Sullivan's Jewel Box: The Bank That Saved an Architect

On the main corner of downtown Owatonna sits a small building that, to anyone who knows American architecture, is almost shocking to encounter in a Minnesota farm town. It looks like something transplanted from a world's fair: immense arched windows, flowing bands of green terra cotta, stained glass glowing amber and cobalt, ornament crawling across every surface in organic loops and tendrils. This is the National Farmers' Bank, built in nineteen oh eight by Louis Sullivan, and it is one of the most important small buildings in the history of American architecture.

By the time Sullivan took this commission, his career was in ruins. The man who had designed the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis and the Transportation Building at the eighteen ninety-three Chicago World's Fair had been overtaken by the Beaux-Arts classicism he despised, and his practice had collapsed. He was broke, nearly forgotten, and reduced to taking whatever work came his way.

What came his way was a banker in Owatonna named Carl Bennett, who had been reading Sullivan's essays on architecture and believed that a small-town bank deserved something more than a pretend Greek temple. He hired Sullivan and gave him unusual freedom. What Sullivan designed was unlike anything on any American main street: a cube of red brick wrapped in ornament, with two immense arched windows flooding the interior with light. His collaborator George Elmslie carved the decorative program; artist Louis Millet designed the stained glass; sculptor Oskar Gross painted the mural inside.

Sullivan called these commissions his jewel boxes. He would go on to design seven more small Midwestern banks before his death in nineteen twenty-four. But Owatonna was the first and the finest. The National Farmers' Bank became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-six. Today it operates as a branch of Wells Fargo, and you can walk in and do your banking inside a masterpiece.