Louis Sullivan and the Auditorium, Form Follows Function's First Draft

Louis Sullivan was thirty years old when he and his partner Dankmar Adler broke ground on the Auditorium Building in eighteen eighty-seven, and he was designing the most technically ambitious structure in America at the time. Steel skeleton construction. Electric lighting throughout. Hydraulic stage machinery capable of lifting sections of the stage floor. A theater that seated four thousand two hundred people, with acoustics that contemporary critics and engineers considered the finest in North America, achieved without the electronics that modern acoustic design depends on. Sullivan solved the sound problem through geometry: the shape of the ceiling arches, the angles of the side walls, the placement of the boxes.

The building was also Sullivan's public argument about what architecture should be. Victorian architecture was ornament applied to structure: decoration that announced status and wealth by covering the underlying form. Sullivan believed the opposite. In an essay he published several years later, titled The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, he wrote the phrase that would follow him for the rest of his life: "form ever follows function." He did not mean simplicity. The Auditorium's interior is dense with carved ornamental detail, Sullivan's signature organic patterns of leaves and tendrils in plasterwork and gold leaf. He meant that the ornament should grow from the building's purpose, not be applied over it.

His apprentice, a twenty-two-year-old draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright, worked in the offices Sullivan maintained in the building's tower. Wright called Sullivan his "Lieber Meister," beloved master, and acknowledged him as the foundational influence on his own work. Wright eventually left to start his own practice, which Sullivan experienced as betrayal. The two men did not fully reconcile before Sullivan's death in nineteen twenty-four, broke and largely forgotten in a downtown Chicago rooming house.

The Auditorium Building is Roosevelt University today. The theater is still in use. The acoustics Sullivan designed without microphones or electronic processing still work.