Wainwright Building

Louis Sullivan called the [Guaranty] Prudential Building a "sister" to his prototuype skyscraper, the Wainwright Building (1890-1892) in Saint Louis, both designed within the decade following William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building (1884) in Chicago, the first tall, metallic-framed structure. With the Wainwright, Sullivan first expressed the essential nature of the new tall buildings - the power of their verticality.

The Prudential, his most mature skyscraper, is a glorious refinement of the Wainwright.

Sullivan had a deep commitment to democratic ideals, natural forms, and to evolving a truly American architecture free of neoclassical excesses.