Burnham & Root, Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (KEY WORK)

Candace Wheeler, “The Dream City,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1893: “Unlike any city which ever existed in substance, this one has been built all at once, by one impulse, at one period, at one stage of knowledge and arts, by men almost equally prominent and equally developed in power. … The whole thing seems to have sprung into being fully conceived and perfectly planned without progressive development or widening of scope. … Some one, considering not only the celerity with which this fairy spectacle was created, has called it a sketch; but it is not even than, for a sketch has at least a chance of preservation. It is a dream which will vanish when the purpose which called it into being is fulfilled. It is foredoomed to evanishment.”

Burnham & Root, Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (KEY WORK)

Louis Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St. Louis, 1890 (KEY WORK)

Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” 1896: “The architects of this land and generation are now brought face to face with something new under the sun namely, that evolution and integration of social conditions, that special grouping of them, that results in a demand for the erection of tall office buildings.”

Louis Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St. Louis, 1890 (KEY WORK) Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” 1896: “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”

Jacob Riis, Five Cents a Spot, 1888 (KEY WORK)