The Guaranty Building, which is now called the Prudential Building, was designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, and built in Buffalo, New York. Sullivan's design for the building was based on his belief that "form follows function". He and Adler divided the building into four zones-The basement, ground-floor zone (public areas for street-facing shops, public entrances and lobbies), office floors with identical office cells clustered around the central elevator shafts and the terminating zone (consisting of elevator equipment, utilities and a few offices).The supporting steel structure of the building was embellished with terra cotta blocks. Different styles of block delineated the three visible zones of the building. Sullivan was quoted as saying, "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." The Guaranty was never meant to be the Guaranty Building. It was the brainchild of a Buffalonian businessman Hascal T. Taylor to construct a speculative office building in the developing downtown district called "The Taylor Building." The untimely demise of Mr. Taylor as the project was reaching its apogee resulted in the Guaranty Construction Company, having been contracted to construct the structure, determining to take on the project alone.
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enbake, March 29th, 2016