[6] Sullivan was born to a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List (who had emigrated to Boston from Geneva with her parents and two siblings, Jenny, b.

The steel weight-bearing frame allowed not just taller buildings, but permitted much larger windows, which meant more daylight reaching interior spaces.

Sullivan attributed the concept to Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman architect, engineer, and author, who first asserted in his book, De architectura (On architecture), that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas – that is, it must be "solid, useful, beautiful.

While his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau or Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terra cotta, and ranging from organic forms, such as vines and ivy, to more geometric designs and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage.

Probably the most famous example of ornament used by Sullivan is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson Pirie Scott store on south State Street.

The cornice is covered by Sullivan's trademark Art Nouveau vines and each ground-floor entrance is topped by a semi-circular arch.

Because Sullivan's remarkable accomplishments in design and construction occurred at such a critical time in architectural history, he often has been described as the "father" of the American skyscraper.

Chicago was replete with extraordinary designers and builders in the late years of the nineteenth century, including Sullivan's partner, Dankmar Adler, as well as Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root.

That and another Root design, the Masonic Temple Tower (both in Chicago), are cited by many as the originators of skyscraper aesthetics of bearing wall and column-frame construction, respectively.

In 1890, Sullivan was one of the ten U.S. architects, five from the east and five from the west, chosen to build a major structure for the "White City", the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893.

By both temperament and connections, Adler had been the one who brought in new business to the partnership, and following the rupture Sullivan received few large commissions after the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store.

He obtained a few commissions for small-town Midwestern banks (see below), wrote books, and in 1922 appeared as a critic of Raymond Hood's winning entry for the Tribune Tower competition.

Sullivan worked on the series with Journal editor Charles Harris Whitaker, who advised he "plot out the material by periods.

"[14] The Autobiography of an Idea began its publication in the June 1922 Journal for the American Institute of Architects[15] and upon its conclusion was published as a book.

A modest headstone marks his final resting spot in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown and Lake View neighborhood.

Nickel had compiled extensive research on Adler and Sullivan and their many architectural commissions, which he intended to publish in book form.

The extensive archive of photographs and research that underpinned the book was donated to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

As finally published, the book, The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, was authored by Richard Nickel, Aaron Siskind, John Vinci, and Ward Miller.

[20] When he read an article about the planned demolition in Clinton, he uprooted his family from their home in southern California and moved them to Iowa.

With the vision of a destination neighborhood comparable to Oak Park, Illinois, he set about creating a nonprofit to save the building, and was successful in doing so.

He relocated his family to Buffalo, New York to save Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin House from possible demolition.

A collection of architectural ornaments designed by Sullivan is on permanent display at Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

It features a scale model of the building by David J. Carli, Professor of Engineering at the State University of New York at Alfred.

[23] That the fictional character of Henry Cameron in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead was similar to the real-life Sullivan was noted, if only in passing, by at least one journalist contemporary to the book.

[26] The fictional Cameron is, like Sullivan – whose physical description he matches – a great innovative skyscraper pioneer late in the nineteenth century who dies impoverished and embittered in the mid-1920s.

[27] The major difference between novel and real life was in the chronology of Cameron's relation with his protégé Howard Roark, the novel's hero, who eventually goes on to redeem his vision.

That Roark's uncompromising individualism and his innovative organic style in architecture were drawn from the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright is clear from Rand's journal notes, her correspondence, and various contemporary accounts.

[30] After decades of estrangement, Wright would again become close to the now-destitute Sullivan in the early 1920s, the time when Roark first comes under the likewise impoverished Cameron's tutelage in the novel.

After the triumphs earlier in his career, Wright came increasingly to be viewed as a has-been, until he experienced a renaissance in the latter half of the 1930s with such projects as Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Headquarters.