BY ADLER AND SULLIVAN
ž Located
at 701 Chestnut St. the Wainwright
Building was designed by the famed architects
Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in 1891.
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Upon its initial completion, the Wainwright Building was "popular
with the people" and received "favorably" by critics.
The Wainwright building was initially rescued from demolition by
the National Trust for Historic Preservation when the Trust took
an option on the structure.
The neighboring Lincoln Trust building (later known as the Title
Guaranty building; designed by Eames and Young, built in 1898 at
706 Chestnut St.) was demolished to make way for the Gateway
Mall in 1983. Architect John D. Randall led an extensive letterwriting campaign to the governor and other noted officials; the
campaign resulted in the restoration of the building as a state
office building instead of its demolition.
After a period of neglect, the building now houses Missouri state
offices.
The building was the target of a recent terrorist bombing threat
by Mark Anthony Grady due to some misunderstanding and bad
blood between him and the government.
The Wainwright building is credited for being the
first successful utilization of steel frame
construction.
The first two floors are faced in brown sandstone,
the next seven stories rise in continuous brick
piers.
Terra cotta panels of ornate foliage relief's decorate
the each floor.
The tenth story is a frieze of intertwined leaf scrolls
framing circular windows, and is capped with
Sullivan's characteristic overhanging roof slab.
The building became a City Landmark in 1972.
The Wainwright building also became a National
Historic Landmark in 1968.
The Wainwright building was commissioned by
Ellis Wainwright, a St. Louis brewer.
ž Wainwright needed office space to manage the
St Louis Brewers Association. It was the second
major commission for a tall building won by the
Adler & Sullivan firm.
ž As designed, the first floor of the Wainwright
Building was intended for street-accessible
shops, with the second floor filled with easily
accessible public offices. The higher floors were
for "honeycomb" offices, while the top floor was
for water tanks and building machinery.
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Aesthetically, the Wainwright Building exemplifies
Sullivan's theories about the tall building, which included a
tripartite (three-part) composition based on the structure
of the classical column, and his desire to emphasize the
height of the building.
He wrote: "[The skyscraper] must be tall, every inch of it
tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it the
glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be
every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer
exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a
single dissenting line."
His 1896 article cited his Wainwright Building as an
example. Despite the classical column concept, the
building's design was deliberately modern, featuring none
of the neoclassical style that Sullivan held in contempt.
Palazzo style refers to the general
shape, proportion and a cluster of
characteristics, rather than a specific
design; hence it is applied to
buildings spanning a period of nearly
two hundred years, regardless of
date, provided they are a
symmetrical with neat rows of
windows.
Neoclassical architecture is an
architectural style produced by the
neoclassical movement that began in
the mid-18th century and it
Neoclassical architecture emphasizes
the wall rather than chiaroscuro and
maintains separate identities to each
of its parts.
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The ornamentation for the building includes a wide frieze,
which expresses the formalized yet naturalistic celery-leaf
foliage typical of Sullivan and published in his System of
Architectural Ornament, decorated spandrels between the
windows on the different floors and an elaborate door
surround at the main entrance.
"Apart from the slender brick piers, the only solids of the
wall surface are the spandrel panels between the
windows..... They have rich decorative patterns in low
relief, varying in design and scale with each story."
The frieze is pierced by unobtrusive bull's-eye windows
that light the top-story floor, originally containing water
tanks and elevator machinery. The building includes
embellishments of terra cotta, a building material that was
gaining popularity at the time of construction.
ž Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.com)
ž Google (www.google.com)
THANK YOU.
OPIYO TED IRO
B02/319538/2013