Get Creative at Home: Create Stamped Greeting Cards Inspired by Architectural Designs
Learn about architect Louis Sullivan’s stylized designs, and then find unexpected objects to use as stamps on handmade cards or artworks.
By Melissa Katzin, Manager of Family Programs, High Museum of Art
Louis H. Sullivan (American, 1856–1924) was an architect and designer, and he spent most of his career in Chicago. Sullivan is known as the “father of skyscrapers” for his use of new developments in engineering to create high-rise buildings like the ones we see in cities today.
The Chicago Stock Exchange Building was one of the first modern skyscrapers, completed in 1894 and reaching thirteen stories high. Sullivan and his team designed the exterior and the interior of the building, everything from staircases to elevators to friezes, which are decorative horizontal bands on furniture, walls, or the side of buildings. Sullivan believed that the architecture and decorative elements of a building should be in harmony with each other.
Sullivan designed Elevator Grill from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building as part of the decorative yet functional elements of the building. An elevator grille is the door in front of an elevator that opens and closes for you to get on or off. Nowadays, elevator grilles are usually plain metal, but in the past, they were often highly decorated.
To create the design for Elevator Grill from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, Sullivan used a pattern. A pattern is when an element or a shape is repeated in a predictable way. Sullivan’s pattern is a series of x’s and o’s, meant to reference seedpods from the crops of the Midwest.
Can you find any patterns in or around your home? Patterns can be created, like the stripes on a T-shirt, or natural, like a row of trees in the park.
Get Creative at Home!
Patterns start with a motif — or an element that is repeated — such as Sullivan’s x’s and o’s in Elevator Grill from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Look closely at Renee Stout’s We Were Laughing on the Sun Porch. Can you identify the motif she used for the yellow and blue wallpaper? Can you find any other patterns in her painting?
A simple way to make a pattern is through stamping. Many different materials can be used as stamps — the yellow and purple dotted pattern on Nellie Mae Rowe’s Fish on Spools might have been made with a pencil eraser or the end of a paintbrush dipped in paint!
Create your own pattern using a motif from a found object!
Find something in your home or outside that you can dispose of or reuse after, such as a leaf, a piece of pasta, an old sponge, or a pencil eraser.
Grab some paint and a folded piece of a paper or a blank greeting card — if you don’t have paint, try using food coloring or even just water!
Dip your object lightly into the paint, and then press it onto the paper. Repeat as many times as you’d like to create your pattern!
