Looking Up: Meet Louis Sullivan

Last week we discussed Louis Sullivan building a new kind of building, the mighty skyscraper. We learned about tripartite division and how pretty much everyone followed Mr. Sullivan’s suit and built their skyscrapers much like Sullivan did.

But even though they were following his blueprint, no one was building quite like Sullivan.

Sullivan was a philosopher, he thought long and hard about his buildings artistically and structurally. While Burnham was building the prettiest buildings he could, Sullivan was building his the only way they could be. They were organic, built out of the ground (Just as a little literary aside, Ayn Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” was based loosely off of Sullivan and his student, Frank Lloyd Wright, that’s why Howard Roark’s buildings are so organic and look like they “grew” out of the ground).

Sullivan coined the term “Form Follows Function”. If you look at Carson’s, you can really see his philosophy straight up. Look at the intense cast iron ornament surrounding the windows on the sidewalk. Sullivan didn’t want old Greek ornament, but he did want ornament! His ornate work on the bottom of Carson’s is all prairie land flowers and leaves, local fauna. With all that seemingly superfluous design, he basically made a picture frame to highlight what was going on in the windows.

Also, if you look at the side of Carson’s, you’ll see that Sullivan really emphasized the horizontal. If you look at the spandrels (the horizontal lines that run across the building) you’ll see that they’re wide and large and the vertical lines (the piers) are thinner. Sullivan knew this was going to be a department store, so by framing the windows and making the building more horizontal, his form is following his function, yes?

NOW! Look at the corner of the building, the rounded corner (left). Sullivan put the entrance on the corner to make it easier to come in and out, but what really stands out is the verticality on the side of the building (note how the piers are now emphasized to draw your eye upwards). Carson’s (it was first the Schlessinger and Mayer department store) in its day was definitely a skyscraper and Sullivan said (in an intense essay on skyscrapers that the skyscraper is “lofty. ... It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.”

A proud and soaring thing. I love that. So now we see why Sullivan made sure to add some verticality to his building. To allow it to be a proud and soaring thing.

There is still even more to see on Sullivan’s building, and I’m in no rush. Take in what you can, look at this building now that it’s shut down and wonder for a moment what Sullivan might have wanted done with this space, now that it’s not a department store. What will go into those beautifully framed windows? Let’s hope it’s not a condo conversion and a stuffy old lobby. I fear Sullivan would come back and kick some ass.