Graceland Cemetery's Getty Tomb: Louis Sullivan's Forgotten Masterpiece

Louis Sullivan is often called the father of skyscrapers — the man who coined the phrase "form follows function" and mentored Frank Lloyd Wright. His most celebrated works are tall commercial buildings: the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, the Wainwright in St. Louis. But many architects consider his greatest achievement to be a small tomb in a North Side cemetery. The Getty Tomb at Graceland Cemetery, built in 1890 as a memorial to Carrie Eliza Getty, wife of lumber merchant Henry Harrison Getty, is a small limestone mausoleum covered in Sullivan's signature intricate organic ornamentation. The detail is extraordinary — dense, rhythmic, botanical patterns that seem to grow from the stone. The door is bronze, cast with Sullivan's ornamental vocabulary in three dimensions. Wright wrote of it: "Outside the realm of music, what finer requiem?" Graceland Cemetery itself is worth visiting: it contains the tombs of Marshall Field, George Pullman, Potter Palmer, Philip Armour, and many other Chicago titans. Sullivan himself is buried here too, in a modest grave not far from the masterpiece he created for someone else.