Louis Sullivan

His mother came from Geneva and his father from Ireland, and both landed in Boston in the late 1840s. The son took shortcuts. He got out of high school a year early and passed a set of examinations that let him skip the first two years at MIT, entering at 16 and leaving after one. Philadelphia and a job with Frank Furness lasted until the depression of 1873 dried the office up. He went to Chicago, where the fire of 1871 had left work everywhere, spent less than a year with William Le Baron Jenney, then a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Back in Chicago he drew stencils for a tabernacle interior. Dankmar Adler hired him in 1879 and made him a partner in 1880.

Adler and Sullivan built theaters first, and the Auditorium Building of 1886 to 1890 was the summit of that work: a 4,200-seat hall wrapped in a hotel, an office block, a 17-story tower and storefronts. Then came the tall buildings, which Sullivan treated as a question of expression rather than engineering. The Wainwright in St. Louis in 1891 ran its piers the full height and settled what a steel frame ought to look like. The Guaranty in Buffalo followed in 1895, then Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago from 1899. At the 1893 fair his Transportation Building and its Golden Door were the only structure not in Beaux-Arts dress and the only one in color, and it took three medals in Paris. In an 1896 essay for Lippincott's he wrote that form ever follows function, and called it the law.

Adler brought in the work. The Panic of 1893 took the work away, and in 1894, with nothing coming, the partnership dissolved. Sullivan received few large commissions ever again. The 20 years after that were a slow subtraction: small-town banks in Iowa and Minnesota, chronic debt, drink. Frank Lloyd Wright had been his draftsman for seven years and was fired in 1894 for taking outside jobs, though he called Sullivan lieber Meister for the rest of his life. Sullivan blamed the Chicago fair, writing in 1922 that it had set American architecture back half a century. That same year the American Institute of Architects paid him 100 dollars a month to write his life in installments, and his last commission was the front of a music store on Lincoln Avenue.

He died in a Chicago hotel room on April 14, 1924, separated from his wife, Mary Azona Hattabaugh. A modest headstone went up in Graceland Cemetery, and later a monument beside it, carved with a French spelling of a middle name his birth certificate never carried. The AIA gave him its Gold Medal in 1944. Then urban renewal took the buildings — the Garrick in 1961, the Stock Exchange in 1972. Richard Nickel, who photographed them and fought for them, was killed inside the Stock Exchange while salvaging ornament when a floor gave way above him. The trading room was rebuilt at the Art Institute in 1977. Nickel's catalogue of all 256 Adler and Sullivan commissions appeared in 2010.

Louis Sullivan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Auditorium Building, Chicago building
  A 4,200-seat theater inside a hotel, an office block and a 17-story tower 1890
• Wainwright Building, St. Louis building
  The vertical piers that answered what a steel frame should look like 1891
• Guaranty Building, Buffalo building
  The last major project of the firm 1895
• The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered article
  Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, March 1896 1896
• Carson Pirie Scott store, Chicago building
  The Art Nouveau ironwork at the corner entrance on State Street 1904
• The Autobiography of an Idea book
  Serialized from June 1922 in the AIA Journal at 100 dollars a month 1924

• 1873 aged ~17 Leaves MIT after one year and takes a job with Frank Furness The depression of 1873 emptied the Philadelphia office and cost him the job.
• 1874 aged ~18 Spends a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris
• 1879 aged ~23 Dankmar Adler hires him, and makes him a partner a year later
• 1887 aged ~31 Frank Lloyd Wright joins the office as his draftsman Wright stayed seven years and called him lieber Meister ever after.
• 1893 aged ~37 The Transportation Building stands out at the Columbian Exposition The only structure not in Beaux-Arts dress and the only one in color.
• 1894 aged ~38 Adler and Sullivan dissolve, and Wright is fired for moonlighting
• March 1896 aged 39 Publishes form ever follows function in Lippincott's
• 1922 aged ~66 Takes 100 dollars a month from the AIA to write his autobiography His last commission that year was the front façade of the Krause Music Store.
• April 14, 1924 aged 67 Dies in a Chicago hotel room

• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. mentored, then fired
• William Le Baron Jenney 1832–1907
  Architect and engineer who designed the first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago. employer in Chicago
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. antagonist at the 1893 fair
• Ayn Rand 1905–1982
  Novelist and philosopher whose defense of individualism and capitalism deeply influenced American conservative and libertarian thought. modeled a character on him
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1886–1969
  Directed architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology and defined American modernist steel-and-glass buildings. inherited the Chicago skyline