Louis Sullivan

Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect and critic often called the father of the skyscraper and, alongside his forerunners, a father of architectural modernism. In partnership with the engineer Dankmar Adler from 1879, most productively through the design of Chicago's 1889 Auditorium Building, he pioneered a steel-framed, vertically emphatic skyscraper architecture that rejected historical revival styles in favor of ornament grown from natural form and organized around function. His maxim form follows function, refined by his own student Frank Lloyd Wright into form and function are one, became one of the founding statements of modern architecture. Sullivan employed Wright at Adler and Sullivan from 1888 to 1893, and Wright, who called him lieber Meister, beloved master, in German, credited him for the rest of his life as the only architect whose influence he ever acknowledged, even after the two parted on bad terms when Sullivan discovered Wright had been taking outside bootleg house commissions in violation of their agreement.