A short magazine essay that asked what a steel-framed office tower should look like, answered that its form should follow from its functions (shops below, a stack of identical offices, machinery on top) and gave modern architecture its most quoted slogan.
By the 1890s the steel frame, the passenger elevator and rising land values in the centre of Chicago and New York had produced a new building type for which the classical rulebook had no answer. Sullivan, the partner of the engineer Dankmar Adler, had already built the Wainwright Building in St Louis (1890–91) and was designing the Guaranty Building in Buffalo when he published this essay in the March 1896 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine.
He begins not with style but with the practical needs of the type: a basement for boilers and plant; a ground floor of shops and banks with wide openings; a second storey reached by stairs; above it an indefinite number of office floors, all alike because every office is alike; and at the top an attic for the tanks, pipes and machinery that close the building’s circulation. The exterior, he argues, should state these facts plainly and, above all, it should express height. His own phrase is that the tall building must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation from bottom to top as a unit without a single dissenting line.
From the observation that in nature every living form is the outward sign of its inner life, Sullivan draws a general law, stated in the essay as “form ever follows function”. He meant it as an organic and even poetic principle, not as a licence for bare utility (his own buildings are covered in ornament of great delicacy), but the shortened slogan became the watchword of functionalism.
The book, part by part
I The problem
A new type born of steel, the elevator and the price of land: how is the architect to give it a dignified and truthful form, rather than piling one classical order on another?
II The three parts
Shops and entrance below, the office floors in the middle, the attic above: the equivalent, Sullivan notes, of the base, shaft and capital of a column, though he derives it from use rather than from precedent.
III Form follows function
The law that every form in nature expresses its function, and that architecture should do the same; the conclusion that the tall building should be tall in every line.
Rules: Form follows function