Sullivan, Louis Henry (1856–1924)

US architect. He was a leader of the Chicago School and an early developer of the skyscraper. His skyscrapers include the Wainwright Building, St Louis (1890); the Guaranty Building, Buffalo (1894); and the Carson, Pirie, and Scott Store, Chicago (1899). He was the teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Other notable works include the Chicago Auditorium (1886–90), which he designed having joined the office of Adler and Sullivan in 1881.

Born in Boston, Sullivan trained in America and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, before starting practice in Chicago in 1880. He designed many commercial and other buildings, generally favouring a variant of the Romanesque style; but in his Wainwright Building at St Louis 1890–91 he adopted a more functional style of design, expressing directly the metal-frame structure, and in his Transportation Building at the World's Fair, Chicago (1893), he made a remarkable attempt to evolve a definitely original and American design, not based on any traditional type. For the Guaranty Building, he used terracotta panels made from moulds sculptured by the architect to clad the steel frame; for the Carson, Pirie, and Scott Store he used exposed cast-iron panels with immensely inventive decoration around the shop windows, and tiled cladding over the expressed steel frame of the floors above.