Dankmar Adler had hired Louis Sullivan in…

Dankmar Adler had hired Louis Sullivan in 1879; he had become a partner in the firm a year later, marking the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years.

Adler is the firm’s engineering designer and administrator, and Sullivan is the planner and artist.

It is at this firm that Sullivan will deeply influence a young designer named Frank Lloyd Wright, who will come to embrace Sullivan's designs and principles as the inspiration for his own work

Louis Henry Sullivan was born to an Irish-born father, Patrick Sullivan, and a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List, both of whom had immigrated to the United States in the late 1840s.

He had grown up living with his grandmother, Anna Mattheus List, in South Reading (now Wakefield), Massachusetts.

Louis had spent most of his childhood learning about nature at his grandparent’s farm.

In the later years of his primary education, his experiences varied quite a bit.

He would spend a lot of time by himself wandering around Boston exploring every street and looking at the surrounding buildings.

Around this time, he had developed his fascination with buildings and he decided he would one day become a structural engineer/architect.

While attending high school, Sullivan had met Moses Woolson, whose teachings had made a lasting impression on him, and will nurture him until his death.

After graduating from high school, Sullivan had studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan had entered MIT at the age of sixteen.

After one year of study, he had moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 had dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go.

At that point, Sullivan had moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and had worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building.

After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan had moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year.

Renaissance art inspires Sullivan’s mind, and he is influenced to direct his architecture to emulating Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicating the styles of earlier periods.

Returning to Chicago, he had begun work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman.

Johnston & Edleman had been commissioned for the design of the Moody Tabernacle, with the interior decorative "fresco secco" stencils (stencil technique applied on dry plaster) designed by Sullivan.