(2 of 6)
Words like these would have been unseemly from the mouths of the richly endowed gentlemen architects on whom U. S. Society relied during its last great period of building. Stanford White and Charles McKim were master eclectics who adapted the styles and ornament of Europe gracefully to New York and New England buildings. Ralph Adams Cram was responsible for the Gothic revival. Bertram Goodhue achieved the monumentality of West Point. From these men Wright was isolated by what in their day appeared to be his eccentricity. The isolation is now seen to have been more theirs than his.
Lieber Meister. An erect, impudent youngster of 18, Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887 with three years of engineering school behind him in Madison. U. S. architecture was then on the rise from a period of post-Civil War jerry-building, and with the death of a great and sound Easterner, Henry Hobson Richardson, the year before, Chicago, rising from its ruins, had become the centre of excitement. Richardson's successor as No. i U. S. architect was an immaculate, brown-eyed little French-Irishman of haughty brilliance named Louis Henry Sullivan. Young Frank Wright had not been in Chicago a year before he was a draftsman in the office of Adler & Sullivan.
"Lieber Meister" is what Frank Lloyd Wright has always called Sullivan since his death in 1924. The reverence is due. Louis Sullivan saw with violent clarity that in industrial Chicago the old styles of European architecture would not serve. Chicagoans to whom the noble pile of the Auditorium Building is part of the landscape and St. Louisans familiar with the ten-story Wainwright Building do not often pause for the solemn reflection that in 1889 and 1891 these were great architectural achievements—office buildings framed in structural steel. Louis Sullivan fathered the skyscraper. In 1899 in the Carson Pirie Scott Building he used the steel structure functionally, i. e., naturally, to provide horizontal bands of window space instead of unnecessary walls.
Prairie Houses. While Louis Sullivan was working on public buildings, what few commissions Adler & Sullivan were given for private houses fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to design. At 20 he married and borrowed $5,000 from Sullivan to build his own home in Oak Park. For the sheer pleasure of it as well as to pay the debts he easily contracted for his growing family, Wright took what jobs he could get designing private houses outside the office. This angered Sullivan and in 1894, after nearly six years with the firm, Wright threw down his pencil and walked out on his own.