“The Setback Skyscraper City of 1891: An Unknown Essay by Louis H. Sullivan”

AboutDonald Hoffmann identifies and republishes a previously unindexed 1891 essay by Sullivan, "The High-Building Question," published in the Chicago pictorial journal *The Graphic*, which had escaped every prior Sullivan bibliography. The essay proposed a zoning formula for regulating skyscraper height by progressively restricting a building's footprint at set elevations, and was illustrated with a rendering — reproduced here — of an imaginary "setback skyscraper city," which Hoffmann calls the most significant surviving document of Sullivan's thinking about urban planning. Hoffmann traces the setback principle's origins to William Le Baron Jenney and William B. Mundie's Manhattan Building (1889–91), whose setbacks Hoffmann shows were actually a structural response to party-wall foundation constraints rather than a concern for light and air, and follows its development through Adler & Sullivan's Schiller Building (1891–92) and their unbuilt Odd Fellows (Fraternity) Temple project (1891), which realized the setback concept most fully. Hoffmann draws on Dankmar Adler's 1892 essay "Light in Tall Office Buildings" to clarify the economic motivations (rentability of well-lit offices) that Sullivan's essay, focused on public amenity, left unstated. The full text of "The High-Building Question" is reprinted as an appendix.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197005%2929%3A2%3C181%3ATSSCO1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z