Illustration by Britt Spencer
On a skyline dominated by the iconic 630-foot Gateway Arch sits the very first structure ever to reach for the stars. Yet at a mere 135 feet tall, what’s today known as the Wainwright StateOffice Building doesn’t even rank among St. Louis’ top 15 tallest buildings.
Even when it was built, in 1891, the 10-story Wainwright (named after its financier, Ellis Wainwright) probably wasn’t the world’s loftiest building. Taller structures had likely been erected in Chicago and New York earlier, though that’s still a matter of some debate. Historians do seem to agree, however, that although the Palazzo-style tower of red sandstone, designed by architects Lewis Henry Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, might not have broken any altitude records, it could be considered the first true skyscraper in spirit. It was the first work to combine the key elements of the modern titans. Here, on Seventh Street between Chestnut and Pine, Adler anSullivan created the template.
“This is the point where [Sullivan’s] ideas really jelled together,” says Andrew Wanko, public historian at the Missouri History Museum. “The Wainwright would become the common ancestor to every tall building that followed, from the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building all the way to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.”
In the late 19th century, as people swarmed America’s cities, the price of downtown real estate skyrocketed—but, as Wanko puts it, “the air above was free.” Designers previously had tried to go higher with such traditional elements as towers and turrets, but load-bearing brick walls could only support so much. Enter the steel skeleton, which provided far more vertical strength. Sullivan took that new technology and incorporated the elements of a classical column—a thick, sturdy base, in this instance a two-story retail section built on 2 feet of red Missouri granite; a long vertical shaft of honeycombed office space; and an ornate but functional crown with a beautiful leafy frieze and bull’s-eye windows. The Wainwright was the first tall building to find beauty in just being tall. (After all, Sullivan—nicknamed the “Father of Skyscrapers”—would later coin the phrase “Form follows function.”)
Success followed Sullivan, who’d go on to design notable buildings across the nation, though none was more prominent than the Wainwright. He became a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, who later put Sullivan’s achievement in perspective: “It’s the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as architecture.”
