This film marks the film on the life and career of Louis Sullivan in-depth as an artist and what he tried so hard to do for American architecture.  Much of the footage is made up of moving shots that trace building details and ornamentation not readily seen by the naked eye. Sullivan’s quixotic belief in the unbreakable connection between social values and architecture is closely examined, as are the cultural forces at work at the end of the nineteenth century that made it impossible for Sullivan’s aesthetic to take root in the American consciousness. The film presents him as an artist who never felt completely comfortable in either the vanishing world of nineteenth-century romanticism or the unsentimental and mechanized one of the twentieth century. And just as important, the film looks at how Louis Sullivan’s genius exerted such a tremendous influence on the development of the most famous architect who ever lived, Frank Lloyd Wright.

He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000 award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the American profession bestows on any of its members.  His private Modernist compound in New Canaan CT, known as the Glass House, is now open to the public.  Visit TMH's extensive online archive of his Modernist houses.