The Legacy of Louis Sullivan, Part One: The Auditorium Building

The years around 1890 still stand out as the period when the modern skyscraper was born in the cities of Chicago and St. Louis. Combining new technology and capital, the firm of Adler and Sullivan revolutionized architecture in the years between two great commissions: Chicago’s 1889 Auditorium Building and St. Louis’s 1891 Wainwright Building. The change in the thinking of what a tall building could be in the intervening years between the two buildings would solidify Louis Sullivan’s reputations as the creator of the modern skyscraper.

The young Louis Sullivan graduated from MIT in a period in American architecture where revival styles, such as the Richardsonian Romanesque, dominated the built environment. Sullivan, the son of immigrants, chafed at American architects’ love affair with historic European styles. For the young architect, a bold, new country such as America required a new style of architecture to exemplify that new brashness. Europe, to Sullivan, represented the past. When he joined the firm of Dankmar Adler in 1879, he stood poised to revolutionize American architecture. Sullivan’s first major project in Chicago would commence this revolt.

, completed in 1889 after years of planning and construction, exemplifies how the first generation of massive office buildings in America had pushed its technological underpinnings to its limit. Adler and Sullivan first had to address a serious site problem; the Auditorium Building’s footings could not rest on bedrock. That’s because the site was located along the former shore of Lake Michigan, and the bedrock was buried in thick clay 100 feet below the surface. The architects came up with an ingenious solution: a giant wood and steel platform on which the building could rest, almost like a barge in a sea of clay.

Upon the barge, the massive stone walls of the Auditorium Building began to rise. As it had worked for millennia, the walls bore the weight of the building; the lower floors feature massive, thick walls that support the upper stories. Like many American office buildings of the time, the Auditorium followed the horizontal alignment of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, or palace. The ground floor featured heavy, dark, rusticated masonry, while the second or middle section, the equivalent of the piano nobile in Italy, was stretched upwards to provide windows for offices in a lighter colored stone. The third partition up top sports small windows that conceal elevator and heating machinery.

Over a century later, the triumph of Adler and Sullivan’s engineering also manifests itself in the looming tower over the main entrance. The additional weight of the extra floors of the tower could have easily caused the tower to pile drive itself into the soft clay below, cracking the walls of the nearby floors. But an examination of the outer walls reveals no signs of such cracking to this day.

The exterior ornament of the Auditorium Building reveals an important moment in the transition of Sullivan’s attitudes towards historic style. There is a prevailing Romanesque Revival feel to the massing and general articulation of the façade. Rounded, classical arches bracket the tops of the pilasters, while small windows punctuate the outer curtain wall. In many ways, the hulking massiveness of the building reveals the constraints of tall load-bearing walls, just as they had in Romanesque architecture centuries before.

But what is fascinating is that Sullivan’s own ahistorical decorative motifs, now so famous and sought after even in fragmentary form, are starting to appear. Snowflake patterns and other floral patterns begin to form out of the sheer stone masonry walls. Clearly, Sullivan was already beginning to demonstrate his frustration at historic revival architecture.

Next week, we will examine how Adler and Sullivan broke away from those constraints in the design of the Wainwright Building.

Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via e-mail at naffziger@gmail.com.