“Sullivan's Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology”

AboutCarl W. Condit examines Louis Sullivan's major commercial buildings — the Auditorium, Wainwright, Guaranty (Prudential), and Carson Pirie Scott — as symbolic expressions of the structural engineering achievements of nineteenth-century iron and steel construction, arguing Sullivan's organic theory of "form follows function" drew its emotional force from his lifelong fascination with bridge engineering. Tracing Sullivan's own account, in *The Autobiography of an Idea*, of a childhood encounter with a suspension bridge and his adult absorption in the construction of James B. Eads's St. Louis bridge and Charles Shaler Smith and L. F. G. Bouscaren's cantilevered Kentucky River bridge at Dixville, Condit provides extended technical histories of both structures — Eads's pioneering use of pneumatic caissons, chrome steel, and cantilever erection; Bouscaren's introduction of hinges based on Karl Culmann's graphical statics. He then argues Sullivan translated his emotional response to these engineering feats into architectural form: the Auditorium's masonry-clad iron and steel framing beneath Richardsonian walls; the Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings' vertical pier rhythms expressing "movement" analogous to a suspension bridge's dynamic tension; and the Carson Pirie Scott Store's cellular steel-cage screen expressing "power." Condit concludes that Sullivan's ornament and formal vocabulary constitute a coherent artistic response to industrial technology, the one stable cultural order available amid the century's disruptions.

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