Architect Louis Sullivan

The purpose of this research is to examine the work of the pioneer American modernist architect Louis H. Sullivan with a view toward demonstrating the influence of European architecture on his work and how his work connected to both European architecture and the American way of living. The focus of the research in this connection will be on Sullivan's design for the Transportation Building at the World's Columbian Exposition held in 1892-93 in Chicago.

Louis H. Sullivan is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of American modernist architecture, which in no small part should be taken to mean a pioneer of a distinctively American style. This reputation is attributed to two factors. The first is his association with the so-called "Chicago School," which is the name given to the commercial-architecture style of buildings constructed in and around the business district of the city, in the main, in the years following the famous fire in the last part of the nineteenth century. Buildings of the Chicago School (many of them factories warehouses in the initial stages but later the earliest skyscrapers) were distinguished by iron-and-steel frameworks made possible by advances in engineering but even more distinguished by Sullivan's oft-articulated principle that the form of a structure should follow function organically: "Sullivan believed that a building must express the environment from which it develops, both the physical and the social aspects of that environment." The second factor o

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ullivan drew from the experience was that "Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave." This was because the authorized style for Exposition buildings was specifically and programmatically Classical and monumental, popularly and enthusiastically received as "an amazing revelation of the architectural art . . . a message inspired from on high. Upon it their imagination shaped new ideals." Controversy surrounds Sullivan's many speeches and writings after the Exposition deploring its architectural slavishness to European classicism. One view is that Sullivan courageously departed from the slavishness by refusing to incorporate monumental colonnade-and-pediment facades dominating other pavilions in the Exposition. Rykwert describes the Exposition as "a vast confection of white plaster columns" , a formulation adopted by subsequent critics. Sullivan distinguished his structure from the colonnade confection principally at its main entrance, by the so-called Great Door, dominated by a series of concentric round arches in a half-dome plano-concave framework, which that formed a sheltered but open pavilion entrance. Photographs of the Golden Door show that each arch, the next-most-interior smaller than the last,

Category: Arts - A