[After excoriating the pretentious mangled buildings that fill the city, Louis Sullivan arrives at the Marshall Field Wholesale Warehouse.]

Here is a man for you to look at. A man that walks on two legs instead of four, has active muscles, lungs and other viscera; a man that lives and breathes, that has red blood; a real man; a virile force — broad, vigorous and with a whelm of energy. We hear so much of greatness, we see little of it. And for this little-much that I give thanks.

Four-square and brown, it stands, in physical fact, a monument to trade, to the organized commercial spirit, to the power and progress of our age, to the strength and resonance of individuality and the force of character; spiritually, it stands as the index of a mind, large enough, courageous enough to cope with these things, master them, absorb them and give them forth again, impressed with the stamp of large and forceful personality; artistically, its stands as an oration of one who knows well to choose his words, who has something to say and says it–and says it as the outpouring of a copious, direct, large and simple mind.