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and new needs were drastically changing the profession of architecture, and an entirely different form of building began to emerge. Architects were called upon to design structures that had never before existed: suspension bridges, grain elevators, train sheds, factories, warehouses, and high-rise office buildings. The exorbitant cost of urban real estate made maximum use of small space imperative, and the invention of the elevator — perfected in the 1880s — made soaring skyscrapers possible. Cheap steel allowed builders to rely on a strong inner cage for support instead of the traditional masonry walls and stone columns. Architects found themselves being virtually forced by modern function to break free of ancient Greek and Roman prototypes.

Hector Guimard, Entrance to the Métro, c. 1900, Paris. This wrought-iron entrance to the Paris Métro, or subway, shows the curling, organic, plantlike style of Art Nouveau that began to replace popular Neoclassical revival styles around the turn of the century. Twenty or so of sculptor Guimard’s serpentine entrances still beautify the Métro.

Charles Garnier, Opera House, 1875, Paris. The Beaux-Arts Opera House was the epitome of the reactionary style modern architects rejected. With its paired Corinthian columns, profusion of sculpture, and ostentatious ornament, it was the biggest and showiest theater in the world.

American midwestern architect Louis Sullivan’s credo of “form follows function” became the rallying cry of the day. The new designs were to express a building’s commercial purpose, without any overlay of historical ornament. It was somehow fitting that the first new school of architecture to emerge in centuries was born in Chicago, “Stormy, husky, brawling, /City of the Big Shoulders,” as poet Carl Sandburg would later call it. Chicago was a city without a past, a city of new immigrants that seemed to be making itself up as it went along.

Chicago was also the site of the 1893 World’s Fair, a huge exposition of pavilions designed to show off America’s industrial might. Ironically — and sadly — the Fair’s buildings, temporary plaster structures, were designed by East Coast traditionalists like Richard Morris Hunt and the firm of McKim, Mead & White in a Neo-Roman style totally out of sync with Chicago’s gritty reality. Dubbed the “White City,” the expo (except for Sullivan’s Transportation Building) showed not the slightest trace of originality. The Fair’s Neoclassicism crowned the Beaux-Arts style as king and set public architecture back for several decades. Meanwhile, the metacenter of modern design would later shift to New York where truly innovative architecture appeared in new structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, finished in 1883, and the first skyscraper, New York City’s Equitable Building (1871).

SULLIVAN: THE FIRST MODERN ARCHITECT. Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) virtually invented the skyscraper and, in the process, put Chicago on the cultural map. With his partner Dankmar Adler, Sullivan designed the Chicago Auditorium that opened in 1889. On opening night, dazzled by the sumptuous building, President William Henry Harrison turned to his vice-president and said, “New York surrenders, eh?”

Sullivan and Chicago were made for each other. As a boy of 12, he had wandered the streets of Boston commenting on buildings that “spoke” to him: “Some said vile things,” he wrote, “some said prudent things, some said pompous things, but none said noble things.” A short stint at the École des Beaux-Arts convinced him that Classicism was dead weight and a radical new approach was necessary. “It can [be done],” he wrote, “and it shall be. No one has — I will! ” With this resolution, he breezed into Chicago where, despite a financial depression, “there was a stir — an energy that made [me] tingle to be in the game,” he wrote.

Sullivan saw immediately that the new vertical towers demanded a wholly new aesthetic. The tall office building “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing,” he said, “rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single