# Van Allen Building [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [SULLIVAN, Louis Henry]() - Date: 1851-1900 - Technique: Photo ## Commentary During the period when Sullivan designed banks \(the "jewel boxes"\) in small towns in the Midwest, he also designed the Van Allen Building \(1912-14\), Clinton, Iowa, and two large houses, the Babson House \(1907; destroyed\), Riverside, Illinois, and the Bradley House \(1909\), Madison, Wisconsin. The Van Allen Building, also known as Van Allen and Company Department Store, is a four-story building commissioned by John Delbert Van Allen \(1850-1928\). Constructed as a department store, it now has upper floor apartments with ground-floor commercial space. The exterior has brick spandrels and piers over the structural steel skeletal frame. Terra-cotta is used for horizontal accent banding and for three slender, vertically applied mullion medallions on the façade running through three storeys, from ornate corbels at the second-floor level to huge outbursts of vivid green terra-cotta foliage in the attic. There is a very slight cornice. Black marble facing is used around the glass show windows on the first floor. The walls are made of long thin bricks in a burnt grey colour with a tinge of purple. Above the ground floor, all the windows are framed by a light grey terra-cotta. As with Sullivan's late Midwestern banks, the Van Allen Building indicates the vigour and inventiveness of the architect during his late years. The play of the rich projecting terra-cotta ornament \(particularly the three flowerlike cartouches above the fourth-floor windows\) against the plain horizontal brick surfaces of the building was a design theme that he utilized in a good number of his late buildings. ## Related artworks - [Auditorium Building: façade \(detail\)]() - [Auditorium Building: façade]() - [Auditorium Building: general view]() - [Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company Building: entrance]() - [Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company Building]() - [Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company Building]() - [Farmers and Merchants Union Bank]() - [Guaranty Building]() - [Harold C. Bradley House]() - [Home Building Association Bank]() - [Home Building Association Bank]() - [Home Building Association Bank]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()