Auditorium and Tower Building

Louis H. Sullivan is acknowledged as one of the first American proponents of modernism in architectural design. The Chicago engineer Dankmar Adler was Sullivan’s business partner from 1883 to 1895. The Auditorium and Tower Building was built by the firm of Adler & Sullivan between 1886 and 1889. This Romanesque Revival-style building occupies a full city block, and it originally housed a civic opera house, hotel, and offices. Some interior details of the building were probably drawn by Frank Lloyd Wright, who joined the firm in 1887. This window formed the upper half of one of four interior sash windows. These interior windows were located in the hotel lobby, behind the front desk, and they opened onto a light well. The gold and brown palette of the “antique” and opalescent glass coordinated with the color scheme of the lobby’s painted plaster decorations. All of the building’s stained glass windows were designed by Sullivan and fabricated by Healy and Millet in Chicago. This window was probably removed during building renovations in the late 1960s.