“Adler and Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo”

AboutJoseph Siry provides a comprehensive centennial study of the Guaranty Building (1895–96), which Sullivan himself considered the "sister" of the Wainwright Building and a key statement in his logical-poetic expression of metallic-frame construction. The article covers the building's original client, oil producer Hascal L. Taylor, and its downtown Buffalo site amid the City and County Hall, St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, and the rival Ellicott Square Building; the 1894–95 design and construction process as the last joint commission of Adler and Sullivan before their partnership dissolved; the steel frame and its terra-cotta cladding as a constructive system, compared to contemporaneous tall office buildings; the building's elevations and planning (including its light court and ninth-floor and other plans); and an extended analysis of the exterior ornament and its fabrication in terra-cotta. A central interpretive section argues that Sullivan's design method — distilling a building type's essential character (here, verticality/loftiness) and making it visually predominant — parallels Hippolyte Taine's aesthetic theory of art, which Sullivan encountered as a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Taine's successor Vaudremer. Siry concludes that the Guaranty represents Adler and Sullivan's organic integration of spatial, structural, mechanical, and ornamental systems into a unified whole, rather than mere applied "composition."

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199603%2955%3A1%3C6%3AAASGBI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N