From Louis Sullivan, Prophet of Modern Architecture by Hugh Morrison, 1935

[T]he Roman Classic style, executed in plaster and staff on temporary wood and steel frameworks, with the exteriors all of a pure and chaste white, was agreed upon for all the major buildings. The disposition of the buildings was determined along major axial lines, formally symmetrical, and affording vistas along lagoons, the whole tied together by a uniform cornice line at a height of sixty feet.

New-York Daily Tribune, October 22, 1893

The wonderful group of buildings, with their marvelous, beautiful surroundings of land and water, created as if by magic, cannot adequately be described or portrayed by either pen or pencil. The eminent architects and artists to whom all this is due laid under tribute the traditions and models of historic art, and all the ripe experience of the distant and the past were combined with the present to form the most beautiful and remarkable collection of architectural monuments that this world has ever witnessed.
                                                                                                                                               —Charles S. Smith, president of the New York Chamber of Commerce

From The Autobiography of an Idea by Louis Sullivan, 1924

The crowds were astonished. They beheld what was for them an amazing revelation of the architectural art, of which previously they in comparison had known nothing. To them it was a veritable Apocalypse, a message inspired from on high. Upon it their imagination shaped new ideals. They went away, spreading again over the land, returning to their homes, each one of them carrying in his soul the shadow of the white cloud, each of them permeated by the most subtle and slow-acting of poisons; an imperceptible miasm within the white shadow of a higher culture. . . . The virus of the World’s Fair, after a period of incubation in the architectural profession and in the population at large, especially the influential, began to show unmistakable signs of the nature of the contagion. There came a violent outbreak of the Classic and the Renaissance in the East, which slowly spread westward, contaminating all that it touched, both at its source and outward. . . .
                The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated deep into the constitution of the American mind, effecting there lesions significant of dementia.

André Bouilhet, commissioner of the Central Union of Decorative Arts in Paris, 1894

It is a great city of palaces the architecture of which awakens no novel sensations in Europeans for we find here again more or less accomplished imitations of the monuments of Greece and Rome. With its domes, with its colonnades, its porticoes, its terraces, its gardens filled with statues, one might think he was looking at the realization of the dream of a young architect in quest of a magnificent projet which might open to him the portals of the Villa Medici. Only one of these palaces, which struck me the first time that I entered Jackson Park, is truly original; it is the work of a young American architect . . . Mr. Sullivan. I refer to the Transportation Building. It is one of the most successful and original buildings, well conceived and of fine proportions; and it has the special merit of recalling no European building.