In 1906, a banker from Owatonna, Minnesota, named Carl Bennett, thinking an impressive new building might attract customers, wrote to ask if Sullivan would consider his small-town commission. The desperate architect agreed, and the result was the first of what came to be called his “jewel box banks,” small buildings in obscure villages that easily rank among America’s most beautiful structures

Completed in 1908, the National Farmers’ Bank looks from the street like a brick cube, with turquoise trim and elegantly modest ornament, dominated by arching stained-glass windows that convey stolidity, appropriate to a financial institution. Then one passes through a low, cramped doorway into an awe-inspiring space: a single room lit by splendidly detailed light fixtures and a glowing skylight that almost give one a sense of being outside. The walls feature murals on agricultural themes, framed by some of Sullivan’s most ornate graphic designs. The green of the windows and walls harmonizes with the red brick and the brown of tables, lights and doors into an autumnal atmosphere, while the iron tracery on the clock, wall sconces and tellers’ grates, are prime specimens of Sullivan’s sumptuous organic abstractions. The room has all the earnest splendor of a cathedral, but is not at all intimidating; it feels instead like a temple to the honest fruits of one’s labor.

The Owatonna Bank led to seven more “jewel box” commissions—each one original, highly detailed, and unlike any banks ever built before. Sullivan biographer Robert Twombly offers a glimpse of his unconventional methods—and of why he sometimes found it hard to get work—in the words of the president of one such bank, the People’s Federal Savings and Loan in Sidney, Ohio. Sullivan came to see the site in 1917, the banker recalled, and

sat on a curbstone for the better part of two whole days, smoking innumerable cigarettes…. Then at the end of that time, he announced to the directors that the design was made—in his mind. He proceeded to rapidly draw a sketch for them, and announced an estimate of the cost. One of the directors was somewhat disturbed by the unfamiliarity of his style, and suggested that he rather fancied some classic columns and pilasters for the façade. Sullivan very brusquely rolled up his sketch and started to depart, saying that the directors could get a thousand architects to design a classic bank but only one to get this kind of bank, and that as far as he was concerned, it was one or the other.

The other directors smoothed things over, and the result was another of Sullivan’s “jewel box” masterpieces.

Lovely as the banks were, however, they couldn’t keep food on the table, and Sullivan—whose drinking had become increasingly uncontrollable—was forced to ask his old protégé Wright for help. The two had reconciled around 1914, as Wright’s career was taking off thanks to the success of his Prairie Style houses, and as the twenties began, Wright and other admirers were able to arrange for Sullivan to write his “Autobiography of an Idea” for much-needed cash. It was not long after completing it the book, that Sullivan in 1924 died of kidney failure in the renovated closet he was using as a bedroom. His $600 funeral costs were covered by Adler’s son and other admirers.

Architects had started rediscovering Sullivan’s work around the same time, but it was Wright who ultimately did the most to restore his reputation. Rarely willing to acknowledge his influences, Wright made an exception for Sullivan, whom he called Lieber Meister (beloved master) and about whom he wrote a book, “Genius and the Mobocracy,” in 1949. “With the master, ‘ornament’ was, like music, a matter of the soul,” Wright declared. “A far greater man than the functionalist he has been wishfully and willfully made to appear.”

Indeed, Sullivan was one of the greatest of American artists. Dedicated, like his hero Whitman, to voicing the ideals of a vibrant dawn of freedom, it’s no coincidence that, just as Whitman’s poetry rejoiced at the bustling modern world of tradesmen, mechanics, “houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers,” so Sullivan’s American art would be focused primarily on commercial structures—office buildings and banks—which served as the cultural and civic engines of the “thrillingly sane” civilization Sullivan wanted to honor. “By concentrating his artistic force on as public and as now commonplace an entity as the commercial skyscraper,” writes literary scholar Kevin Murphy, “Sullivan was elevating the purpose of commercial building to that of monumental architecture, that is, to the level of an architecture which seeks to embody the aspirations of a people and to inspire that public with its own best image of itself.”