Beauty is the promise of Function
HORATIO GREENOUGH

It was a dramatic moment in the history of modern
architecture, late one afternoon in the year 1890
when Louis Sullivan strode into the Chicago office
of his chief draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
proudly tossed on the table the manila stretch on
which he had drawn the elevation of St. Louis's
Wainwright Building. "Look at it," Sullivan com-
manded. "It's tall!" ¹

Tall it was, every line of it. This was the building
in which Louis Sullivan first gave logic and form
to the skyscraper, that structure which announced
the beginning of modern architecture. It was Sul-
livan's genius that he was able to conceive of the
tall office building as a great unity, infused "with
a single germinal idea, which shall permeate the
mass and its every detail with the same spirit."
As Frank Lloyd Wright was later to put it, "Until
Louis Sullivan showed the way, the high buildings
lacked unity. They were built up in layers like a
great wedding cake. All were fighting height in-
stead of gracefully and honestly accepting it." ²

American and European architecture at the time
was in the heyday of Victorian revivalism. In
France there was a preference for an ornate and
florid neoclassicism. In the United States high
fashion was represented by the more historically
correct eclecticism of the powerful firm of McKim,
Mead & White, a firm adept at applying Renais-
sance forms to such large structures as Boston's
Public Library and New York's University Club.
Meanwhile, abroad, a revolt against machine vulgar-
ity was taking the form of a return to the crafts in a
stillborn movement called art nouveau, labeled fin
de siècle almost before the century had in fact
ended.

But behind Sullivan's emergence as the first
great form giver of modern architecture there was
also an intense half century of engineering discov-
ery. The highly inventive James Bogardus as early
as 1848 had worked out a system of prefabricated
iron façades and columns that had spread the
vogue for iron store fronts across the United States.
These cast-iron pillars and structures proved highly
vulnerable to fire, as one disaster after another
demonstrated. But they did make iron and glass
familiar construction materials for a whole genera-
tion of American architects.

A multitude of other innovations and improve-
ments coalesced to make the skyscraper possible.
Fireproofing had just been developed. Elisha
Graves Otis had, in 1853, demonstrated a safe steam
elevator, an absolute necessity if buildings were
to rise much above six stories. Major William Le-
Baron Jenney, a highly creative engineer and one of
Sullivan's teachers, took a daring step in 1885
and finished off his Home Insurance Building in
Chicago with the new bessemer-steel beams and
columns just developed for the railroads. When
Jenney proved that steel could hold up buildings,
and the walls as well, the skyscraper was born.

Height--witness the towers of Bologna--is often
equated with arrogance. But the pressures behind
the cliffs of Chicago skyscrapers were basically
mercantile in origin. In the decade 1880-1890Chi-
cago's population had doubled to reach 1 million
and was still growing. Land in the business district
was at a premium, and the only way to expand was
up. So pressing was this need that Chicago archi-
tects had been attempting the seemingly impossible,
mounting higher and higher with masonry walls
whose immense weights caused some buildings to
sink as much as 18 inches into the ground. In
Burnham & Root's seventeen-story Monadnock
Building (the tallest masonry building ever
erected) the walls were 12 feet thick at the base.

Sullivan and his immensely talented engineering
partner Dankmar Adler also tried their hand at
masonry construction. Their Auditorium Building,

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