The Wainwright Building (also known as the Wainwright State Office Building) is a 10-story,

terra cotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracot ...

office building An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific d ...

at 709 Chestnut Street in

downtown ''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business distric ...

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, whic ...

. The Wainwright Building is considered to be one of the first aesthetically fully expressed

early skyscrapers The earliest stage of skyscraper design encompasses buildings built between 1884 and 1945, predominantly in the American cities of New York City, New York and Chicago. Cities in the United States were traditionally made up of low-rise buildings, ...

. It was designed by

Dankmar Adler Dankmar Adler (July 3, 1844 – April 16, 1900) was a German-born American architect and civil engineer. He is best known for his fifteen-year partnership with Louis Sullivan, during which they designed influential skyscrapers that boldly addr ...

and

Louis Sullivan Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloy ...

and built between 1890 and 1891. It was named for local

brewer Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast. It may be done in a brewery by a commercial brewer, ...

, building contractor, and

financier An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital most of the time the investor purchases some species of property. Type ...

Ellis Wainwright.Sullivan also designed the

Wainwright Tomb The Wainwright Tomb is a mausoleum located in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. Originally constructed for Charlotte Dickson Wainwright in 1892, the tomb also contains the remains of her husband, Ellis Wainwright. The mausoleum was ...

in St. Louis's

Bellefontaine Cemetery Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1849 as a rural cemetery, Bellefontaine is home to a number of architecturally significant monuments and mausoleums such as t ...

for his wife Charlotte Dickson Wainwright. The building, listed as a

landmark A landmark is a recognizable natural or artificial feature used for navigation, a feature that stands out from its near environment and is often visible from long distances. In modern use, the term can also be applied to smaller structures or f ...

both locally and nationally, is described as "a highly influential prototype of the modern office building" by the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artist ...

. Architect

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

called the Wainwright Building "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as

Architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

." The building is currently owned by the State of Missouri and houses state offices. In May 2013 it was listed by an episode of the PBS series 10 That Changed America as one of "10 Buildings That Changed America" because it was "the first skyscraper that truly looked the part" with Sullivan being dubbed the "Father of Skyscrapers."

Commission, design and construction

The Wainwright building was commissioned by Ellis Wainwright, a St. Louis

. Wainwright needed office space to manage the St Louis Brewers Association. It was the second major commission for a tall building won by the

Adler & Sullivan Adler & Sullivan was an architectural firm founded by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in Chicago. Among its projects was the multi-purpose Auditorium Building in Chicago and the Wainwright Building skyscraper in St Louis. In 1883 Louis Sullivan w ...

firm, which had grown to international prominence after the creation of the ten-story

Auditorium Building The Auditorium Building in Chicago is one of the best-known designs of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. Completed in 1889, the building is located at the northwest corner of South Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive. The building was d ...

in Chicago (designed in 1886 and completed in 1889). As designed, the first floor of the Wainwright Building was intended for street-accessible shops, with the second floor filled with easily accessible public offices. The higher floors were for "honeycomb" offices, while the top floor was for water tanks and building machinery.

Architecture

Aesthetically, the Wainwright Building exemplifies Sullivan's theories about the tall building, which included a tripartite (three-part) composition (base-shaft-attic) based on the structure of the classical column, and his desire to emphasize the height of the building. He wrote: " he skyscrapermust 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." His 1896 article cited his Wainwright Building as an example. Despite the classical column concept, the building's design was deliberately modern, featuring none of the

neoclassical style Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the Neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century in Italy and France. It became one of the most prominent architectural styles in the Western world. The prevailing style ...

that Sullivan held in contempt. Wainright 5

Historian Carl W. Condit described the Wainwright as "a building with a strong, vigorously articulated base supporting a screen that constitutes a vivid image of powerful upward movement." The base contained retail stores that required wide glazed openings; Sullivan's ornament made the supporting piers read as pillars. Above it the semi-public nature of offices up a single flight of stairs are expressed as broad windows in the curtain wall. A

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

separates the second floor from the grid of identical windows of the screen wall, where each window is "a cell in a honeycomb, nothing more". The building's windows and horizontals were inset slightly behind columns and piers, as part of a "vertical aesthetic" to create what Sullivan called "a proud and soaring thing." This perception has since been criticized as the skyscraper was designed to make money, not to serve as a symbol. Wainright 6

The

ornamentation An ornament is something used for decoration. Ornament may also refer to: Decoration *Ornament (art), any purely decorative element in architecture and the decorative arts * Biological ornament, a characteristic of animals that appear to serve o ...

for the building includes a wide

frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

below the deep

, which expresses the formalized yet naturalistic celery-leaf foliage typical of Sullivan and published in his ''System of Architectural Ornament'', decorated

spandrel A spandrel is a roughly triangular space, usually found in pairs, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame; between the tops of two adjacent arches or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently fill ...

s between the windows on the different floors and an elaborate door surround at the main entrance. "Apart from the slender brick piers, the only solids of the wall surface are the spandrel panels between the windows. ... . They have rich decorative patterns in low relief, varying in design and scale with each story." The frieze is pierced by unobtrusive bull's-eye windows that light the top-story floor, originally containing water tanks and elevator machinery. The building includes embellishments of

, a building material that was gaining popularity at the time of construction. One of Sullivan's primary concerns was the development of an architectural symbolism consisting of simple geometric, structural forms and organic ornamentation. The Wainwright Building where he juxtaposed the objective-tectonic and the subjective-organic was the first demonstration of this symbolism. Wainwright Building - 2012

Unlike Sullivan, Adler described the building as a "plain business structure" stating:Hoffman, p. 5

In a utilitarian age like ours it is safe to assume that the real-estate owner and the investor in buildings will continue to erect the class of buildings from which the greatest possible revenue can be obtained with the least possible outlay ... The purpose of erecting buildings other than those required for the shelter of their owners is specifically that of making investments for profit.

The building is considered the first skyscraper to forgo the normal ornamentation used on skyscrapers at the time. Some architectural elements from the building have been removed in renovations and taken to the

Sauget, Illinois Sauget ( ) is a village in St. Clair County, Illinois, United States. It is part of Greater St. Louis. The population was 141 at the 2020 census, down from 159 in 2010. Geography Sauget is located at (38.587013, -90.166690). According to the ...

storage site of the

National Building Arts Center The National Building Arts Center (NBAC) is a large collection of significant architectural, structural, and industrial items saved before these elements from the built environment are demolished. It is the physical collection of the St. Louis Bui ...

History

Upon its initial completion, the Wainwright Building was "popular with the people" and received "favorably" by critics. In 1968, the building was designated as a

National Historic Landmark A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Only some 2,500 (~3%) of over 90,000 places listed ...

and in 1972 it was named a city landmark. The Wainwright building was initially rescued from demolition by the

National Trust for Historic Preservation The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a privately funded, nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works in the field of historic preservation in the United States. The member-supported organization was founded in 1949 b ...

when the Trust took an option on the structure. Later, it was acquired by Missouri as part of a state office complex and the St. Louis Landmarks Association, in one of its early victories, is credited with having rescued the Wainwright Building from a construction project. The neighboring Lincoln Trust building (later known as the Title Guaranty building; designed by

Eames and Young Eames and Young was an American architecture firm based in St. Louis, Missouri, active nationally, and responsible for several buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. History The principals were Thomas Crane Young, FAIA and Wil ...

, built in 1898 at 706 Chestnut St.) was demolished to make way for the Gateway Mall in 1983. Carolyn Toft, Landmarks Association's executive director, stated that this building "... formed an ensemble with three other late-19th century commercial buildings, including he Wainwright Building that could not be equaled anywhere else in the country. Saving the Wainwright was important, but how much more important it would have been to save the entire group." Architect John D. Randall led an extensive letter-writing campaign to the governor and other noted officials; the campaign resulted in the restoration of the building as a state office building instead of its demolition. After a period of neglect, the building now houses Missouri state offices.

Notes

References

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External links