Marshall Field

Wholesale Store
(Chicago, 1885–1887,
demolished 1930) is
Richardson's
"culminating statement
of urban commercial
form", and its
remarkable design
influenced Louis
Sullivan, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and many
other architects
Chicago School of
Architecture
“birthplace of modern
architecture.”
 LOUIS HENRY SULLIVAN
• Father Of Skyscrapers
• A mentor to Frank Lloyd
Wright, and an inspiration to
the Chicago group of
architects who have come to
be known as the Prairie
School.
• Sullivan is one of "the
recognized trinity of
American architecture”
• studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts
• returned to Chicago in 1875 got a job as a
draftsman in the
• office of Joseph S. Johnson & John Edelman
• left Johnson in 1879
• worked in the office of Dankmar Adler
• the firm of Adler & Sullivan designed over 180
buildings during its existence
• The taller the building, the more strain this placed
on the lower sections of the building; since there
were clear engineering limits to the weight such
"loadbearing“ walls could sustain, large designs
meant massively thick walls on the ground floors,
and definite limits on the building's height.
• The development of cheap, versatile steel in the
second half of the 19th century changed those
rules.
“form ever follows function”
• his buildings could be spare and crisp in their
principal masses, he often punctuated their plain
surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and
something like Celtic Revival decorations

• usually cast in iron or terracotta, and ranging from

organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric
designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design
heritage.
• Terra cotta is lighter and easier to work with than
stone masonry. Sullivan used it in his architecture
because it had a malleability that was appropriate
for his ornament.
• Another signature element of Sullivan's work is the
massive, semi-circular arch. Sullivan employed such
arches throughout his career—in shaping
entrances, in framing windows, or as interior design.

• All of these elements can be found in Sullivan's

widely admired Guaranty Building, which he
designed while partnered with Adler.
 Chicago Auditorium Building
• Since 1947, the
Auditorium Building
has been the home
of Roosevelt
University.
• The Auditorium
Theatre
• the first home of
• the Chicago Civic
Opera and the
Chicago
• Symphony
Orchestra.
• Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago
businessman, incorporated
the Chicago Auditorium
Association in December
1886 to develop what he
wanted to be the world's
largest, grandest, most
expensive theater that
would rival such institutions
as the Metropolitan Opera
House in New York City. He
was said to have wanted to
make high culture
accessible to the working
classes of Chicago.
• The building was to include
an office block and a first
class hotel.
• The entrance to the
auditorium is on the
south side beneath
the tall blocky
eighteen-story tower.
• The rest of the
building is a uniform
ten stories, organized
in the same way as
Richardson's Marshall
Field Wholesale Store.
The interior
embellishment,
however, is wholly
Sullivan's, and some of
the details, because
of their continuous
curvilinear foliate
motifs, are among the
nearest equivalents to
European Art
Nouveau architecture
WAINWRIGHT BUILDING
• "The eleven-storey Wainwright Building
represents Sullivan's first attempt at a
truly multi-storey format, in which the
device of the suppressed transom
taken from the facade of Richardson's
Marshall Field Store, Chicago of 1888, is
used to impart a decidedly vertical
emphasis to the building's overall form.
• The two-storey base of the classical
tripartite composition is faced in fine
red sandstone set on a two-foot-high
string course of red Missouri granite.
• While the middle section consists of red
brick pilasters with decorated terra
cotta spandrels, the top is rendered as
a deep overhanging cornice faced in
an ornamented terra cotta skin to
match the enrichment of the spandrels
and the pilasters below."
GUARANTY BUILDING
The Carson Pirie Scott Building
• mahogany and marble fixtures .
• new combination arc and incandescent lights
the] largest and finest display windows in the
world
• reading, writing and rest rooms . . . telephone
booths . . . [an] emergency medical aid room .
. . [an] exposition of oriental rugs . . . and
10,000 chrysanthemums
• The Carson Pirie Scott building had the most
clearly expressed steel frame of any building in
Chicago.
• The frame, sheathed in glazed white terra
cotta, allowed for some of the largest windows
ever seen and flexible, wide-open spaces.
• What really makes Sullivan’s design stand out is
the building’s lavish foliate ornamentation.
Every inch of the framework surrounding
Carson’s bottom story windows is covered in
entirely original cast-iron, nature-inspired
embellishments