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To best answer this question, let’s start with a peak at the background of modern architecture.
For 5000 years, iron had been used in very limited supply because it could only be produced in very limited supply. The limiting factor was the limited availability of charcoal. After the blast furnace was developed in the 14th Century. The mighty forests of England and Central Europe were receding, seeing this danger, the production of iron was curtailed to prevent stripping of the forests. Finally, coal was introduced as an alternative to charcoal. Coal was in great supply. This was one of the great contributions to England’s development during the Industrial Revolution. In the 18th Century bridges were built of cast iron and with advent of railroads, a demand for cast iron was created. In 1801, a cotton mill with an internal load bearing frame formed by cast iron stanchions and beams was successfully put in use. The load bearing external walls were load bearing masonry into which a delicate iron skeleton was inserted as though a shell.
In 1851, Joseph Paxton built the Crystal Palace in London only using glass and iron. The building was over 750,000 square feet, and took only four months to build. A similar sized masonry building would take taken years to build. The impact of the Crystal Palace was overwhelming. Natural sunlight shown throughout the entire building. with the ever changing pageant of he clouds. The limiting factor was the internal spans. The arch of the middle arch spanned 70 feet. The side aisles rested upon a great number of closely placed columns.
At about the same time in Paris, Henri Labrouste, a professor at the Beaux-Arts, resigned because of the rigid formalism of the Beaux-Arts and formed his own school. He built the Bibliotheque Sainte-Germaine in Paris, in the thick external walls of which there is a steel structure of arched shaped lattice girders carried on cast iron stanchions. The entrance to the reading room is startling. A glass wall, about 30 feet tall, its only feature being a few steel guides separates the reading room from the stacks. Labrouste wrote his brother at this time: ” I tell the students repeatedly that the arts have the power to make everything beautiful, but the architectural form must correspond to the purpose for which it is intended.” This changed one of the fundamentals of the Beaux-Arts- now a building must be designed from the inside out. This lead us to Louis Sullivan- the advocate of form follows function
Louis Sullivan- (1856-1924) the father of the high rise building.
The theory of using a steel skeleton in the construction of multi-story buildings originated in Chicago. The really significant contribution of the Chicago School was the logical development of the steel skeleton as a load bearing structure and in evolving a characteristic form of architectural form for this new type structure. Stanchions and beams can be connected so that the skeleton forms a rigid load bearing structure from from foundation to roof. Louis Sullivan had given the most searching consideration to the construction and functional problems of skyscrapers and his theoretical principles are as important as his buildings.
One of the several architects Louis Sullivan worked for in Chicago was Dankmar Adler, who was so impressed with Louis Henry Sullivan’s drawing talent and his ability to devise architectural design that Adler made him a junior partner late in 1881 or early in 1882 and then full partner in the new firm of Adler & Sullivan, organized May 1, 1883. From the beginning of their association until July 11, 1895, when Adler temporarily quit architecture because of the national depression, Adler & Sullivan designed approximately 180 buildings.
Adler and Sullivan complemented each other perfectly. Recognized as an outstanding acoustical and structural engineer as well as a reliable architect, Adler ,nonetheless, understood his own limitations as a designer. Though eight years senior to his 26-year-old partner in 1883, Adler turned over to Louis Sullivan full responsibility for all composition and decorative work. Generally speaking, Adler took care of mechanicals and structurals, Louis Sullivan handled the art, and together they worked out the program. Their mutual talents were first recognized in the theater and concert hall genre. Beginning in 1879, with Louis Sullivan a free-lance assistant on Central Music Hall in Chicago, the partners produced eight reconstructions and one new theater over the next seven years, culminating in their grandest structure, the Chicago Auditorium Build ing (1886-1890).
The reconstruction of Chicago’s Hooley’s Theater in 1882 was the first commission to generate praise for Louis Sullivan independent of Adler. Louis Sullivan was, said one commentator, “the master spirit directing and shaping the creation” (1) of the new interior. By the time McVicker’s Theater was remodeled in 1885, Louis Sullivan ‘s work was “the best” of its kind in Chicago, according to one critic, “superior to anything heretofore seen in any public building in this country”, in the eyes of another. Even more impressive to contemporaries than Sullivan ‘s rich exfoliated ornament in a carefully coordinated array of colors, however, was his handling of incandescent light. Adler & Sullivan ‘s theaters did away with flaming chandeliers in favor of electric light fixtures worked into overhead decoration continuing down and around the room sides. The totality, evenness, and clarity of light startled observers accustomed to flickering gas lamps. Together with Adler’s impressive acoustics and uninterrupted sight lines, Sullivan ‘s lighting and ornament earned the firm a well-deserved reputation for excellence in theater design.
The same was said of Adler & Sullivan ‘s offices commercial structures, and factories. In the series of commissions in the 1880s-the 1881 Rothschild, 1882 Jeweler’s, 1884 Troescher, and the 1887 Wirt Dexter and Selz, Schwab buildings being the best known-they developed several trademarks. Using isolated footings instead of continuous foundations when possible, Adler widened the spans between masonry-clad columns, thereby increasing fenestration. In his facade compositions, Louis Sullivan projected the comparatively thin columns slightly forward of the building’s main mass. The result as his tentative thrust at a system of vertical construction as well as illumination “far greater than is usually obtained by other architects,” said a local building magazine. Their alleged motto, “let there be light,” this magazine continued, assured them “abounding orders from confiding clients.” Their private dwellings were also marked by “originality” and “common sense”.
This kind of reputation, but especially their theater successes, landed them the commission for the Auditorium Building on December 22, 1886. At $3,200,000, it was the costliest edifice in the city, and at 8,737,000 cubic feet of volume the largest in the nation. Running from Michigan Boulevard along Congress Street to Wabash Avenue, it was 63,350 square feet plan in 10 stories plus a seven-floor, 40 x 70 ft tower. The program was ultimately arranged as a 400-room hotel on Michigan and partway down Congress, 136 offices and stores on Wabash and in the tower, and a 4200-seat concert hall that, with support facilities, occupied half the total area and one-third the volume of the entire structure, the largest permanent concert hall ever built at the time. The non-steel building of load-bearing masonry walls weighing 110,000 tons confronted Adler with as many structural challenges as did the acoustics of the vast auditorium. But Louis Henry Sullivan solved them as successfully as Louis Henry Sullivan did the aesthetics.
Basing his facade composition loosely on Henry Hobson Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885-1887) in Chicago, Louis Sullivan articulated the granite-and-lime-stone exterior in a rhythmic and utilitarian manner befitting ting both the cultural and commercial nature of its interior functions. The lavish auditorium, the main dining room, and the banquet hall were among the finest interior spaces Louis Henry Sullivan ever conceived. Taking his cue from Adler’s acoustical requirements, his Auditorium Theater featured four elliptical arches, wider and higher toward the rear, dividing the ceiling into smooth ivory panels of the most delicate lace like tracery. The arches were not structural, although they appeared to be, and Louis Henry Sullivan made them the basis of his decorative scheme. Chevron moldings divide their faces into hexagons enclosing foliated designs that lower into electric lights, into grilled bosses hiding air inlets, and into smaller triangles with additional foliage. The lights run down the arches and across the boxes illuminating the entire room softly and completely. To the rear of the hall where the coved ceiling soars dramatically to provide sight lines for the gallery, Louis Henry Sullivan placed an immense stained-glass skylight. In the great hall, one reviewer wrote, “the sight is one of the most remarkable . . . in the world”, an assessment echoing the general sentiment, including that of Montgomery Schuyler, the sober Architectural Record critic, who concluded, after considering the pros and cons of the building, that Louis Henry Sullivan was “one of the most striking and interesting individualities among living architects”.
The problem was the high-rise office building, the skyscraper, as it came to be called in the 1890s. The challenge for Louis Henry Sullivan was not so much structural, for most of the load-bearing and mechanical obstacles to great height had already been solved, as it was the aesthetics of structure. Louis Henry Sullivan was convinced that this historically new building type required a new design treatment, not one based on analogies to other kinds of buildings or one rooted in history, as most architects believed. Louis Henry Sullivan saw the skyscraper as a symbol of U.S. business that was the basis of the national culture, and therefore as an opportunity to create a long-anticipated indigenous architectural style. So when Adler and Louis Henry Sullivan received a commission in 1890 from St. Louis brewer and real estate promoter Ellis Wainwright for what came to be a 10-story rental structure, Louis Henry Sullivan made the most of it.
His solution to the skyscraper problem did not come easily. Frank Lloyd Wright, his principal assistant at the time, remembered how Louis Henry Sullivan struggled over the facade composition, leaving the office for long walks, throwing away sketch after sketch, until finally Louis Henry Sullivan burst into Wright’s room and threw a drawing on the table. “I was perfectly aware of what had happened,” Wright recalled. ‘This was Louis Henry Sullivan ‘s greatest moment-his greatest effort. The ‘skyscraper . . . as an entity with . . . beauty all its own, was born” with a steel frame.
Louis Sullivan outlined his skyscraper theory six years later in his most famous essay, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”. By carefully analyzing the program requirements, Louis Henry Sullivan decided that skyscrapers had three major clusters of functions, each of which should be expressed separately. The first was public-seen on the one-or two-story base-consisting of entering and leaving, meeting and greeting, waiting, shopping, and locating the entrance from the outside. The second set of functions was private: various kinds of office work. And the third was architectural: the housing of mechanical equipment and storage in an attic that could also serve as an aesthetic device for terminating the facade in a decisive way
Louis Henry Sullivan had in fact designed the Wainwright Building according to his as yet unwritten theory, with a two-story base treated in an expansive, sumptuous way with an easily identified entrance flanked by broad display windows; a shaft of seven identically articulated floors to indicate the similar nature of work in the various offices; and a richly decorated attic suggesting a crisp termination, and that the functions there were of yet a third and different order.
All this was but one aspect of Louis Sullivan ‘s thinking. It was necessary to differentiate the three principal functions, to be sure, but it was equally important to unite them harmoniously at the same time, because Louis Sullivan believed, as Louis Sullivan had written earlier, that every building should reveal “a single, germinal impulse or idea, which shall permeate the mass and its every detail,” so that “there shall effuse from the completed structure a single sentiment . . .”. What was the skyscraper’s single sentiment? Or, as Louis Henry Sullivan asked himself in his 1896 essay: “What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?” Louis Henry Sullivan answered in some of his most direct but most memorable prose. “It is lofty. … It must be tall, every inch of it tall. … It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation . . . from bottom to top . . . without a single dissenting line”. So Louis Henry Sullivan recessed the horizontals, projected forward the structural columns and nonstructural mullions, and took the corner piers all the way from sidewalk to cornice. His “system of vertical construction” was now complete.
But in his 1896 essay Louis Sullivan had one more point to make, the most important point of all. Working from the particular to the general, Louis Sullivan advanced his “final, comprehensive formula” for the solution of the skyscraper problem, indeed, of all architectural problems. All things in nature had shapes, forms, and outward appearances “that tell us what they are, that distinguishes them . . . from each other,” Louis Sullivan asserted. “Unfailingly in nature these shapes express the inner life,” and when analyzed reveal that “the essence of things is taking shape in the matter of things.” Life seeks form in response to needs, the life and the form being “absolutely one and inseparable.” “Where function does not change,” Louis Sullivan insisted, “form does not change,” so it was “the pervading law of all things . . .that form ever follows function. That,” Louis Henry Sullivan emphasized, “is the law”. With the Wainwright Building and the assertion of “form follows function,” Louis Sullivan’s place in architectural history was assured.
Irrespective of the acclaimed buildings Louis Sullivan had produced, the rejection of the “Chicago School” in the U.S. brought Sullivan little business. The Beaux-Arts architecture was the architecture most popular in the United States. Sullivan’s influence in the European architectural movement however, was huge. Aalto, Le Corbusier, Gropius, van der Rohe, agreed with Frank Lloyd Wright about the great influence that Sullivan had on each. Sullivan died penniless in 1924. Eight years after his death, in 1932, The Museum of Modern Art in New York performed a great service to reviving modern architectural thinking in the U.S. by showing examples of a few Beaux-Arts American buildings compared to buildings of Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Aalto, and the Bauhaus. This did much to change the face of American high rise buildings.
Frank Lloyd Wright(1867-1959)
Through the turn of the century, Wright’s distinctively personal style was evolving, and his work in these years foreshadowed his so-called “prairie style,” a term deriving from the publication in 1901 of “A Home in a Prairie Town” which he designed for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Wright echoed Sullivan’s strong distaste for Beaux-arts styles and its gaudy decorations.
Prairie houses were characterized by low, horizontal lines that were meant to blend with the flat landscape around them. Typically, these structures were built around a central chimney, consisted of broad open spaces instead of strictly defined rooms, and deliberately blurred the distinction between interior space and the surrounding terrain. Wright acclaimed “the new reality that is space instead of matter” and, about architectural interiors, said that the “reality of a building is not the container but the space within.” The W.W. Willits house, built in Highland Park, Illinois in 1902, was the first house that embodied all the elements of the prairie style. His masterpiece of the prairie style is the Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909.
In 1910, Wright left his wife and five children to move to Europe. He prepared a set of drawings based on Sullivan’s theories that were then published in Europe. This brought these new architectural concepts to young, architects who loved the concept that form follows function. They were revolting against the elaborate ornamentation of the beaux-arts.
All though Wright’s work was revered in Europe, the end of the Chicago School meant Wright had great difficulty getting work in the U.S. Dvelopers only wanted Beaux-Arts buildings. Wright was completely isolated A famous European architect, Bruno Taut, who loved Wright’s work, visited this country and said in his book ” even to mention Wright’s name was shocking” Only with the rising influence of the new European architecture did American begin start to take an interest in Wright’s work.
Nevertheless , Wright is now recognized as one of the great pioneers of modern architecture. His Fallingwater has been named the outstanding building of the 20th Century.
Now- the original question- Were Sullivan and Wright successful architects? Does a fickle public determine success?
Both of these architects had little financial success- both have great influence on today’s architecture world wide. In most of their carreers their work was not the trend. Compare them to the hedge fund operators who made more $$ in a day then they made in their lifetimes. Both these architects continue to be well respected world wide. Their works continue to live on, while the architectural fads of yesteryears have long since faded away.
It is a great victory for men who believed in what they did.
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