Dankmar Adler came to Chicago in 1861 at the age of seventeen.  He was born in 1844 in Lengsfeld, Germany and at the age of ten migrated  with his parents to Detroit.  His father became the rabbi of Congregation Beth-el in Detroit and later of the KAM Temple in chicago.  Dankmar's formal education was cut short when he chose to become a draftsman in the office of Detroit architect E. Willard Smith, who later moved to Chicago.

He joined the Union Army in 1862 and served in the Chattanooga and Atlanta campaigns.  In the last months of the war, he was an officer of the Topographical Engineer Corps in Tennessee. He began his career in architecture in Chicago in 1866, building mostly churches, schools and courthouses.  In 1871 with the Chicago fire, everything changed, and he began to be commissioned for office buildings.

He had several partnerships during that time, the Central Music Hall being his first independent commission and most important until joining Louis Sullivan in 1881.

Louis Sullivan was born in Boston of Irish and German-French parentage.  During his childhood, his love of drawing and architecture were passionate.  When his parents moved to Chicago in 1869, Louis remained in Boston and enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's  school of  architecture in 1872.    Feeling that the course was lacking in excitement, Sullivan left after a year and went to live with his grandparents in Philadelphia, going to work for the architectural firm of Furness and Huwitt as an apprentice draftsman.

The depression of 1873 and 1874 were disastrous for the business of Furness and Hewitt, and Sullivan had to leave.  He went to Chicago in 1873.  After studying the architecture of the newly built city,  he chose William Le Baron Jenney's office to apply for a job as draftsman.   It was here that he met and worked with William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Daniel Burnham.

Still looking for excitement, Sullivan went to Paris in 1874 and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He returned to Chicago in 1875, and his first job for which he had responsibility was the interior decoration of Moody's Tabernacle.

In time  he came to admire the work of engineers, and believed strongly in the concept "form follows function."  He entered Adler's office in 1879, becoming a partner in 1880.  The first building Sullivan and Adler designed together was the Borden Block, 1879-1880 at the northwest corner of Randolph and Dearborn Streets (demolished in 1916).