Wainwright Building

When financier Ellis Wainwright asked Louis Sullivan to design a new, tall office building in St. Louis, it wasn’t the very first skyscraper ever built. That distinction had already been achieved just a few years earlier in New York and Chicago, as new skeleton frame building methods had made taller buildings possible.

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But before the Wainwright Building, no one had yet designed a tall building that embraced its tallness. The tall building was a new phenomenon – and before the Wainwright, architects were designing structures with disparate segments stacked one on top of the other, as on a tiered wedding cake.

With the Wainwright Building, Louis Sullivan is widely credited with figuring out what tall buildings could look like. In his simple, elegant design, he visually organized the building by reinterpreting the elements of a classical column: a strong base, a soaring vertical shaft, and a decorative (and functional) capital.

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Writing in 1896, Sullivan explained the revelation that led him to his groundbreaking design: “What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect … It must be tall, every inch of it tall … It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line...”

With his design for the Wainwright, Sullivan created a new visual vocabulary for tall buildings. Its aesthetic influence can be seen not only in the buildings that immediately followed it, but also in sleek, soaring modernist skyscrapers that came decades later.