Sullivan Center: The Perfect Skyscraper

Or so its irascible architect would have you believe

Each week, discover an historic Chicago landmark and meet the people who built the Windy City. Includes audio recorded by Jim Goodrich.

Form follows function is an architectural mantra that has been repeated so often that it's become white noise. It’s something someone says when they're talking about architecture, especially when they're talking about architecture in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But for one architect, form ever follows function was a plea for the belief that each structure should be designed for its specific use. One building should not be interchangeable with another, especially when what happens within a building differs based on its occupants.

To Louis Sullivan, a building was not a building was not a building.

Louis Sullivan was by all accounts a genius and by most an arrogant misanthrope with an ego to rival that of his protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright. He suffered no fools, and to him, fools were those who relied on the tired influence of Greek and Roman classicism. Just because you slapped neo on the front didn't make it new.

What Louis wanted, what he felt architecture needed, was an entirely new design language that was utilitarian without being boring, and artistic without being frivolous. He wanted a distinct, and democratic, American architecture—and he created it.