Louis Sullivan
Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924) was born in Boston and came to Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to join in the rebuilding effort. Six months later, Sullivan left for Paris to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, which was the leading school of architecture in the world.
In 1879, Sullivan joined the respected engineer Dankmar Adler (1844–1900), who had been practicing in Chicago since 1866. For fourteen years, this relationship produced buildings distinguished by both their design and engineering innovations. Sullivan and Adler’s work contributed to the development of the uniquely American building type, the skyscraper, and their partnership produced such remarkable structures as the Auditorium Building (1886–1889) in Chicago, the Wainwright Building (1890–1891) in St. Louis, the Chicago Stock Exchange (1893–1894, demolished 1972), and the Guaranty Building (1894-1895) in Buffalo, New York. Their most renowned residential design was the commission for James Charnley on Astor Street in Chicago, the Charnley-Persky House, which was completed in 1892.
Sullivan is well known for his belief that a building’s function should be clearly expressed in its form and structure. Discontented with designing in the historical styles taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, Sullivan set out to create an architectural vocabulary that would reflect contemporary American culture. Due to an economic depression that started in the U.S. in 1893, which stifled new architectural commissions, Adler withdrew from the partnership in 1895 and, like Sullivan, continued to practice independently. Among Sullivan’s most renowned projects from this later period are the Schlesinger and Mayer Store (now Sullivan Cnter, previously Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co., 1898–1899 and 1902–1903) in Chicago, the Bayard-Condict Building (1897) in New York, and the facade of the Gage Building (1898–1899) in Chicago. After 1900, Sullivan’s work consisted mainly of exquisitely designed banks, stores, and churches located in small towns throughout the Midwest. Sullivan’s protégés, most notably George Grant Elmslie and Frank Lloyd Wright, carried on his functional theories and philosophy of architectural ornament in their Prairie School designs.
Frank Lloyd Wright
A native of Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1885 to 1886. Restless with the formal education process, Wright left school in 1887 and moved to Chicago, where he found work as a draftsman for the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Later that year, Wright joined the Adler & Sullivan firm and worked as a draftsman on the firm’s largest project to date, the massive Auditorium Building (1886–1889).
Over the next few years, Wright became the principal draftsman at Adler & Sullivan and indirectly had a hand in the design of projects including the James Charnley House (1891–1892). Although Wright left the firm in 1893 after taking independent commissions, the six years he spent in the Adler & Sullivan office were the most influential years of his training. Sullivan’s philosophy that the form of a building should derive from the function of its space would be incorporated into Wright’s own work. Also, like Sullivan, Wright had a reverence for nature expressed in his preference for organic architecture the materials and shapes of which could be adapted to specific sites and uses. Wright’s independent career, which lasted from 1893 until his death in 1959, is one of the longest and most distinguished of any architect in America.