Wainwright Building

Opened in 1891 and designed by Adler & Sullivan, the Wainwright Building was their first true skyscraper. It was built for Ellis Wainwright, a wealthy St. Louis brewer. It’s a wonderful example of Sullivan’s emphasis on verticality in his tall buildings. Before Sullivan, tall buildings hid their height with an emphasis on the horizontal layers of floors. Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked on the building’s design, later said of Sullivan:

“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.”

The materials are a Symphony in Red. At the very bottom a line of red Missouri granite meets the sidewalk. The lower two stories rise with brown sandstone ashlar, and have severe rectangular openings with only the entrances framed by a carved band of ornamentation. It gains its height with continuous red brick piers from the third to the tenth floors, red terra cotta spandrels (vertical space between the windows) with ornate foliage reliefs are recessed to emphasize those vertical piers. Then it ends with a flourish with a frieze of intertwined leaf scrolls framing circular windows and cornice of that same red color of terra cotta.

It shows off Sullivan’s concept of “form follows function.” Bottom floors were retail and needed light, height, and easy & obvious entrances. Offices were all the same, they needed a smaller window and a place for a desk but could go up indefinitely. And the attic was for mechanical equipment and service spaces, so it could have smaller windows — opening up the rest of the surface for a vast area for ornamentation.

But adding to the overall plan, the floral designs on the terra cotta spandrels show a variety of imaginative patterns. And each floor repeats the same panel, but each level has a different design.