Louis Sullivan
Louis Sullivan
Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School. Along with Henry Hobson Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan is one of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth3 September 1856
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
The problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man.
What the people are within, the buildings express without.
Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.
National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. ... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.
How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it.
The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.
Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.
But the building's identity resided in the ornament.
An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times.
In the history of mankind there are recorded two great Inversions. The first, set forth by the Nazarene to the effect that love is a greater power and more real than vengeance. The second proclaimed the earth to be a sphere revolving in its course around the sun. These affirmations were made in the face of all evidence sacred to the contrary.
The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.