Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Dankmar Adler
American, German; 19th-century
St. Louis, MO: 709 Chestnut Street
88%
Wainwright Building. 1982 (as Adler & Sullivan)
A perfect cube, unadorned and uncorrupted, would be beauty itself. But there couldn't ever be such a thing in the world. So Sullivan's ornamentation for the Wainwright building are like an apology for this human inability of ours to ever achieve, even to comprehend, an ideal. "If this building can't really be a Form," it seems to say, "at least it can be garlanded with forms, and forms and forms." Sullivan's skyscrapers, even this jewel, are not his greatest buildings: the tombs and the banks, smaller and therefore condensed, forced him more fully, more precisely to integrate ornament with overall structure. The Wainwright Building loses a small amount of its oomph at the ground level (which is to say it somewhat misses the mark on aesthetically metabolizing its size, which was unprecedented) but it also soars with those vertical bands of brick — touched with floral features at only their tops and bottoms — and halts its own rise humbly with the magnificent frieze at its peak, an emblem of heaven to crest this new church for working men. (Adler was the engineer and deserves artistic credit for creating Sullivan's canvas.) (TFS, 2025)