1856-1924
Architect

Chicago's Premier Architect.

While not recognized in his own time as a pioneer of modern architecture, Louis Henri Sullivan enjoyed the admiration of his peers during his years as Chicago's premier architect. He was one of the first architects in the late nineteenth century to struggle to free the profession from its adherence to styles of the past, to decoration for its own sake, to masking the functions of buildings in an effort to emphasize their surface effects. His dictum "form follows function" subsumed aesthetics to structure without sacrificing elegance. This dictum became the rallying cry of modern architects, beginning with Sullivan's most famous student, Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan's most important work took place between 1880 and 1905, after which he sank into obscurity. Later his reputation was restored by American and European architects who pointed out that Sullivan was the progenitor of architectural modernism. The...