LOUIS SULLIVAN

No question about it. My favorite toys were building toys–Tinker Toys, blocks, Lincoln Logs, American Bricks, a rusty Erector Set. I loved making structures of my own design. I still have a couple of Lego sets at my apartment–Snape's Dungeon and Hogwarts Castle, but you have to follow the instructions exactly with those–no improvising. Was I a budding architect? Alas, no. I did take architectural drawing in high school, and actually got a C–which was an improvement over the Ds and Fs I got in mechanical drawing–but I wasn't very good at making nice, neat plans. And I had even less creativity. An art teacher in eight-grade despaired of me saying I was a waste of paint.

However, lack of ability is not the same as lack of interested. I have long been an avid student of architecture. I have taken hundreds of photos of building and own dozens of books about architecture. I even taught an adult interest class in church architecture.

I suppose my interest really got sparked my father. Although he was a machinist, he had studied drafting in high school as I did. Same school. As a matter of fact, my drafting teacher was the son of a person teaching drafting when my father was at school. Dad's drawing are far better than mine. We still have them.

I suspect that my father's interest in houses and such was primarily technical–how things worked, electric, plumbing, structure. But my father was familiar with one architect, the most famous architect in Chicago, maybe the most famous architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright. Everyday on his was to work in the suburbs he passed a Frank Lloyd Wright house. When the family would go out to his place of work for the annual open house, he would always point out the Wright house. Maybe that's where my architectural interest got started.

Now this is going to upset my east-coast readers, especially the Noo Yawkers, but the birthplace of modern American architecture was Chicago, not New York. The first skyscraper, a building with a steel frame ten stories or more, was William LeBaron Jenny's Home Insurance Building, in Chicago, (1893-5). Of course that was demolished, so I never saw it, but I have seen and been in and photographed Jenny's second Letier Building (1889-1890) and the Reliance Building designed by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root and erected 1890-94. The reliance building is amazing. Even though it's almost 120 years old it still looks modern.

For my money, the great genius of Chicago architecture was Louis Sullivan. I am intimately familiar with his work. The Auditorium Theater Building (1886-1889) by Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler was home to Roosevelt University which I attended. It was an ingenious design, a huge theater surrounded by a hotel and office building.



Despite it's ten stories with a seventeen story tower over the entrance, the building is load-bearing masonry. It has huge, thick walls on the first floor. It looks like a massive pile of stone. The whole building fell on hard times with the theater eventually used as a USO center with bowling alleys on the stage, but it was restored in the 1960 to it's former elegance. Some of the special rooms also were restored. The banqueting hall became the Ganz Recital hall where we musicians performed and listen to one another. The top floor dining room was the library. More recently the lobby and second floor observation rooms were restored as well. I don't know if they every fixed up the classrooms the musical college used on the tenth floor. It was pretty nasty in my day.


The auditorium itself is breathtaking whether you're in the audience or on stage.

(Yes, I can prove I've been on stage there. The stage entrance is under the first floor lobby stairway. Non-performers wouldn't know that.)



I sang there in the chorus many times, and I appeared in my only stage work "Third Planet from the Sun" by Ramon Zupko. This was one of the first theaters with electric lights and an early air-conditioning system. The perfect acoustics are the result of Adler's engineering skills. The elaborate decoration is Sullivan's inspiration. He advocated "organic architecture" which is most evident in the ornaments. He started with geometric patterns and worked them until they became something quite natural. Much of the decoration was carried out by Sullivan's young draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright. Although Sullivan would fire Wright some years later for taking side jobs of his own, Wright held Sullivan in great admiration.




It's believed by some that most of the work on the Sullivan's James Charnley Residence (1890) was done by Wright. I don't know. It's a much more starkly modern building than the Auditorium building, but it still seems to have the bulk of a Sullivan design. A few years back it was restored and opened to the public.

You wouldn't think that one of the most memorable works of a great architect would be a tomb, but it is true. Sullivan's Getty Tomb in Graceland Cemetery.




It's a great piece of work. The tomb appears in numerous books on architecture. Another tomb that Sullivan is supposed to have designed s the Wainwright tomb in St. Louis (1892-3). I've only seen picture of it, but it doesn't have the same elegance. In the early 1950s Wright confessed that he had executed the design for the Wainwright tomb, and he was very critical of his own work.

The other Sullivan work I am very familiar with is his 1899 Schlesinger, Meyer Store, now know as Caron, Pirie, Scott Store one of the great Chicago department stores.



Looking at it today, it's hard to believe it's over 100 years old. Sullivan was to first to conceived of the large glass display windows. When you look at the building from some distance, you're struck by the expanse of glass and gleaming terra cotta that conceals the steel frame. Up close the two-story ornamented cast-iron facade dominates. And then there is the main entrance. The original owners wanted a curved corner as the main entrance. Sullivan resisted their wish, but in the end gave them what they wanted, more than they wanted. The corner is striking because of that curved entrance.

This building was the last great work of Sullivan. He career plummeted downward probably due in a large part to his alcoholism. But his advanced ideas of modern architecture were also to blame. It just didn't catch on in the United States. It did in Europe, however, where it was the inspiration for what would be called the International Style. It came back to this country in the stripped-down steel frame and glass boxes that have dominated our architecture for years. This was the bete-noir of Wright. He hated the style with a passion.

Two last bits on Sullivan. In the mid-seventies I took a trip from Madison, Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota on Amtrak 's "North Coast Hiawatha." Madison is the capital of Wisconsin and the site of the University of Wisconsin, but the train no longer stops in Madison. You go to the train station and catch a little bus out to the nowhere town of Columbus, Wisconsin. I had time to kill until the train arrived, so I wandered through the downtown, such as it was. There I came upon the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank. I had never heard of it before, but I could tell just by looking at it that it was a Louis Sullivan design.



Done in 1919 it was one of several Midwest banks Sullivan designed in his declining years. This was not Sullivan's greatest work, though it has some nice stained glass windows in it.

There's one more Sullivan work practically in the neighborhood where I grew up. I probably passed it dozens of times without noticing it since by my time it was no longer a music store. It's the last of Sullivan's designs (1922), though he did only the facade. What gives it away is the elaborate letter "K" in typical Sullivan style that decorates the second story.



The last building and the last of Louis Sullivan. He died two years later impoverished, dependent on the support of old friends like Wright.

Oh, dear, I had meant this to be about Wright, not Sullivan, but there is something so tragic about a great man like Sullivan falling into oblivion. It's sad that some of his best work was demolished, notably the Schiller Theater and the Chicago Stock Exchange although the trading room of the later was dismantled and rebuilt in the Art Institute of Chicago, a fitting tribute.




One of these days I'll get around to Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the meantime, may the Lord bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

Note: All the pictures except the interior of the Auditorium, the stairway, and the Bank are my own.