"The Wainwright Building is a ten-story office building constructed 1890-91
and designed by Louis Sullivan. The first two floors are faced in brown
sandstone, severely plain; the next seven stories rise in continuous red brick
piers, those on the corners three times the width of those between the windows.
The set-back windows are alternated with spandrel panels of red terra cotta
decorated with ornate foliage reliefs, varied at each floor in design and scale.
The tenth story is a frieze of intertwined leaf scrolls framing circular
windows, and is capped with Sullivan's characteristic overhanging roof slab, its
edge also decorated...
All the technical elements that had become standard features of Chicago
office buildings in the late 1880 T s are present for the first time in
Sullivan's designs with the Wainwright: raft footings of reinforced concrete,
the braced and rivetted steel frame, the wall bays carried on spandrel shelf
angles, the fireproof-tile covering of all structural members, and movable
interior partitions. Above the skylighted ground floor, the U-shaped plan
provides an outer exposure for each office.
The quality of height in the Wainwright is emphasized through the use of a
system of closely ranked pierlike bands that give the street elevations their
forceful vertical thrust. False piers between each pair of true piers reinforce
the image of a powerful upward movement...
The Wainwright Building was the first Adler and Sullivan commission involving
the use of completely iron and steel framing. The structure was built between
1890 and 1891 for Ellis Wainwright, a wealthy St. Louis brewer with a wide range
of aesthetic interests. The resulting design represents Sullivan's most thorough
attempt to create a special form appropriate to the multi-story office block.
Sullivan explained in an essay, "The Tall Office Building Artistically
Considered," that the appearance of an office building should reflect the
activities within. First, the entrance should be obvious. The main floor shops
need large windows for advertising their wares. Above, the identical office
floors are designed to be subdivided in many different ways; thus, their windows
should be identical, none more important than any other. Finally, the attic
story terminates the building visually and houses mechanical equipment and
service spaces. This internal arrangement is clearly expressed in the exterior
of the Wainwright Building.
"Why is this building probably the greatest work of architecture of the
Nineteenth Century? How does it differ from one of the neighboring buildings of
the same time? Architecture is not decoration; it is far more. It is essential
not to mistake surface for substance. Prior to the Wainwright Building, steel
frame structures had been covered with architectural cliches and trappings which
bore no relation to the revolutionary new frame-work type of construction. They
were covered with ill-fitting clothes borrowed from load-bearing types of
construction. Sullivan not only conceived an original solution to the new
problem of the steel frame, but an architectural expression hardly surpassed
since. The Wainwright Building was not the first steel frame skyscraper; rather
it is the first architectural solution, the first architectural expression of
the high rise skeleton construction office building as such. It is
architecturally the father of all contemporary office buildings. It in great
because all elements, light and shadow, solids and voids, color, texture,
materials, decoration, proportion and rhythm, work in concert expressing
Sullivan's IDEA of a modern high rise office building. The neighboring buildings
may or may not be pleasant, but they lack the unity, the internal harmony the
coherence present in this great work of art." ....from an essay by W.
Philip Cotton, Jr., AIA, St. Louis Architect and Preservationist, discussing the
architectural significance of the Wainwright Building.
"When he brought the drawing board with the motive for the Wainwright
outlined in profile and elevation upon it and threw the board down on my table,
I was perfectly aware of what had happened. This was a great Louis H. Sullivan
moment. The tall building was born tall. His greatest effort? No. But here was
the 'skyscraper': a new thing beneath the sun, entity imperfect, but with
virtue, individuality, beauty and all its own. Until Louis Sullivan showed the
way, high buildings lacked unity. They were built-up in layers. All were
fighting height instead of gracefully and honestly accepting it. What unity
those false masonry masses have that now pile up toward the big city skies is
due to the master mind that first per ceived the high building as an harmonious
unit its height triumphant." ....Frank Lloyd Wright was working in the
office of Adler and Sullivan and apparently was the chief draftsman when
Sullivan conceived the Wainwright Building. Later Wright wrote of the birth of
the Wainwright Building in Genius & the Mobocracy which is the source of the
above quotation."
Information above from the
National Register Nomination Form
The Wainwright Building was threatened with demolition in the early 1970's.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation purchased the lease to save the
building and then sold it to the State of Missouri. The State of Missouri
renovated the Wainwright Building and it is now used for state offices.