Louis Sullivan, Son of Irish Immigrant, Born in Boston on September 3, 1856

Photo Courtesy of New York Public Library Archives

 The family lived at 22 South Bennett Street in Boston’s South End, and he attended local public schools, including English High School.

Sullivan spent his summers with his grandparents in South Reading in a bi-lingual household and he advanced quickly as a student, attending MIT at age16 and then moving to Paris to complete his studies before settling in Chicago right after the Chicago Fire of 1871, where his services were in great demand.

Sullivan’s father Patrick Sullivan, an itinerant dance teacher from Ireland, arrived in Boston on the ship The Unicorn in July 1847 just weeks after Deer Island’s quarantine station had opened for hundreds of passengers too sick to come ashore. According to Louis, in his book, Autobiography of an Idea, his father “immediately set up a (dance) academy and was successful. He was always successful.”

In his autobiography, Louis talks fondly of the family’s Irish maid, Julia Head, who raised him with Irish fairy tales, songs and the Irish language, greatly influencing his imagination.  He writes that Julia had sent him “vibrating at the suggestion of an unseen power and he became rigid in his resolve to penetrate the mystery that seemed to lie back in the tales she told.”

Boston Globe writer Margo Miller referred to Sullivan as “one of the great fantasists, working where folktales meet science fiction….All of his ornaments reproduce a battle of nature fighting the control of art – or technology – and art fighting back.”

Louis Sullivan was part of a 19th century movement to create an American style of architecture that acknowledged the masterpieces of European design but didn’t copy them. He was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, and influenced a number of architects known as the Prairie School.

Sullivan coined the adage that ‘form ever follows function,’ and his buildings in the Midwest, just over ten stories high and considered gigantic by standards of the time, prompted the new word skyscrapers. His most famous structures are the Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the Prudential Building in Buffalo.