The man who paid for the Guaranty Building never saw a brick of it. Hascal L. Taylor, a Buffalo oil man, had bought the corner of Church and Pearl around 1890 with the stated intention of putting up the finest office building in the country. He hired Adler & Sullivan of Chicago. He died the same month the plans were finished.
So the building does not carry his name. It carries the name of the company that stepped in and built it, the Guaranty Construction Company, which is how one of the most important skyscrapers in America ended up named after a contractor.
The last thing Adler and Sullivan did together
Dankmar Adler was the engineer and the businessman. Louis Sullivan was the designer. Together they had already worked out how a tall building could be honest about the steel inside it, and Buffalo got their final major collaboration. Adler left the partnership while the work was going on.
Construction ran through 1895 and into 1896; sources differ on the exact months. Thirteen stories, roughly 150 feet, 116 feet of frontage on Church Street and 93 on Pearl. When it opened it was the tallest building in Buffalo.
The young draftsman who drew out much of the ornament was George Grant Elmslie. Sullivan detailed the cornice and the capitals himself.
"Form ever follows function"
Sullivan published the essay in Lippincott's Magazine in March 1896, the same season the building was finishing. It's called "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," and the line everybody quotes is usually quoted wrong. What he actually wrote was:
form ever follows function, and this is the law.
The Guaranty is that essay standing up. Sullivan read the office tower as a stack of different jobs and gave each one a different face: a base with big openings where the public and the shops belong, a shaft of identical office floors expressed as unbroken vertical piers, an attic for the machinery, and a cornice to end the sentence. You can see the building's organization from the sidewalk. That was the point.
The terra cotta is the argument
Here is where people misread Sullivan. "Form follows function" got adopted a generation later by modernists who used it to justify stripping ornament off everything. Sullivan meant nearly the opposite.
The steel frame at Church and Pearl is sheathed entirely in terra cotta: fired clay blocks, two full elevations of them, every one carrying a raised geometric-organic pattern derived from seed pods, vines, and branching stems. No two zones repeat carelessly. The ornament thickens around the entrance and the cornice, exactly where a person's eye lands.
The material choice was functional too. Terra cotta was fireproof, light enough to hang off a steel skeleton, and could be pressed in a mold, so a level of decoration that would have bankrupted a stone-carving job became repeatable. Sullivan used industrial mass production to make a building that reads as woven by hand.
It was renamed the Prudential Building in 1899, which is why older Buffalonians and some maps still call it that.
1974, and how close it came
A fire broke out on the tenth floor in 1974 and left severe smoke and water damage through the upper floors. Tenants left. By 1977 an owner was openly weighing demolition of a National Historic Landmark, designated in May 1975, on a downtown corner in a city with a lot of empty downtown corners.
What saved it was a coalition of local preservationists with federal help; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pushed to secure funding. A restoration costing about $12.4 million was completed in December 1983. The American Society of Civil Engineers had named it a landmark of civil engineering in 1980, while it was still half-wrecked.
The law firm Hodgson Russ bought the building in 1998 and made it their headquarters after a further renovation in the mid-2000s. In 2017 they opened a ground-floor Interpretive Center about the building and its place in the invention of the skyscraper. It's open during business hours, and Preservation Buffalo Niagara runs tours by appointment. You can walk in off the street and stand in a Louis Sullivan lobby.
Wear it
Our Guaranty tee takes the thing that makes the building unmistakable, the rhythm of piers and the terra cotta pattern between them, and puts it on cotton.
It's one design in the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark apiece. Thirty-six years and a few blocks away, City Hall answered the same question in a completely different accent, and Central Terminal answered it out on the East Side. The whole set is mapped in the full town-by-town guide.
A man paid for a building he never saw, a contractor's name ended up on it, and a fire nearly finished it. It's still there, and it's still the best-dressed thing downtown.