Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) was an American architect, born in Boston. He studied for a year at MIT, worked for Frank Furness in Philadelphia and William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago, and studied briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1880s he became the partner of the engineer Dankmar Adler (1844-1900) in the Chicago firm Adler & Sullivan, which lasted until the mid-1890s. Frank Lloyd Wright worked for the firm and called Sullivan his "lieber Meister" (dear master).

Sullivan set out a design method for the steel-framed office tower. In his 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" he wrote that "form ever follows function" and divided the tower into a base for shops, a stack of identical office floors, and a top story for machinery, finished with a cornice. The ten-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1890-1891) and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1895-1896) follow this plan, with continuous vertical piers between the windows and terracotta panels of his own leaf and geometric ornament.

His other works include the Auditorium Building in Chicago (1889), the Transportation Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago (1899-1904). After 1895 his commissions declined, and his last major works were small Midwestern banks such as the National Farmers' Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota (1908). He received the AIA Gold Medal posthumously in 1944.