ullivan is a really influential figure both in Chicago and especially with Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s the one who articulates a vision of the tall office building as the sort of grand new romantic form the architect will work in that’s going to create the new American city, the new American space. And Wright clearly absorbs some of that although Wright doesn’t build tall office buildings. What Wright gets from Sullivan more than that is this vision of the architect as hero, a culture hero, somebody who will be the person who will speak the soul of the nation, the soul of the age and by giving that soul expression and form, build the whole universe that we inhabit.—William Cronon, Historian

Sullivan was very, very involved with the tall office building... he would design a building that would reveal a sense of tallness based on the steel frame. Wright took that idea...and said himself that he transferred Sullivan’s thinking to the program of the domestic. And he, in fact, did a complete 90 degree inversion, if you will, where Sullivan was involved with the idea of tallness as an expression of commercial power in the city, Wright then took the idea of shelter, related that to the horizontality of the prairie, but also the sense of reflecting the ground and therefore a sense of well being and comfort with the earth, and developed the idea of the prairie house very much out of this typological thinking.—Neil Levine, Architectural Historian