Louis Sullivan gave the skyscraper its 
grammar. While steel frames were 
already rising in Chicago, he made height legible. Not a stack of floors—a vertical organism with base, shaft, and crown. Structure became sentence.

In 1896, he wrote the line that would echo across continents: form ever follows function. For Sullivan, this wasn’t austerity. Function generated expression. Offices demanded vertical rhythm; retail demanded openness at the corner. Even his ornament—lush, botanical, tightly disciplined—grew from structure rather than masking it. Controlled organicism, never chaos.

Working within the Chicago School’s steel logic, he translated engineering into architecture people could read. And in his studio stood a young Frank Lloyd Wright, who later called him “dear master.” The lineage is direct. The skyline changed accordingly.