May 10, 2023 • 41 mins
Louis Sullivan was an architect working in Chicago at the dawn of the skyscraper. He sought to define a new, bold style of design in the U.S., and was deeply frustrated when his peers didn’t do the same.
Research:
- Sullivan, Louis. “An Autobiography of an Idea.” Dover Architecture. 2012. Kindle Edition.
- “Louis Sullivan.” Chicago Architecture Center. https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/architecture-dictionary/entry/louis-sullivan/
- “Auditorium Building.” Chicago Architecture Center. https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/auditorium-building/
- Smith, Mark Richard. “Louis Sullivan – The Struggle for American Architecture.” Whitecap Films. 2010.
- “Charnley-Persky House Museum.” https://www.sah.org/about-sah/charnley-persky-house
- Glancey, Jonathan. “The city that changed architecture forever.” BBC Culture. October 5, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150930-chicago-birthplace-of-the-skyscraper
- “Auditorium Theater.” https://auditoriumtheatre.org/
- Chewning, John Andrew. “William Robert Ware and the beginnings of architectural education in the United States, 1861-1881.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1986. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14983
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Dankmar Adler". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Apr. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dankmar-Adler
- Koeper, H.F.. "Louis Sullivan". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Apr. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Sullivan
- Lowe, David Garrard. “Architecture: The First Chicago School.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/62.html
- “World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.” American Experience. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/chicago-worlds-columbian-exposition-1893/
- Crook, David H. “Louis Sullivan and the Golden Doorway.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 26, no. 4, 1967, pp. 250–58. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/988451
- Mumford, Mark. “Form Follows Nature: The Origins of American Organic Architecture.” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), vol. 42, no. 3, 1989, pp. 26–37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1425061
- Gary C. Meyer. “Louis Sullivan’s Columbus Jewel Box.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 88, no. 3, 2005, pp. 2–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4637133
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "William Le Baron Jenney". Encyclopedia Britannica, 21 Sep. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Le-Baron-Jenney
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, this is another
edition of person I've had on my list for a
million years. We've both had a lot of them. Lately,
(00:23):
I'm trying to like revisit that list and not just
put names on it and then hide it on my
phone and not think about it again and then later
be like I don't know what to talk about it.
It's like, yeah, hey, brainiac, you have a whole list
of things that you've wanted to talk about. I had
an internal conversation recently about whether to like just scrap
my short list and start over because it's gotten so
(00:45):
long and so many of the names now I just
keep looking at and not not doing I'm picking and choosing. Yeah,
this is one that I have wanted to do for
a while. You know. It's architectural, which I guess follows
and my discussions of people in the arts, but it
(01:09):
also I had come upon a thing recently where I
literally overheard a kid in an airport talking to his
mom about where skyscrapers came from like when did buildings
get so tall? And I was like, don't tell him,
don't tell him, but I know at least the start,
(01:31):
and I figured now as this good a time as
any to talk about that. So we are talking about
a man who is to me similar to Jean Baptiste Lulie,
and that he was kind of a pain in the
neck to people that knew him, but was also you know,
certainly has been lauded as a genius, and I think
(01:53):
a little bit more than luli In his time, there
were people that liked him and tried tried to make
for him even after his like heyday was done. But
if you have ever heard the phrase form follows function,
that is attributed to this man, and you will see
why as we talk about his work and how it's
(02:13):
often inspired by nature, and how he had this whole
ideology about architecture in the United States and how architecture
should have its own unique American identity, and how he
really tried to push boundaries in that regard and it
didn't always work out. But so today we are talking
about Louis Henry Sullivan or sometimes you'll see it Louis
(02:36):
Arie Sullivan, because his mother was Swiss. He seemed to
not really use the middle name so much that I
saw one way or the other. I think he just
let it be Americanized and let people do what they preferred. So.
Louis Henry or Arie Sullivan was born September third, eighteen
(02:58):
fifty six, in Boston, Massachusett. His father, Patrick Sullivan was
Irish and taught dance, and his mother, Audrian Friends was
liszt as Holly just said, was Swiss. He later wrote
of her quote, she seemed French but not wholly so
which I love that quote. Louis was their second child.
(03:21):
He had a brother named Albert Walter Sullivan, who was
two years older. When the boys were young, the Sullivans
spent at least one summer on Cape Anne in a
small area known as Folly Cove. Louis later relayed that
he almost drowned there one day, and that a local
farmer had saved him. In eighteen sixty nine, the Sullivans
(03:43):
moved to Chicago, Illinois, but Louis didn't go with them.
He stayed with his grandparents outside of Boston. Sullivan wrote
about all of this in his autobiography in a pretty
quaint way, noting that his grandparents really desperately wanted one
of their grandchildren to live with them. This autobiography, which
will quote from a lot, is in the third person,
(04:05):
and he wrote, quote the farm had been but recently acquired,
and the child appeared shortly thereafter as a greedy parasite
to absorb that affection, that abundant warmth of heart which
only Grandma and Grandpa have the intuitive folly to bestow.
In short, they loved him and kept him bodily clean.
Louis attended public school, which he described as a dreary prison,
(04:30):
but he also said he didn't have any real memories
of it, calling this time a quote gray blank. When
writing of his early years, Sullivan describes himself as quote
not an enfanteried, but but rather an independent, isolated compound
of fury, curiosity, and tenderness. He hated most of his
(04:52):
school lessons because they were perpetually pondering abstract questions featuring
fictional scenarios. Occasionally, he'd kind of rally and do really
well with his schoolwork for a while to try to
please his grandmother, but then he would get bored again
and kind of stop achieving. He was often in trouble
and described being whipped across the hands with a ratan
(05:14):
and class. By his own account, he was his grandparents pet.
They let him do largely as he pleased, and that
involved a lot of gardening. As a boy, he often
skipped school and wandered around the countryside. He also describes
being just enthralled anytime he saw people at work. The
idea of work and being industrious was intriguing to him. Yeah,
(05:39):
he was like this kid that was kind of rebellious,
but not in a troublemakery kind of way. He writes
about how like he was not one of those boys that,
like in the stereotypical way of the day, wanted to
get in fights and make messes and be dirty. He
just like wanted to go sit in fields and look
at flowers and grasses much farmers do in their thing.
Ye yes uh. Louis enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of
(06:03):
Technology in eighteen seventy two to study architecture, and at
the time, the program, which came to be known as
the School of Architecture and Planning was still very new.
It had been founded in eighteen sixty five by architect
William Robert Ware Initially, the program was a one or
two year course of study, set up as sort of
like a graduate program. You either had to have had
(06:25):
an undergraduate degree or some experience in the field to
enroll in it, and when Sullivan enrolled, the program had
only been actively offering formal education for about four years
because prior to eighteen sixty eight, that three years between
the founding and then the curriculum was still in its
planning stages. But even though the program was not long,
(06:46):
Sullivan got frustrated with it. He left less than a
year in. He thought he might go to Paris to
study in the architecture program at Acol de Bozar, but
he ended up taking the path of an apprentice working
at the Furnace and Hewitt firm of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
didn't stay there long either, though, just a few months.
Sullivan's next move was to Chicago. By the end of
(07:09):
eighteen seventy three, he had secured a job there in
William le Baron Jenny's office. Jenny had established his office
in Chicago after having been an engineering officer in the
US Civil War. This would have seemed like a perfect fit,
but Sullivan was still restless and there just wasn't enough
money flowing into construction to keep him occupied. In eighteen
(07:30):
seventy four, he finally set out for Paris with the
intent to study there. So this might seem like Louis
Sullivan was finally achieving his dream. But if it was,
he really wasn't any more focused at ecl de Bozar
than he had been anywhere else. It's worth noting that
he would have been just about eighteen at this point.
(07:51):
Maybe it's not all that surprising that he found himself
distracted by the possibilities of his time in Europe. I'm
forty seven, I would be distracted. Instead of studying, he
did things like tour Italy. He was incredibly moved by
the art of Michelangelo, which he saw for the first
time while visiting Rome. He spent two full days in
(08:15):
the Sistine Chapel, mostly by himself, and in his words
quote communed in the silence with a superman. Yeah, he
really held Michelangelo in extraordinarily high regard. He also spent
a little time in the workshop of Emil vau Remat,
who taught at Bozaar. So even though Sullivan wasn't a
great student, it does seem like his educators saw some
(08:36):
promise in him, and he had been the only American
student admitted into the school that year. That was something
that was made possible by him working pretty quickly to
gain affluency in French just so he could pass the
entrance exams. He was so smart and seemed so full
of promise, but none of the avenues of study that
(08:56):
he tried really gave him anything but frustration that he
wasn't creating more and learning history less. He kind of
felt like he was getting like memorize previous forms of
architecture rather than being taught how to actually do things.
He left Paris after less than a year there and
returned to Chicago in the early summer of eighteen seventy five. Initially,
(09:19):
Sullivan's work in Chicago after he returned from Europe was
as a contractor draftsman. This freelance life gave him an
opportunity to work with a lot of architecture offices to
see what he liked. During these contract jobs, Sullivan was
introduced to a man named Dankmar Adler. Adler was twelve
years older than Louis Sullivan. He'd been born in Prussia
(09:41):
on July third, eighteen forty four and moved to the
United States at the age of ten. While he was
still a teenager, Adler started studying architecture. In eighteen sixty one,
he moved to Chicago found work as a draftsman, working
under Augustus Bauer. Adler was in the middle a rapid
rise in the architectural world when the US Civil War began.
(10:05):
He served in the war and then immediately went back
to Chicago when it ended, once again with Bauer. Initially,
although he worked for several other firms as well, He
started a firm with Edward Berling in eighteen seventy one.
In eighteen seventy nine, Sullivan started working for Adler's office.
This was the same year that Adler famously designed Chicago's
(10:27):
Central Music Hall, which established many of the standards of
the music venues that followed. One reason this structure became
the prototype of music halls around the city and then
around the country was that Adler had carefully designed it
to optimize the building's acoustics for musical performance. Any biography
you see of Adler, they talk about how acoustics were
(10:47):
like his area of expertise. The project was one that
Adler undertook as an independent architect after he broke from
his previous business partner, Edward Berling. After two years of
work at the Adler firm and having hand designed some
incredible ornamentation for various projects, Louis Sullivan was made partner
and the firm's name was updated to Adler and Sullivan Architects.
(11:11):
And at this point things really took off for both
of them because they were a perfect combination. Adler had
this deep understanding of things like acoustics and engineering, but
he didn't have as much of a knack for the
creative design aspects of the job, and that was where
Sullivan really shown there's a reason Chicago had so many
construction projects going on in the eighteen eighties. This was
(11:35):
after the eighteen seventy one Chicago fire. So yes, that's
the fire with the O'Leary cow mythology. The actual cause
of the initial fire is not known, but after it
started in the southwest quadrant of the city, it spread
really rapidly thanks to hot, dry conditions. Over the course
of a day and a half, it destroyed three and
(11:57):
a half square miles of the city. An estimated one
hundred thousand people lost their homes. Several hundred people died
after this tragedy. The city needed to rebuild a lot
of infrastructure, residences, government, and commercial buildings simultaneously. It also
expanded well beyond its pre fire footprints. So for architects
(12:19):
in the eighteen eighties there was a steady stream of work. Yeah,
there's a whole lot of Chicago history. You can look
up around like that moment where they decide is the
city doomed? No, We're just going to rebuild it, and
they kind of take a very proactive approach to being
as smart about building as they could. We will talk
some about the work that Adler and Sullivan did in
(12:41):
Chicago as well as other places after we first paused
for a sponsor break. We talked before the break about
why Chicago was such a good place to be an
architect in the late nineteenth century. Additionally, there is a
(13:03):
reason that Chicago is where the first skyscraper was built,
although by modern standards we'd think of it as pretty tiny.
It was just ten floors in less than one hundred
and fifty feet tall. That was the Home Life Insurance
building built by William L. Barn Jenny, who you may
recall Sullivan worked for at one point. So Chicago is
on the shore of Lake Michigan, and it is hemmed
(13:24):
in by the Chicago River, and in the late nineteenth
century it also had industrial yards that were kind of
creating some barriers around the city that prevented sprawl. So
where it couldn't build out, it very purposely built up,
and Adler and Sullivan were in the right career and
the right place at the right time to be part
(13:45):
of this. While Adler and Sullivan worked on a wide
variety of residential and commercial properties, one of their most
well known projects is the Auditorium Building of Chicago that
was started in eighteen eighty six and completed in eighteen
eighty nine. Leading up to this point, they'd worked on
a number of music halls and theaters together, combining Adler's
(14:06):
skills in acoustic engineering with Sullivan's talent for exquisite ornamentation.
So a large scale project that included a performance space
was exactly the kind of thing they were perfect for.
This was a mixed use building project. It had to
include obviously an auditorium with seating for four thousand, but
(14:27):
also an office building and a four hundred room hotel.
Ferdinand wife Peck was a lawyer in Chicago who was
also community minded. He was on the city's Board of Education,
and he was a founder of the Illinois Humane Society,
and he was a strong supporter of the arts. And
he spearheaded the Auditorium building project, which was intended to
(14:49):
make cultural events like opera accessible to all of Chicago's citizens,
regardless of socioeconomic status. The hotel element of this project
had been added to the plan as a way to
subsidize the cost of running the performance space. But this
entire project was not just an issue of problem solving
(15:09):
from an engineering and design standpoint. It was also an
effort on the part of Chicago's business leaders to try
to ease the tensions that had developed in the city
as industrialization had created a very obvious separation between the
wealthy and the poor who worked for them. They were
hoping like, hey, we'll all come together and enjoy the
arts and that might help smooth things out, which is
(15:30):
a little bit of a I'll just be kind and say,
idealistic way to look at the problem. For context, just
so you understand how kind of fraught the situation was
in Chicago. The Haymarket affair, which we have talked about
on the show before, had taken place in May of
eighteen eighty six, just a couple months before this project started.
(15:53):
This was at a time when the marshall Field Department Store,
designed by HH Richardson, was being built near and that
was inspirational for Sullivan in that it was not an
overly done building. Richardson had opted to let the exterior
stone be its own ornamentation instead of adding a whole
bunch of additional pieces. For Sullivan, who wanted to break
(16:15):
away from the traditional design that he had found so
frustrating when studying in school, the marshall Field building was
like a green light. While finishing the auditorium building, Adler
and Sullivan moved their offices to the complex's tower, and
there on the sixteenth floor, they had a full view
of the city. This building looks solid and it is
(16:38):
despite being built on a tricky base of unstable soil.
Adler designed a really unique foundation for this structure, with
multiple isolated peers that each hold up their own sections
of the building's weight, and those peers kind of sank
into position as a floating foundation. As the construction was
carried out, A combination of wrought iron and cast iron
(16:59):
support give the auditorium a degree of flexibility as well.
Inside is one beautiful piece of ornamentation after another. There
are luminous surfaces and intricacies just everywhere. There are mosaic floors,
warm tones of marble, and gilded trims, and the theater
was one of the first to have electric lighting illuminating it,
(17:21):
so all those beautiful finishes gave off a warm and
inviting glow. Even the plaster used for the interior walls
was carefully selected for the way it helped amplify sound
without distorting it, and it was specifically designed for fire safety,
with egress passages built into all of these beautifully adorned features.
(17:43):
Later in life, Louis wrote in the third person about
the design of the auditorium, quote, Louis's heart went into
this structure. It is old time now, but its tower
holds its head in the air as a tower should,
so sweet. Another significant relationship began during the work on
the auditorium building. Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm as
(18:05):
Sullivan's apprentice, and he was hired because this was a
huge project and Sullivan really needed some help in the design.
Of the Auditorium. Wright understood his vision, so he came
on as a draftsman. Soon he was the project's lead draftsman.
The Auditorium Building was not Adler and Sullivan's sole project.
(18:25):
Their firm took on a lot of others while this
structure was being built. One of those was the Wainwright
Building in Saint Louis. This project began in eighteen ninety one,
and it's significant because it was the first building to
successfully implement steel frame construction. It's a ten story building.
The first two floors, which have a brown sandstone exterior,
(18:48):
are emphasized visually over the upper floors. Floors three through
nine have a brick exterior, and the tenth story has
a more decorative outer finish, adorned with a scroll work
of leaves and circular windows and an overhanging roof. While
the Wainwright Building is often lauded as Sullivan's greatest technical achievement,
we have to note that he did not originate the
(19:09):
idea of using a steel frame to support a building.
That goes back to his former employer William Labarn Jenny,
who we already credited as having built the first skyscraper,
but Sullivan innovated the idea by breaking away stylistically from
the traditional architectural styles that it left other architects sort
of stymied in terms of how they could add the
(19:30):
height that a steel structure would enable to existing styles
without creating a visual mess. It's kind of like, if
you imagine suddenly something like Versailles getting taller and taller
and taller, it would be very strange. And that's why
Sullivan was like, but what if we just changed the style.
Sullivan also designed a number of cemetery tombs in addition
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to buildings. Eliza Getty's tomb in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery is
considered one of the most beautiful structure in the cemetery.
Commissioned in eighteen ninety, it's a building that's solid and
squared off, but also has a honeycomb design carved into it,
so it references the natural living world while also providing
(20:13):
a final resting place. It's sometimes considered the first example
of Sullivan's entree into what came to be known as
the Chicago School, which we'll talk about in a bit.
In eighteen ninety one, work started on the Charley House
that's a residence that feels very familiar when you look
at it, if you know the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
(20:33):
And Wright worked a lot on the project, and during construction,
Sullivan continued to show him the way that careful, beautiful
ornamentation inspired by nature could elevate a building that was
otherwise quite bold in its lines and materials. In eighteen
ninety three, several significant things happened for Sullivan. First, there
was the Columbian Exposition. A name we mentioned earlier was
(20:57):
involved in the planning. Ferdinand Peck, who was vice president
of the Expo, and Sullivan, had envisioned this world's fare
as an opportunity to showcase the emerging US style of architecture.
It didn't really play out as he hoped at all,
though Louis wrote of the exposition quote, Chicago was ripe
(21:19):
and ready for such an undertaking. It had required enthusiasm
and the will. It won out in a contest between
the cities. The prize was now in hand. It was
to be the city's crowning glory. A superb site on
the Lake adjoined the southern section of the city. This
site was to be transformed and embellished by the magic
(21:41):
of American prowess, particularly in architectural aspects, as to set
forth the genius of the land in that great creative art.
It was to be a dream city where one might
revel in beauty. It was to be called the White
City by the Lake. That location so out aside for
the Expo was carved out specifically so tourists wouldn't see
(22:04):
any of the less appealing parts of Chicago. Yeah. I mean,
I think if you've lived in any city where a
big international something has gone on, we've all seen this happen.
When it came to planning the site for the expo,
landscape architect Frederick law Olmsted, who has also come up
on the show before, laid out the site. Architect John
(22:27):
Root was the project's consulting architect and his partner, architect
Daniel Hudson Burnham, was named chief of construction, and Burnham
had the idea to invite ten of the most respected
architects of the US to participate, five from the East
and five from the West, suggesting that each contribute a design,
and Sullivan was of course among them. The auditorium building
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in particular, had really put him on the map. Also
included where William Labaron, Jenny Henry van Brunn, George b. Post,
Robert Peabody, Charles McKim, and Richard Morris Hunt. The first
meeting of all the architects took place in February eighteen
ninety one, and they were all to bring their design
ideas with them, and this was, to be clear, a
(23:10):
really significant moment. It was kind of like the All
Star Game of architecture, and it was recognized at the
time as one of the most significant meeting of artists
of all time. But John Root had died the month
before the meeting unexpectedly, and he was not replaced. That
was an incident that Sullivan would later describe as a
quote shadow of a white cloud falling over the project.
(23:33):
As the construction of the site was carried out and
the expo opened, Sullivan was so disappointed by the whole
thing he later wrote in his autobiography, quote, the damage
wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a
century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated
deep into the constitution of the American mind, affecting their
(23:55):
lesions significant of dementia. He found the fervor for replicating
Renaissance and classic architecture to be just a complete letdown
on the part of his peers at a time when
they could all be showing their originality, most of them
had instead decided to go very traditional routes, except for Sullivan.
(24:17):
He also described the people who had visited and then
gone home to talk about the Expo as people who
were carrying a contagion. He really felt that part of
the creative responsibility of the architects was quote an elevation
of the public taste. He really did not see that.
At the Columbia Expo, the Beaux Art style was selected
(24:39):
as the design style for the White City, with a
court of honors surrounding his central water feature. But Adler
and Sullivan as a firm, did not do that. Their
transportation building, designed by Sullivan, featured color and original ornamentation
and an entry known as the Golden Door, which featured
concentric gold arcs that recessed with each successively smaller curve,
(25:02):
kind of inviting someone to walk in. This building was
a huge break from the rest of the buildings at
the Expo, and it got a lot of attention a
lot of people. Historically, of course, it got torn down
because it was part of a temporary expo setup. But
a lot of people have talked about how this was
really an incredible achievement. But most people that visited the
(25:22):
Expo and the White City talked about it for a
long time, having been impressed and reassured by the other
people's nods back to history and what felt like, you know,
a stable part of global history that would carry them
forward in a way where they had built on the
work of others. So we'll take another little sponsor break
(25:44):
and then come back to talk about Sullivan's later years,
which were rather difficult. After the let down of the Expo,
there was more difficulty for Louis Sullivan. The depression that
(26:05):
followed the Panic of eighteen ninety three meant that all
of the building projects that had been so abundant in
the eighteen eighties were no longer coming in, and the
firm's resources really started drying up. Additionally, that style that
had gained Sullivan so many accolades just a few years
earlier was suddenly no longer in fashion. To add to that,
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Frank Lloyd Wright and Sullivan had a fight that severed
their relationship. These two men had become very close. Wright
was almost like a sun to Sullivan in eighteen eighty nine,
when Wright had moved to the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago,
Sullivan had become the mortgage holder of the property and
(26:46):
the house where the younger draftsman was living, and after
his own home had been built, Wright had started taking
commissions to design and build other houses like it in
the neighborhood as kind of a side hustle to get
some extra money coming in. Sullivan found out about it
all in eighteen ninety three and fired Right. There's been
(27:08):
a lot of speculation about the ways the two men's
relationship may have shifted over the years, with Right probably
out and growing his willness to just acquiesce to Sullivan's
every order as his own skill and knowledge grew. We'll
never really know what passed between them, though they did reconcile,
but not for about a decade and a half. Yeah,
(27:30):
it's a you know, part of that initial deal of
like will I will pay for a lot of this album,
I'll help you financially meant that Frank Lader could build
this really impressive, beautiful house because he had some financial leverage,
and that that's what got it all and Sullivan kind
of saw his other projects as like bootleg. Adler and
(27:52):
Sullivan projects like basically going, Oh, I'm a draftsman with them,
I'll put this house together. Didn't go over well, and
then Dankmar Adler left Architecture. He decided to take a
job with Crane Elevator in eighteen ninety five, which he needed.
They were not making money and this caused a massive
rift with Sullivan, who felt betrayed that his partner would
(28:15):
just leave the firm. Sullivan seems like he was a
grudge holder because even when Adler tried to come back
to the firm just a few months later, Sullivan refused
this was a really, really foolish decision. Throughout their partnership,
Sullivan had often been the creative lead on projects, but
Adler was sort of the glue that held everything together.
(28:37):
Whereas Louis was mercurial and wanted to focus on art,
Dankmar was steadfast. He was really good at project managing
all of their contracts from design through to completion, while
also incorporating his considerable technical expertise. He was excellent at
the administrative side of the business. He was really good
with people, whereas Sullivan was not. While Adler was perfectly
(29:01):
able to set up a new office for himself and
continued to work steadily in architecture. Sullivan struggled. It's kind
of obvious that Sullivan had some interpersonal communication issues. His
sharp breaks with two different collaborators, that being Adler and
Wright in such a short time, that's a pretty good indicator.
(29:22):
He was known to be arrogant and stubborn, and he
lost out on jobs because of it. Additionally, it had
largely been Adler's various contacts that had kept contracts coming
in for them, and without that it just got harder
and harder to drum up business. Sullivan did have some
notable and successful commissions in the later stage of his career, though.
(29:45):
In eighteen ninety six, the Garantee Building, designed by Sullivan
was completed in Buffalo, New York. This is a structure
that's pretty interesting because from a distance it looks very
modern even today. It was built in a very similar
style to the Wainwright Building. But then when you see
it more closely, you see that it is deeply ornamented
(30:05):
terra cotta on the outside, and it's like, as you
get closer, it feels like it grew right out of
the earth. The Schlessinger and Mayor Department Store began construction
in eighteen ninety nine, and this project posed an interesting
challenge for Sullivan, who had been focusing on buildings that
at the time were considered skyscrapers. This construction needed more
(30:28):
emphasis on the horizontal rather than vertical spread, and as
he had done with his tall office buildings, Sullivan focused
on the first two floors it's visually the most important,
recognizing that these would be the ones people walking by
would see the most. Because the building was intended for sales,
it also meant that it needed to include wide windows
(30:51):
that could be used for display, a contrast again to
the usually taller than wider windows that were usually included
in office buildings. In addition to being wider than taller,
the windows on the first two floors were decorated with
details that resembled picture frames. It was all designed to
really appeal to passers by and invite them in. The
(31:14):
whole building has beautiful botanical craftsmanship inside and out. Yeah,
all of the motifs are so super pretty. Sullivan also
got married in eighteen ninety nine to a woman from
California named Margaret Davies hadabow. This marriage seems to have
often caused historians and biographers to scratch their heads a
(31:34):
little bit. It seems to have sort of sprung up
out of nowhere, and it has grown even more confusing
as people have tried to track down information about Margaret,
who appears to have been pretty fast and loose with
her own biographical details in her lifetime, often fibbing about
her age and name. And this marriage is weird because
it also took place at a time when Sullivan seemed
(31:57):
to be pushing more and more people away, including his
older brother Albert. Louis and Margaret separated in nineteen oh
six after seven years of marriage. They never reconciled, and
they were formally divorced in nineteen seventeen, likely precipitated by
Margaret's desire to marry someone else. In the years between
the separation and the divorce, Sullivan really hit hard times financially.
(32:21):
He sold most of his personal belongings at auction in
nineteen oh nine just to have some ready cash to
get by. Also, in nineteen oh nine, Sullivan lost the
one employee who seemed able to tolerate his sour temper.
That was George Grant Elmsley, Scotland born. Elmsley had worked
for Sullivan for twenty years at that point. It's possible
(32:44):
that some of Sullivan's more ornamental work during that time
was really George's doing, while Elmsley was hired away by
another of Louis Sullivan's former employees. This has to have
been a blow. The next several years were dotted with
a handful of projects that were much smaller in scale
than the ones that Sullivan had become known for. Mostly
(33:06):
he designed banks, though one of the earliest of these,
the National Farmers Bank in Minnesota, has been speculated to
perhaps have even been Elsley's design, but it definitely has
the spirit of Sullivan's style. These bank projects, which are
quite beautiful, were nicknamed the Jewel Boxes. The work on these,
as well as the Schlessinger and Mayer building, is often
(33:28):
described as kind of the most unrestrained of Sullivan's life.
But while his peers from the Expo were being hired
to build huge project after huge project based on the
classicist style they had embraced and showcased there in Chicago,
Sullivan's projects remained small. Throughout all of his financial hardships.
(33:48):
Sullivan had remained in his offices in the Auditorium building tower,
but as the nineteen teens were on, it became impossible
to keep this space first team into a small office
near the ground floor that lasted less than two years,
though in nineteen twenty he had to close up his
offices for good. Often he worked out of a single
(34:11):
room where he lived sitting at his desk. He often
had to ask for financial help from his friends. Yeah,
he seems like he lived in a variety of places
there towards the end of his life. For sometimes it
would be a hotel. Sometimes a friend would put him up,
So he was moving around a lot. But in his
final years, Louis took on two projects. He wrote his
(34:32):
autobiography and he wrote a book on architectural ornamentation. And
these books were actually commissioned by the American Institute of
Architects in exchange for a stipend. I feel like probably
a lot of his colleagues were like, we have to
figure out some way to help him, and also like
it would be very beneficial to have his thoughts on
these matters written down. His autobiography, titled An Autobiography of
(34:55):
an idea, which we've quoted several times here, is written,
as we said, in the third person. It's really a
pretty delightful read, particularly the sections describing his childhood. But
he is also pretty venomous when writing about his colleagues
in the architectural world in the ways that he felt
like they sold out. His treatise, titled A System of
Architectural Ornament, features twenty studies which he hand drew notating
(35:20):
how he created original ornamental designs. But these walkthroughs of
design ideas aren't just ornament. They really offer a guide
map to creative thinking. Sullivan died at the age of
sixty eight, shortly after having seen the first copies of
his book. He was laid to rest in the Graceland
Cemetery near the decorative tombs that he designed, although his
(35:44):
own grave was unadorned. Although he could be a difficult
figure even in his lifetime, Sullivan's contemporaries recognized really what
an extraordinary talent he was. His ideology was that a
structure's form should not hide its purpose, but be a
parent about it, something that wouldn't find true footing until
decades after he died. This concept of what he called
(36:07):
honest architecture may have been at odds with trends in
his later life, but it also cemented him as a
singular voice in cultural style in the US. Many of
the buildings Sullivan designed, including ones that we've talked about today,
are now recognized as historically significant. Today. Sullivan is grouped
in with William Laban, Jenny his partner Adler, John Root,
(36:30):
and Daniel Burnham under the umbrella term the Chicago School
or the First Chicago School. This grouping recognizes the innovation
that these men spearheaded in developing ways that construction and
design could carry upward, creating the first skyscrapers, and setting
the foundation of architectural design in the United States. One
(36:53):
of my favorite passages in Sullivan's autobiography really spoke to
me as a representation of who Louis Sullivan was and
how he perceived the world. This is not a particularly
important passage. It's not one that comes up a lot
when you see documentaries or read articles about him. It's
just a moment where he talks about the architect as
a problem solver, and I really loved it. So he
(37:16):
wrote quote as a rule inventions which are truly solutions
are not arrived at quickly. They may seem to appear suddenly,
but the groundwork has usually been long and preparing. It
is of the essence of this philosophy that man's needs
are balanced by his powers. That as the needs increase,
the powers increase. That is the one reason why they
(37:39):
are herein called powers kind of love that. Yeah, if
you're dreaming it, it's because you know that some part
of it is a solvable problem. So that is the
sometimes difficult, but always kind of inspiring Louis Sullivan. Yeah,
are you gonna read the listener mail? I am. I
(38:02):
don't know why this made me laugh. Well, I do
no part of it, but this is from our listener Sean,
and he writes, good afternoon, Holly and Tracy. I just
finished the April fourteenth Behind the Scenes, in which Holly
mentioned someone touching tapestries in the Vatican. I cannot recall
which of you lives in Atlanta. I'm pretty sure it's Holly.
(38:23):
You are correct, Pretty sure you'll know what I'm referencing.
Years ago, when my daughter was three. She's in her
first year of college now. My ex wife and ex
in laws took my daughter and son to an art
museum in or around Atlanta, there was a globe shaped
art installation hanging from the ceiling at the exact eye
level of a three year old, and yep, before we
could stop her, to our utter mortification, my daughter went
(38:46):
up and slapped the globe, which started to swing. Needless
to say, we hurried out with the docins glaring the
whole way. To the best of my knowledge, no permanent
damage was done. As my own aside, I will say,
I don't know that I would fault the three year
old in situation, But the person in the Vatican was
a full grown human who just dragged his hand like
twenty feet down a beautiful tapestry. Sean continues again, I
(39:11):
cannot recall which of you loves Bob's Burger's a personal favorite.
That is also me. I also wanted to mention because
I don't think anybody else has that. The show's episode
fourteen of season six, called Harmoniums, featured a conflicted Tina
in a Mister Fron musical about the deadly dangers of
kissing because of mononucleosis. I was surprised neither you nor
any listener, Maile, unless I missed one, mentioned this in
(39:34):
reference to the September fourteenth, twenty twenty two episode on
Imagen Recton's Kiss not campaign. As the episode seems retrospectively
to be drawn straight from history. I'm surprised I didn't
think of that either, because I'm pretty obsessive about Bob's Burgers.
Didn't even come to me. That is a very funny episode, though,
if anybody would like an entree into Bob's Burger's. Anyway,
(39:57):
your podcast is when I make sure to keep up
with regularly. Though I despair of ever listening to all
the bad catalog, You're always a joy to listen to,
fair and honest and dense with information, a future I adore.
Thank you for all your hard work. Then there are
pet pictures, Chip under the Christmas tree, Belle staring at
the camera, and Max on our twin granddaughter's pillow. Not
pictured are the turtles and the bees. These are very
(40:20):
very cute little fluffs that look like they were made
in a factory. They're so cute, adorable, adorable. I will say,
while we admire and respect the commitment for people who
do choose to listen to our whole entire back catalog,
it is not a requirement. No, I would be daunted.
(40:41):
I would say not even an encouragement because if you
go back to the very beginning ones, like, they're a
totally different style and scope from what we are now.
A lot of folks on there who are wonderful colleagues
who we loved and enjoyed working with, but like they
haven't been involved in the show in years. So especially
(41:03):
when people start with like episode one as the first
thing they listen to, I'm like, it's a whole difference.
It's not can give you idea of what you're about
to get? Yeah, yeah, yeah, But I mean if you
just want to go ahead, if you want to go
for it, but yet feel no pressure to do so
at all. If you would like to write to us,
(41:24):
no pressure there either, But it's super easy to do.
You can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you haven't subscribed, you can do
that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(41:45):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, this is another
edition of person I've had on my list for a
million years. We've both had a lot of them. Lately,
(00:23):
I'm trying to like revisit that list and not just
put names on it and then hide it on my
phone and not think about it again and then later
be like I don't know what to talk about it.
It's like, yeah, hey, brainiac, you have a whole list
of things that you've wanted to talk about. I had
an internal conversation recently about whether to like just scrap
my short list and start over because it's gotten so
(00:45):
long and so many of the names now I just
keep looking at and not not doing I'm picking and choosing. Yeah,
this is one that I have wanted to do for
a while. You know. It's architectural, which I guess follows
and my discussions of people in the arts, but it
(01:09):
also I had come upon a thing recently where I
literally overheard a kid in an airport talking to his
mom about where skyscrapers came from like when did buildings
get so tall? And I was like, don't tell him,
don't tell him, but I know at least the start,
(01:31):
and I figured now as this good a time as
any to talk about that. So we are talking about
a man who is to me similar to Jean Baptiste Lulie,
and that he was kind of a pain in the
neck to people that knew him, but was also you know,
certainly has been lauded as a genius, and I think
(01:53):
a little bit more than luli In his time, there
were people that liked him and tried tried to make
for him even after his like heyday was done. But
if you have ever heard the phrase form follows function,
that is attributed to this man, and you will see
why as we talk about his work and how it's
(02:13):
often inspired by nature, and how he had this whole
ideology about architecture in the United States and how architecture
should have its own unique American identity, and how he
really tried to push boundaries in that regard and it
didn't always work out. But so today we are talking
about Louis Henry Sullivan or sometimes you'll see it Louis
(02:36):
Arie Sullivan, because his mother was Swiss. He seemed to
not really use the middle name so much that I
saw one way or the other. I think he just
let it be Americanized and let people do what they preferred. So.
Louis Henry or Arie Sullivan was born September third, eighteen
(02:58):
fifty six, in Boston, Massachusett. His father, Patrick Sullivan was
Irish and taught dance, and his mother, Audrian Friends was
liszt as Holly just said, was Swiss. He later wrote
of her quote, she seemed French but not wholly so
which I love that quote. Louis was their second child.
(03:21):
He had a brother named Albert Walter Sullivan, who was
two years older. When the boys were young, the Sullivans
spent at least one summer on Cape Anne in a
small area known as Folly Cove. Louis later relayed that
he almost drowned there one day, and that a local
farmer had saved him. In eighteen sixty nine, the Sullivans
(03:43):
moved to Chicago, Illinois, but Louis didn't go with them.
He stayed with his grandparents outside of Boston. Sullivan wrote
about all of this in his autobiography in a pretty
quaint way, noting that his grandparents really desperately wanted one
of their grandchildren to live with them. This autobiography, which
will quote from a lot, is in the third person,
(04:05):
and he wrote, quote the farm had been but recently acquired,
and the child appeared shortly thereafter as a greedy parasite
to absorb that affection, that abundant warmth of heart which
only Grandma and Grandpa have the intuitive folly to bestow.
In short, they loved him and kept him bodily clean.
Louis attended public school, which he described as a dreary prison,
(04:30):
but he also said he didn't have any real memories
of it, calling this time a quote gray blank. When
writing of his early years, Sullivan describes himself as quote
not an enfanteried, but but rather an independent, isolated compound
of fury, curiosity, and tenderness. He hated most of his
(04:52):
school lessons because they were perpetually pondering abstract questions featuring
fictional scenarios. Occasionally, he'd kind of rally and do really
well with his schoolwork for a while to try to
please his grandmother, but then he would get bored again
and kind of stop achieving. He was often in trouble
and described being whipped across the hands with a ratan
(05:14):
and class. By his own account, he was his grandparents pet.
They let him do largely as he pleased, and that
involved a lot of gardening. As a boy, he often
skipped school and wandered around the countryside. He also describes
being just enthralled anytime he saw people at work. The
idea of work and being industrious was intriguing to him. Yeah,
(05:39):
he was like this kid that was kind of rebellious,
but not in a troublemakery kind of way. He writes
about how like he was not one of those boys that,
like in the stereotypical way of the day, wanted to
get in fights and make messes and be dirty. He
just like wanted to go sit in fields and look
at flowers and grasses much farmers do in their thing.
Ye yes uh. Louis enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of
(06:03):
Technology in eighteen seventy two to study architecture, and at
the time, the program, which came to be known as
the School of Architecture and Planning was still very new.
It had been founded in eighteen sixty five by architect
William Robert Ware Initially, the program was a one or
two year course of study, set up as sort of
like a graduate program. You either had to have had
(06:25):
an undergraduate degree or some experience in the field to
enroll in it, and when Sullivan enrolled, the program had
only been actively offering formal education for about four years
because prior to eighteen sixty eight, that three years between
the founding and then the curriculum was still in its
planning stages. But even though the program was not long,
(06:46):
Sullivan got frustrated with it. He left less than a
year in. He thought he might go to Paris to
study in the architecture program at Acol de Bozar, but
he ended up taking the path of an apprentice working
at the Furnace and Hewitt firm of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
didn't stay there long either, though, just a few months.
Sullivan's next move was to Chicago. By the end of
(07:09):
eighteen seventy three, he had secured a job there in
William le Baron Jenny's office. Jenny had established his office
in Chicago after having been an engineering officer in the
US Civil War. This would have seemed like a perfect fit,
but Sullivan was still restless and there just wasn't enough
money flowing into construction to keep him occupied. In eighteen
(07:30):
seventy four, he finally set out for Paris with the
intent to study there. So this might seem like Louis
Sullivan was finally achieving his dream. But if it was,
he really wasn't any more focused at ecl de Bozar
than he had been anywhere else. It's worth noting that
he would have been just about eighteen at this point.
(07:51):
Maybe it's not all that surprising that he found himself
distracted by the possibilities of his time in Europe. I'm
forty seven, I would be distracted. Instead of studying, he
did things like tour Italy. He was incredibly moved by
the art of Michelangelo, which he saw for the first
time while visiting Rome. He spent two full days in
(08:15):
the Sistine Chapel, mostly by himself, and in his words
quote communed in the silence with a superman. Yeah, he
really held Michelangelo in extraordinarily high regard. He also spent
a little time in the workshop of Emil vau Remat,
who taught at Bozaar. So even though Sullivan wasn't a
great student, it does seem like his educators saw some
(08:36):
promise in him, and he had been the only American
student admitted into the school that year. That was something
that was made possible by him working pretty quickly to
gain affluency in French just so he could pass the
entrance exams. He was so smart and seemed so full
of promise, but none of the avenues of study that
(08:56):
he tried really gave him anything but frustration that he
wasn't creating more and learning history less. He kind of
felt like he was getting like memorize previous forms of
architecture rather than being taught how to actually do things.
He left Paris after less than a year there and
returned to Chicago in the early summer of eighteen seventy five. Initially,
(09:19):
Sullivan's work in Chicago after he returned from Europe was
as a contractor draftsman. This freelance life gave him an
opportunity to work with a lot of architecture offices to
see what he liked. During these contract jobs, Sullivan was
introduced to a man named Dankmar Adler. Adler was twelve
years older than Louis Sullivan. He'd been born in Prussia
(09:41):
on July third, eighteen forty four and moved to the
United States at the age of ten. While he was
still a teenager, Adler started studying architecture. In eighteen sixty one,
he moved to Chicago found work as a draftsman, working
under Augustus Bauer. Adler was in the middle a rapid
rise in the architectural world when the US Civil War began.
(10:05):
He served in the war and then immediately went back
to Chicago when it ended, once again with Bauer. Initially,
although he worked for several other firms as well, He
started a firm with Edward Berling in eighteen seventy one.
In eighteen seventy nine, Sullivan started working for Adler's office.
This was the same year that Adler famously designed Chicago's
(10:27):
Central Music Hall, which established many of the standards of
the music venues that followed. One reason this structure became
the prototype of music halls around the city and then
around the country was that Adler had carefully designed it
to optimize the building's acoustics for musical performance. Any biography
you see of Adler, they talk about how acoustics were
(10:47):
like his area of expertise. The project was one that
Adler undertook as an independent architect after he broke from
his previous business partner, Edward Berling. After two years of
work at the Adler firm and having hand designed some
incredible ornamentation for various projects, Louis Sullivan was made partner
and the firm's name was updated to Adler and Sullivan Architects.
(11:11):
And at this point things really took off for both
of them because they were a perfect combination. Adler had
this deep understanding of things like acoustics and engineering, but
he didn't have as much of a knack for the
creative design aspects of the job, and that was where
Sullivan really shown there's a reason Chicago had so many
construction projects going on in the eighteen eighties. This was
(11:35):
after the eighteen seventy one Chicago fire. So yes, that's
the fire with the O'Leary cow mythology. The actual cause
of the initial fire is not known, but after it
started in the southwest quadrant of the city, it spread
really rapidly thanks to hot, dry conditions. Over the course
of a day and a half, it destroyed three and
(11:57):
a half square miles of the city. An estimated one
hundred thousand people lost their homes. Several hundred people died
after this tragedy. The city needed to rebuild a lot
of infrastructure, residences, government, and commercial buildings simultaneously. It also
expanded well beyond its pre fire footprints. So for architects
(12:19):
in the eighteen eighties there was a steady stream of work. Yeah,
there's a whole lot of Chicago history. You can look
up around like that moment where they decide is the
city doomed? No, We're just going to rebuild it, and
they kind of take a very proactive approach to being
as smart about building as they could. We will talk
some about the work that Adler and Sullivan did in
(12:41):
Chicago as well as other places after we first paused
for a sponsor break. We talked before the break about
why Chicago was such a good place to be an
architect in the late nineteenth century. Additionally, there is a
(13:03):
reason that Chicago is where the first skyscraper was built,
although by modern standards we'd think of it as pretty tiny.
It was just ten floors in less than one hundred
and fifty feet tall. That was the Home Life Insurance
building built by William L. Barn Jenny, who you may
recall Sullivan worked for at one point. So Chicago is
on the shore of Lake Michigan, and it is hemmed
(13:24):
in by the Chicago River, and in the late nineteenth
century it also had industrial yards that were kind of
creating some barriers around the city that prevented sprawl. So
where it couldn't build out, it very purposely built up,
and Adler and Sullivan were in the right career and
the right place at the right time to be part
(13:45):
of this. While Adler and Sullivan worked on a wide
variety of residential and commercial properties, one of their most
well known projects is the Auditorium Building of Chicago that
was started in eighteen eighty six and completed in eighteen
eighty nine. Leading up to this point, they'd worked on
a number of music halls and theaters together, combining Adler's
(14:06):
skills in acoustic engineering with Sullivan's talent for exquisite ornamentation.
So a large scale project that included a performance space
was exactly the kind of thing they were perfect for.
This was a mixed use building project. It had to
include obviously an auditorium with seating for four thousand, but
(14:27):
also an office building and a four hundred room hotel.
Ferdinand wife Peck was a lawyer in Chicago who was
also community minded. He was on the city's Board of Education,
and he was a founder of the Illinois Humane Society,
and he was a strong supporter of the arts. And
he spearheaded the Auditorium building project, which was intended to
(14:49):
make cultural events like opera accessible to all of Chicago's citizens,
regardless of socioeconomic status. The hotel element of this project
had been added to the plan as a way to
subsidize the cost of running the performance space. But this
entire project was not just an issue of problem solving
(15:09):
from an engineering and design standpoint. It was also an
effort on the part of Chicago's business leaders to try
to ease the tensions that had developed in the city
as industrialization had created a very obvious separation between the
wealthy and the poor who worked for them. They were
hoping like, hey, we'll all come together and enjoy the
arts and that might help smooth things out, which is
(15:30):
a little bit of a I'll just be kind and say,
idealistic way to look at the problem. For context, just
so you understand how kind of fraught the situation was
in Chicago. The Haymarket affair, which we have talked about
on the show before, had taken place in May of
eighteen eighty six, just a couple months before this project started.
(15:53):
This was at a time when the marshall Field Department Store,
designed by HH Richardson, was being built near and that
was inspirational for Sullivan in that it was not an
overly done building. Richardson had opted to let the exterior
stone be its own ornamentation instead of adding a whole
bunch of additional pieces. For Sullivan, who wanted to break
(16:15):
away from the traditional design that he had found so
frustrating when studying in school, the marshall Field building was
like a green light. While finishing the auditorium building, Adler
and Sullivan moved their offices to the complex's tower, and
there on the sixteenth floor, they had a full view
of the city. This building looks solid and it is
(16:38):
despite being built on a tricky base of unstable soil.
Adler designed a really unique foundation for this structure, with
multiple isolated peers that each hold up their own sections
of the building's weight, and those peers kind of sank
into position as a floating foundation. As the construction was
carried out, A combination of wrought iron and cast iron
(16:59):
support give the auditorium a degree of flexibility as well.
Inside is one beautiful piece of ornamentation after another. There
are luminous surfaces and intricacies just everywhere. There are mosaic floors,
warm tones of marble, and gilded trims, and the theater
was one of the first to have electric lighting illuminating it,
(17:21):
so all those beautiful finishes gave off a warm and
inviting glow. Even the plaster used for the interior walls
was carefully selected for the way it helped amplify sound
without distorting it, and it was specifically designed for fire safety,
with egress passages built into all of these beautifully adorned features.
(17:43):
Later in life, Louis wrote in the third person about
the design of the auditorium, quote, Louis's heart went into
this structure. It is old time now, but its tower
holds its head in the air as a tower should,
so sweet. Another significant relationship began during the work on
the auditorium building. Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm as
(18:05):
Sullivan's apprentice, and he was hired because this was a
huge project and Sullivan really needed some help in the design.
Of the Auditorium. Wright understood his vision, so he came
on as a draftsman. Soon he was the project's lead draftsman.
The Auditorium Building was not Adler and Sullivan's sole project.
(18:25):
Their firm took on a lot of others while this
structure was being built. One of those was the Wainwright
Building in Saint Louis. This project began in eighteen ninety one,
and it's significant because it was the first building to
successfully implement steel frame construction. It's a ten story building.
The first two floors, which have a brown sandstone exterior,
(18:48):
are emphasized visually over the upper floors. Floors three through
nine have a brick exterior, and the tenth story has
a more decorative outer finish, adorned with a scroll work
of leaves and circular windows and an overhanging roof. While
the Wainwright Building is often lauded as Sullivan's greatest technical achievement,
we have to note that he did not originate the
(19:09):
idea of using a steel frame to support a building.
That goes back to his former employer William Labarn Jenny,
who we already credited as having built the first skyscraper,
but Sullivan innovated the idea by breaking away stylistically from
the traditional architectural styles that it left other architects sort
of stymied in terms of how they could add the
(19:30):
height that a steel structure would enable to existing styles
without creating a visual mess. It's kind of like, if
you imagine suddenly something like Versailles getting taller and taller
and taller, it would be very strange. And that's why
Sullivan was like, but what if we just changed the style.
Sullivan also designed a number of cemetery tombs in addition
(19:52):
to buildings. Eliza Getty's tomb in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery is
considered one of the most beautiful structure in the cemetery.
Commissioned in eighteen ninety, it's a building that's solid and
squared off, but also has a honeycomb design carved into it,
so it references the natural living world while also providing
(20:13):
a final resting place. It's sometimes considered the first example
of Sullivan's entree into what came to be known as
the Chicago School, which we'll talk about in a bit.
In eighteen ninety one, work started on the Charley House
that's a residence that feels very familiar when you look
at it, if you know the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
(20:33):
And Wright worked a lot on the project, and during construction,
Sullivan continued to show him the way that careful, beautiful
ornamentation inspired by nature could elevate a building that was
otherwise quite bold in its lines and materials. In eighteen
ninety three, several significant things happened for Sullivan. First, there
was the Columbian Exposition. A name we mentioned earlier was
(20:57):
involved in the planning. Ferdinand Peck, who was vice president
of the Expo, and Sullivan, had envisioned this world's fare
as an opportunity to showcase the emerging US style of architecture.
It didn't really play out as he hoped at all,
though Louis wrote of the exposition quote, Chicago was ripe
(21:19):
and ready for such an undertaking. It had required enthusiasm
and the will. It won out in a contest between
the cities. The prize was now in hand. It was
to be the city's crowning glory. A superb site on
the Lake adjoined the southern section of the city. This
site was to be transformed and embellished by the magic
(21:41):
of American prowess, particularly in architectural aspects, as to set
forth the genius of the land in that great creative art.
It was to be a dream city where one might
revel in beauty. It was to be called the White
City by the Lake. That location so out aside for
the Expo was carved out specifically so tourists wouldn't see
(22:04):
any of the less appealing parts of Chicago. Yeah. I mean,
I think if you've lived in any city where a
big international something has gone on, we've all seen this happen.
When it came to planning the site for the expo,
landscape architect Frederick law Olmsted, who has also come up
on the show before, laid out the site. Architect John
(22:27):
Root was the project's consulting architect and his partner, architect
Daniel Hudson Burnham, was named chief of construction, and Burnham
had the idea to invite ten of the most respected
architects of the US to participate, five from the East
and five from the West, suggesting that each contribute a design,
and Sullivan was of course among them. The auditorium building
(22:49):
in particular, had really put him on the map. Also
included where William Labaron, Jenny Henry van Brunn, George b. Post,
Robert Peabody, Charles McKim, and Richard Morris Hunt. The first
meeting of all the architects took place in February eighteen
ninety one, and they were all to bring their design
ideas with them, and this was, to be clear, a
(23:10):
really significant moment. It was kind of like the All
Star Game of architecture, and it was recognized at the
time as one of the most significant meeting of artists
of all time. But John Root had died the month
before the meeting unexpectedly, and he was not replaced. That
was an incident that Sullivan would later describe as a
quote shadow of a white cloud falling over the project.
(23:33):
As the construction of the site was carried out and
the expo opened, Sullivan was so disappointed by the whole
thing he later wrote in his autobiography, quote, the damage
wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a
century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated
deep into the constitution of the American mind, affecting their
(23:55):
lesions significant of dementia. He found the fervor for replicating
Renaissance and classic architecture to be just a complete letdown
on the part of his peers at a time when
they could all be showing their originality, most of them
had instead decided to go very traditional routes, except for Sullivan.
(24:17):
He also described the people who had visited and then
gone home to talk about the Expo as people who
were carrying a contagion. He really felt that part of
the creative responsibility of the architects was quote an elevation
of the public taste. He really did not see that.
At the Columbia Expo, the Beaux Art style was selected
(24:39):
as the design style for the White City, with a
court of honors surrounding his central water feature. But Adler
and Sullivan as a firm, did not do that. Their
transportation building, designed by Sullivan, featured color and original ornamentation
and an entry known as the Golden Door, which featured
concentric gold arcs that recessed with each successively smaller curve,
(25:02):
kind of inviting someone to walk in. This building was
a huge break from the rest of the buildings at
the Expo, and it got a lot of attention a
lot of people. Historically, of course, it got torn down
because it was part of a temporary expo setup. But
a lot of people have talked about how this was
really an incredible achievement. But most people that visited the
(25:22):
Expo and the White City talked about it for a
long time, having been impressed and reassured by the other
people's nods back to history and what felt like, you know,
a stable part of global history that would carry them
forward in a way where they had built on the
work of others. So we'll take another little sponsor break
(25:44):
and then come back to talk about Sullivan's later years,
which were rather difficult. After the let down of the Expo,
there was more difficulty for Louis Sullivan. The depression that
(26:05):
followed the Panic of eighteen ninety three meant that all
of the building projects that had been so abundant in
the eighteen eighties were no longer coming in, and the
firm's resources really started drying up. Additionally, that style that
had gained Sullivan so many accolades just a few years
earlier was suddenly no longer in fashion. To add to that,
(26:26):
Frank Lloyd Wright and Sullivan had a fight that severed
their relationship. These two men had become very close. Wright
was almost like a sun to Sullivan in eighteen eighty nine,
when Wright had moved to the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago,
Sullivan had become the mortgage holder of the property and
(26:46):
the house where the younger draftsman was living, and after
his own home had been built, Wright had started taking
commissions to design and build other houses like it in
the neighborhood as kind of a side hustle to get
some extra money coming in. Sullivan found out about it
all in eighteen ninety three and fired Right. There's been
(27:08):
a lot of speculation about the ways the two men's
relationship may have shifted over the years, with Right probably
out and growing his willness to just acquiesce to Sullivan's
every order as his own skill and knowledge grew. We'll
never really know what passed between them, though they did reconcile,
but not for about a decade and a half. Yeah,
(27:30):
it's a you know, part of that initial deal of
like will I will pay for a lot of this album,
I'll help you financially meant that Frank Lader could build
this really impressive, beautiful house because he had some financial leverage,
and that that's what got it all and Sullivan kind
of saw his other projects as like bootleg. Adler and
(27:52):
Sullivan projects like basically going, Oh, I'm a draftsman with them,
I'll put this house together. Didn't go over well, and
then Dankmar Adler left Architecture. He decided to take a
job with Crane Elevator in eighteen ninety five, which he needed.
They were not making money and this caused a massive
rift with Sullivan, who felt betrayed that his partner would
(28:15):
just leave the firm. Sullivan seems like he was a
grudge holder because even when Adler tried to come back
to the firm just a few months later, Sullivan refused
this was a really, really foolish decision. Throughout their partnership,
Sullivan had often been the creative lead on projects, but
Adler was sort of the glue that held everything together.
(28:37):
Whereas Louis was mercurial and wanted to focus on art,
Dankmar was steadfast. He was really good at project managing
all of their contracts from design through to completion, while
also incorporating his considerable technical expertise. He was excellent at
the administrative side of the business. He was really good
with people, whereas Sullivan was not. While Adler was perfectly
(29:01):
able to set up a new office for himself and
continued to work steadily in architecture. Sullivan struggled. It's kind
of obvious that Sullivan had some interpersonal communication issues. His
sharp breaks with two different collaborators, that being Adler and
Wright in such a short time, that's a pretty good indicator.
(29:22):
He was known to be arrogant and stubborn, and he
lost out on jobs because of it. Additionally, it had
largely been Adler's various contacts that had kept contracts coming
in for them, and without that it just got harder
and harder to drum up business. Sullivan did have some
notable and successful commissions in the later stage of his career, though.
(29:45):
In eighteen ninety six, the Garantee Building, designed by Sullivan
was completed in Buffalo, New York. This is a structure
that's pretty interesting because from a distance it looks very
modern even today. It was built in a very similar
style to the Wainwright Building. But then when you see
it more closely, you see that it is deeply ornamented
(30:05):
terra cotta on the outside, and it's like, as you
get closer, it feels like it grew right out of
the earth. The Schlessinger and Mayor Department Store began construction
in eighteen ninety nine, and this project posed an interesting
challenge for Sullivan, who had been focusing on buildings that
at the time were considered skyscrapers. This construction needed more
(30:28):
emphasis on the horizontal rather than vertical spread, and as
he had done with his tall office buildings, Sullivan focused
on the first two floors it's visually the most important,
recognizing that these would be the ones people walking by
would see the most. Because the building was intended for sales,
it also meant that it needed to include wide windows
(30:51):
that could be used for display, a contrast again to
the usually taller than wider windows that were usually included
in office buildings. In addition to being wider than taller,
the windows on the first two floors were decorated with
details that resembled picture frames. It was all designed to
really appeal to passers by and invite them in. The
(31:14):
whole building has beautiful botanical craftsmanship inside and out. Yeah,
all of the motifs are so super pretty. Sullivan also
got married in eighteen ninety nine to a woman from
California named Margaret Davies hadabow. This marriage seems to have
often caused historians and biographers to scratch their heads a
(31:34):
little bit. It seems to have sort of sprung up
out of nowhere, and it has grown even more confusing
as people have tried to track down information about Margaret,
who appears to have been pretty fast and loose with
her own biographical details in her lifetime, often fibbing about
her age and name. And this marriage is weird because
it also took place at a time when Sullivan seemed
(31:57):
to be pushing more and more people away, including his
older brother Albert. Louis and Margaret separated in nineteen oh
six after seven years of marriage. They never reconciled, and
they were formally divorced in nineteen seventeen, likely precipitated by
Margaret's desire to marry someone else. In the years between
the separation and the divorce, Sullivan really hit hard times financially.
(32:21):
He sold most of his personal belongings at auction in
nineteen oh nine just to have some ready cash to
get by. Also, in nineteen oh nine, Sullivan lost the
one employee who seemed able to tolerate his sour temper.
That was George Grant Elmsley, Scotland born. Elmsley had worked
for Sullivan for twenty years at that point. It's possible
(32:44):
that some of Sullivan's more ornamental work during that time
was really George's doing, while Elmsley was hired away by
another of Louis Sullivan's former employees. This has to have
been a blow. The next several years were dotted with
a handful of projects that were much smaller in scale
than the ones that Sullivan had become known for. Mostly
(33:06):
he designed banks, though one of the earliest of these,
the National Farmers Bank in Minnesota, has been speculated to
perhaps have even been Elsley's design, but it definitely has
the spirit of Sullivan's style. These bank projects, which are
quite beautiful, were nicknamed the Jewel Boxes. The work on these,
as well as the Schlessinger and Mayer building, is often
(33:28):
described as kind of the most unrestrained of Sullivan's life.
But while his peers from the Expo were being hired
to build huge project after huge project based on the
classicist style they had embraced and showcased there in Chicago,
Sullivan's projects remained small. Throughout all of his financial hardships.
(33:48):
Sullivan had remained in his offices in the Auditorium building tower,
but as the nineteen teens were on, it became impossible
to keep this space first team into a small office
near the ground floor that lasted less than two years,
though in nineteen twenty he had to close up his
offices for good. Often he worked out of a single
(34:11):
room where he lived sitting at his desk. He often
had to ask for financial help from his friends. Yeah,
he seems like he lived in a variety of places
there towards the end of his life. For sometimes it
would be a hotel. Sometimes a friend would put him up,
So he was moving around a lot. But in his
final years, Louis took on two projects. He wrote his
(34:32):
autobiography and he wrote a book on architectural ornamentation. And
these books were actually commissioned by the American Institute of
Architects in exchange for a stipend. I feel like probably
a lot of his colleagues were like, we have to
figure out some way to help him, and also like
it would be very beneficial to have his thoughts on
these matters written down. His autobiography, titled An Autobiography of
(34:55):
an idea, which we've quoted several times here, is written,
as we said, in the third person. It's really a
pretty delightful read, particularly the sections describing his childhood. But
he is also pretty venomous when writing about his colleagues
in the architectural world in the ways that he felt
like they sold out. His treatise, titled A System of
Architectural Ornament, features twenty studies which he hand drew notating
(35:20):
how he created original ornamental designs. But these walkthroughs of
design ideas aren't just ornament. They really offer a guide
map to creative thinking. Sullivan died at the age of
sixty eight, shortly after having seen the first copies of
his book. He was laid to rest in the Graceland
Cemetery near the decorative tombs that he designed, although his
(35:44):
own grave was unadorned. Although he could be a difficult
figure even in his lifetime, Sullivan's contemporaries recognized really what
an extraordinary talent he was. His ideology was that a
structure's form should not hide its purpose, but be a
parent about it, something that wouldn't find true footing until
decades after he died. This concept of what he called
(36:07):
honest architecture may have been at odds with trends in
his later life, but it also cemented him as a
singular voice in cultural style in the US. Many of
the buildings Sullivan designed, including ones that we've talked about today,
are now recognized as historically significant. Today. Sullivan is grouped
in with William Laban, Jenny his partner Adler, John Root,
(36:30):
and Daniel Burnham under the umbrella term the Chicago School
or the First Chicago School. This grouping recognizes the innovation
that these men spearheaded in developing ways that construction and
design could carry upward, creating the first skyscrapers, and setting
the foundation of architectural design in the United States. One
(36:53):
of my favorite passages in Sullivan's autobiography really spoke to
me as a representation of who Louis Sullivan was and
how he perceived the world. This is not a particularly
important passage. It's not one that comes up a lot
when you see documentaries or read articles about him. It's
just a moment where he talks about the architect as
a problem solver, and I really loved it. So he
(37:16):
wrote quote as a rule inventions which are truly solutions
are not arrived at quickly. They may seem to appear suddenly,
but the groundwork has usually been long and preparing. It
is of the essence of this philosophy that man's needs
are balanced by his powers. That as the needs increase,
the powers increase. That is the one reason why they
(37:39):
are herein called powers kind of love that. Yeah, if
you're dreaming it, it's because you know that some part
of it is a solvable problem. So that is the
sometimes difficult, but always kind of inspiring Louis Sullivan. Yeah,
are you gonna read the listener mail? I am. I
(38:02):
don't know why this made me laugh. Well, I do
no part of it, but this is from our listener Sean,
and he writes, good afternoon, Holly and Tracy. I just
finished the April fourteenth Behind the Scenes, in which Holly
mentioned someone touching tapestries in the Vatican. I cannot recall
which of you lives in Atlanta. I'm pretty sure it's Holly.
(38:23):
You are correct, Pretty sure you'll know what I'm referencing.
Years ago, when my daughter was three. She's in her
first year of college now. My ex wife and ex
in laws took my daughter and son to an art
museum in or around Atlanta, there was a globe shaped
art installation hanging from the ceiling at the exact eye
level of a three year old, and yep, before we
could stop her, to our utter mortification, my daughter went
(38:46):
up and slapped the globe, which started to swing. Needless
to say, we hurried out with the docins glaring the
whole way. To the best of my knowledge, no permanent
damage was done. As my own aside, I will say,
I don't know that I would fault the three year
old in situation, But the person in the Vatican was
a full grown human who just dragged his hand like
twenty feet down a beautiful tapestry. Sean continues again, I
(39:11):
cannot recall which of you loves Bob's Burger's a personal favorite.
That is also me. I also wanted to mention because
I don't think anybody else has that. The show's episode
fourteen of season six, called Harmoniums, featured a conflicted Tina
in a Mister Fron musical about the deadly dangers of
kissing because of mononucleosis. I was surprised neither you nor
any listener, Maile, unless I missed one, mentioned this in
(39:34):
reference to the September fourteenth, twenty twenty two episode on
Imagen Recton's Kiss not campaign. As the episode seems retrospectively
to be drawn straight from history. I'm surprised I didn't
think of that either, because I'm pretty obsessive about Bob's Burgers.
Didn't even come to me. That is a very funny episode, though,
if anybody would like an entree into Bob's Burger's. Anyway,
(39:57):
your podcast is when I make sure to keep up
with regularly. Though I despair of ever listening to all
the bad catalog, You're always a joy to listen to,
fair and honest and dense with information, a future I adore.
Thank you for all your hard work. Then there are
pet pictures, Chip under the Christmas tree, Belle staring at
the camera, and Max on our twin granddaughter's pillow. Not
pictured are the turtles and the bees. These are very
(40:20):
very cute little fluffs that look like they were made
in a factory. They're so cute, adorable, adorable. I will say,
while we admire and respect the commitment for people who
do choose to listen to our whole entire back catalog,
it is not a requirement. No, I would be daunted.
(40:41):
I would say not even an encouragement because if you
go back to the very beginning ones, like, they're a
totally different style and scope from what we are now.
A lot of folks on there who are wonderful colleagues
who we loved and enjoyed working with, but like they
haven't been involved in the show in years. So especially
(41:03):
when people start with like episode one as the first
thing they listen to, I'm like, it's a whole difference.
It's not can give you idea of what you're about
to get? Yeah, yeah, yeah, But I mean if you
just want to go ahead, if you want to go
for it, but yet feel no pressure to do so
at all. If you would like to write to us,
(41:24):
no pressure there either, But it's super easy to do.
You can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you haven't subscribed, you can do
that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(41:45):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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Tracy Wilson
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