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 of Sullivan's standing as pioneer of a distinctively American architecture has much to do with his programmatic disavowal of the influence of European architecture on the evolution of American construction around the turn of the century. In a speech given before the American League of Architects in 1901, he stated: "American architecture is composed, in the hundred, of ninety parts aberration, eight parts indifference, one part poverty, and one part Little Lord F...