Word: sullivans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Form Follows Function." Architect Sullivan had already put in a year at M.I.T. (he entered at 16) and two years at Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts before he was taken on in 1880 as partner by one of Chicago's top engineers, Dankmar Adler. During the 15 years-the two men worked together, they drafted plans for more than 100 buildings, including Chicago's Auditorium Building, Stock Exchange and a score of office buildings that set trends throughout the Midwest...
...Sullivan's major contribution was to establish the skyscraper as an architectural form in its own right. One of his best is Buffalo's Guaranty (now Prudential) Building (left), finished in 1895 at the peak of Sullivan's powers, just before his partnership with Adler broke up. In designing it Sullivan broke away from the neoclassic-temple design that obsessed his contemporaries. Following his own maxim, "form follows function," he created instead a building that clearly expressed its own purpose: a foundation of ground display shops, a center block of identical office floors and a crowning attic...
Imperative Emotion. But for Sullivan, "function" was not bare-boned utilitarianism. Once the problem is analyzed, he insisted, "We must heed the imperative voice of emotion." This meant exalting the loftiness of the building as "the very open organ-tone of its appeal." For Sullivan, the organ-tone required its grace notes as well: the wrought-iron and terracotta decoration he lavished on his buildings, inside and out (opposite...
...Sullivan's exuberant geometric and floral motifs are now long out of fashion. But for the present generation of modern architects too long imprisoned in a strait-jacket of glassy steel and aluminum purism, his concern for structure, color and decoration today places Sullivan, who died almost forgotten in 1924, once again at the center of tomorrow's architectural aspirations...
...Sullivan Show (Sun., 8 p.m.. CBS). Bing Crosby, Phil Silvers, Julie Andrews. Louis Armstrong; a tribute to LIFE Magazine on its 20th anniversary...