In 1944, Louis Sullivan was the second architect to posthumously receive the AIA Gold Medal.
21 Facts About Louis Sullivan
2.
Louis Sullivan learned that he could both graduate from high school a year early and bypass the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations.
3.
Louis Sullivan moved to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
4.
Louis Sullivan worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel frame building.
5.
Louis Sullivan used it in his architecture because it had a malleability that was appropriate for his ornament.
6.
Probably the most famous example of ornament used by Louis Sullivan is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson Pirie Scott store on south State Street.
7.
All of these elements are found in Louis Sullivan's widely admired Guaranty Building, which he designed while partnered with Adler.
8.
In 1890 Louis Sullivan was one of the ten US architects, five from the east and five from the west, chosen to build a major structure for the "White City", the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893.
9.
Louis Sullivan went into a twenty-year-long financial and emotional decline, beset by a shortage of commissions, chronic financial problems, and alcoholism.
10.
Louis Sullivan obtained a few commissions for small-town Midwestern banks, wrote books, and in 1922 appeared as a critic of Raymond Hood's winning entry for the Tribune Tower competition.
11.
Louis Sullivan died in a Chicago hotel room on April 14,1924.
12.
Louis Sullivan left a wife, Mary Azona Hattabaugh, from whom he was separated.
13.
Louis Sullivan's built work expresses the appeal of his incredible designs: the vertical bands on the Wainwright Building, the burst of welcoming Art Nouveau ironwork on the corner entrance of the Carson Pirie Scott store, the terra cotta griffins and porthole windows on the Union Trust building, and the white angels of the Bayard Building, Louis Sullivan's only work in New York City.
14.
Fragments of Louis Sullivan buildings are held in many fine art and design museums around the world.
15.
Louis Sullivan led the effort to save the Van Allen Building in Clinton, Iowa from demolition.
16.
Louis Sullivan relocated his family to Buffalo, New York to save Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House from possible demolition.
17.
Louis Sullivan's efforts were successful in both St Louis and Buffalo.
18.
The City Museum in St Louis has a large collection of Sullivan ornamentation on display, including a cornice from the demolished Chicago Stock Exchange, 29 feet long on one side, 13 feet on another, and nine feet high.
19.
The Center, the only museum dedicated to Louis Sullivan, is open to the public.
20.
That the fictional character of Henry Cameron in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead was similar to the real-life Louis Sullivan was noted, if only in passing, by at least one journalist contemporary to the book.
21.
Yet a look at these buildings clearly reveals that Louis Sullivan's muse had not abandoned him.