Sullivanesque architecture is the term this blog uses for buildings designed by Louis Sullivan or inspired by him. Characterized by their elaborate ornamentation, Sullivanesque compositions are otherwise similar in expression and massing to the Commercial style and Chicago School buildings of the 1880s-1900s.
Louis Sullivan began practicing as an architect in the 1870s, working for Frank Furness and William Le Baron Jenney. He eventually was hired by Dankmar Adler and became a partner in Adler's firm in 1880. Sullivan's best-known designs, both with Adler and alone, date from 1880-1900. It was during this period that his style of ornamentation began to be emulated by others on commercial buildings. An example that I've visited (but won't be featured on this blog unless I get pictures with my actual camera, sadly, not just my phone) is the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, which has the same "base-shaft-capital" articulation and highly detailed ornamentation.
Sullivanesque buildings have two key characteristics: elaborate ornament and a proto-Modernist massing and expression. Louis Sullivan's terra-cotta ornamentation features rich foliate forms combined with geometric ones, a style he alone pioneered and is a marker of a building he designed. The buildings themselves are usually rectangular high-rises of masonry construction with a steel frame, which is expressed by the spacing of bays on the facade. His early skyscrapers such as the Wainwright Building use pilasters to express their verticality, a novel idea at the time. Other features common across Sullivan-designed or Sullivanesque buildings are arches, square, palazzo-like massing, and a "devil in the details" mentality.
Louis Sullivan's final commission (the facade of the Krause Music Store) was completed in 1922, though by that time classically-influenced and Beaux-Arts architecture had surpassed the Gilded Age designs of before. However, some of Sullivan's students such as George Elmslie were still designing buildings in their master's language.