Remembering Louis Sullivan

My mentor Studs Terkel slyly mocked our country when he called it the United States of Amnesia. American Architecture is an especially amnesiac swamp.

Americans can cite baseball hitter stats to the fourth decimal. It's not that our compatriots' brains are absent. Their culture trains them to ignore Culture. They should take the time to view a new DVD on one of our country's greatest architects, Louis Sullivan.

Sullivan's life (1856-1924) was full of disappointments. He was reared on his grandparents' farm north of Boston and at 16 entered M.I.T., then a pioneering architecture school with a Beaux Arts faculty trained in Paris. He found the curriculum— copying Greek and Roman images— a yawning bore and dropped out after a year.

But Sullivan hungered to see Paris directly. After six weeks there he was fluent in French and was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. But the old BA ritual still turned off his curious muse, and he dropped out again after a year.

Europe, not academia, inflamed Sullivan's imagination, especially Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. He vowed to do as well.

Triumph in Chicago

Back in America, Chicago beckoned. A devastating fire in 1871 paradoxically freed the urban landscape for new architects to work.

In 1875 came the greatest marriage of architectural skills in our history: the acoustical moxie of engineer Dankmar Adler and the decorative skill of Sullivan. Their first triumph was the Auditorium on Chicago's main drag, Michigan Avenue. The duo ran with the dream of philanthropist Ferdinand Peck, who funded a 4,000-seat opera house "for the masses," a 400-room hotel for the movers and shakers who were then rebuilding Chicago, and a 17-story office building. (Adler and Sullivan set up shop on the 16th floor, with an unbeatable view of the new metropolis abuilding.)

Sullivan then "invented" the skyscraper— first the Wainwright in St. Louis, and the Guaranty in Buffalo— transforming the classical column into a base, with upward thrust floors topped by a roof "capital." That simple form succeeded throughout the Midwest.

Enter Frank Lloyd Wright

When the perfectionist Sullivan fell behind on his sketches, he hired a Wisconsin dropout— the then unknown Frank Lloyd Wright, soon to become their firm's chief draftsman. Adler and Sullivan invited President Benjamin Harrison to the Auditorium opening in 1892. He was so impressed that Congress soon gave Chicago the go-ahead on the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, a year late for the quadra-centenary because of that year's financial panic.

Alas, Sullivan and Adler's main competitors, Daniel Burnham and John Root, got the Columbian exhibition call to create their White City, a Beaux Arts revival to end all, an insult to Sullivan's program to create a new architecture expressing America's unique values.

Sullivan did design the most popular building at the fair, the Transportation Building. But millions of American that summer took the White City virus back to their hometowns, delaying Sullivan's dream for a generation. Adler was married with kids, so when the Panic of '93 killed their business, he took a $25,000-a-year job from Crane Elevator and dissolved the firm. In 1900, at age 44, Louis married unhappily. And it was downward for the rest of his life: cheap hotels, loans from old friends, miserable isolation.

Small-town idealism

Nevertheless, Sullivan's greatest achievement, in my judgment—the small-town banks his clients dubbed his "Jewel Boxes"— paralleled this painful alienation. During that brief turn of the century era of Progressive politics, small towns abounded in the sort of idealism that responded to Sullivan's dreams.

Serendipitously, my son Michael left Philadelphia for college in Minnesota. There he introduced me to Sullivan's greatest Jewel Box— in Owatonna (that is to say Nowhere), Minnesota.

Soon I fell in love with Sullivan's Jewel Boxes. I bought myself a Greyhound Ameripass and proceeded to make a pious odyssey of my devotion. One night I pit stopped overnight in Dayton, where my Newman Club chum, Sandy King, was teaching American history at the University of Dayton. Up at the crack of dawn the next morning to take the First Dirty Dawg to Sidney, Ohio, I was the only guy on the bus.

Bus driver's awakening

As we pulled into Sidney, I shyly asked the driver for some extra time to take pictures. "Sure," he smiled affably. "Two cigarettes' worth!" (The Jewel Box was a wonder, the motto "THRIFT" scrawled sweetly across the main façade.)

As I piled back on the bus, the driver exclaimed, "Damn, but that's a pretty building! I've driven by it a thousand times and never even noticed it. Thank you, mister for opening my eyes."

I smiled and ogled my Greyhound map. Next stop: Grinnell, Iowa.

Take it from my favorite Greyhound driver. See Mark Richard Smith's new Sullivan DVD and you'll soon be roaming his Midwest as I did, relishing on the spot Louis Sullivan's Jewel Boxes.♦


To read a response, click here.