On the eve of the twentieth century, Chicago was rapidly outgrowing its borders. Architect Louis Henry Sullivan (American, 1856-1924) answered the demand for more office space, theaters, department stores, and financial centers by pioneering what would become an essential model for city life-the skyscraper. Blending Art Nouveau complexity with geometric elegance, Sullivan's tall buildings included Chicago's Auditorium Building, the largest building in the world when it was completed in 1889. Louis Sullivan's designs stand today as leading exemplars of Chicago School architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked as an assistant to Sullivan, liked to refer to him as his "lieber Meister," or "beloved master." Sullivan brought to his practicea conviction that ornamentation should arise naturally from a building's overall design, restating themes expressed in the structure as a whole. Having spent much of his career in a late Victorian world that bristled with busy, fussy ornament forornament's sake, Sullivan tossed all that bric-a-brac into the fire with the now famous dictum "Form follows function." He honored this ideal in his skyscrapers and his residential commissions, as well as in the small-town banks so important to thesecond half of his career. In Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture, nearly two hundred photographs with descriptive captions document Sullivan's genius for modern design. Patrick Cannon introduces each chapter with key biographical information and discusses the influences that shaped Sullivan's illustrious career. Rare historical photographs chronicle those buildings that, sadly, have since been destroyed, while James Caulfield's contemporary photography captures Sullivan's existing Chicago buildings and many other structures in Eastern and Midwestern cities.
