“Beyond Chicago: Louis Sullivan in the American West”

AboutRobert Twombly argues that Sullivan scholarship has overemphasized his Chicago work at the expense of his significant trans-Mississippi practice, particularly in St. Louis, where Adler & Sullivan pursued ten skyscraper projects (1890–1894) alongside commissions in Pueblo, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. Twombly traces Sullivan's rhetorical construction of "the West" as an honest, democratic counterpoint to a corrupt, tradition-bound East (drawing on *Kindergarten Chats*), and situates this ideology within Sullivan's biography and his leadership of western architectural associations. The article then presents detailed design and construction histories of the Pueblo Opera House Block (1888–1889), the unbuilt Ontario Hotel and Seattle Opera House Block projects (1890), the Dooly Block (1890–91), the Wainwright Building (Sullivan's first skyscraper, 1890–91), the Mercantile Club and Union Trust Building projects, the Portland Building and St. Nicholas Hotel projects, unbuilt "Trust and Savings" skyscraper studies, and the Chemical National Bank project, arguing that these St. Louis buildings pioneered Sullivan's mature "system of vertical construction" and, in the Chemical National Bank scheme, anticipated the neutral curtain-wall aesthetic of twentieth-century Modernism before Chicago examples did.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-8684%28198511%2954%3A4%3C405%3ABCLSIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V