The Wainwright Building

The Wainwright Building
Location: 709 Chestnut Street, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Architect: Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler
Year: 1890-91
Height: 44.81 meters / 147 feet
Stories: 10

About the Wainwright Building:

Named after Missouri brewer Ellis Wainwright, the Wainwright Building revolutionized American architecture. To empathize the height, architect Louis Sullivan used a three-part composition:

• The first two stories are unornamented brown sandstone with large, deep windows.
• Uninterrupted red brick piers extend through the next seven stories. Between the piers are horizontal panels decorated with leaf ornaments.
• The top story is decorated with round windows and terra cotta leaf scroll ornaments inspired by the Notre-Dame de Reims in France.

Louis Sullivan wrote that 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." (The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, 1896, by Louis Sullivan.

In his essay The Tyranny of the Skyscraper, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called the Wainwright Building "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as Architecture."

Learn More:

• Inventory from the National Register of Historic Places