Designed by Louis Sullivan, completed 1904 Chicago, Illinois
The Carson Pirie Scott (originally the Schlesinger and Mayer) Store in Chicago,
designed and built in 1898–1904, was the last large commercial structure designed by
Louis Sullivan. In later modernist historiography, this building was acclaimed for its
forthright expression of steel-and-glass construction in its upper elevations. As such,
Carson Pirie Scott was seen as a forerunner of the International Style in commercial
architecture of the mid-20th century, epitomized by the later tall buildings of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe. Carson Pirie Scott was also pivotal in the international development
of the department store as a building type in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From a
Postmodernist perspective of the 1980s, the building’s outstanding feature is Sullivan’s
ornamental enrichment of the show-window frames along the two-story base that served
to enhance the display of apparel to a largely female clientele.
Since 1881 the retail dry-goods firm of Leopold Schlesinger and David Mayer had
occupied parts of a preexisting structure on the southeast corner of State and Madison
Streets at the center of Chicago’s retail shopping corridor along State Street. Over the
years Schlesinger and Mayer had commissioned the firm of Adler and Sullivan (and
afterward Louis Sullivan alone) to design remodelings and expansions of their quarters.
The principal client was David Mayer, who commissioned Sullivan’s design for the new
Schlesinger and Mayer Store, first announced in May 1898. By this time, a group of new
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and projected buildings for retailing created by nearby competitors, as well as the high
annual rental value of the corner property, had accentuated the need for a new building on
the site. Sullivan’s original design called for a uniformly 12-story steel-frame structure,
including a rounded corner tower recalling that of the earlier building on the site. The
original design also featured a cladding of white Georgia marble for the steel frame above
the two-story base (the marble was changed to white enameled terra-cotta as built) and
cast bronze for the ornamentally elaborate frames of the show windows on the lower two
floors (the bronze became painted cast iron as built). The first three-bay section of the
new Schlesinger and Mayer Store, built late in 1899, was only nine stories tall because of
a height limit of 120 feet imposed on tall buildings by Chicago’s city council. A
relaxation of that limit to 240 feet in 1902 enabled construction of the corner and State
Street sections of the building in 1903–04 to the originally designed height of 12 stories,
extending seven bays down State Street south of the rounded corner.
The new building opened in October 1903 with additional interior work continuing
into the spring of 1904. After the dissolution of the Schlesinger and Mayer firm, Carson
Pirie Scott and Company acquired control of the building in August 1904. In December,
Carson’s commissioned D.H.Burnham and Company to add five bays to Sullivan’s 12-
story structure, extending it 104 feet farther south on State Street. In 1948 the
overhanging cornice and top-floor colonnade along the whole building were removed and
replaced by a low parapet wall. In 1960–61 Holabird and Root designed an eight-story
addition adjoining the Burnham bays to the south on State Street. In 1979 Carson Pirie
Scott commissioned architect John Vinci to partially restore their landmark building,
including cleaning the terra-cotta and replacing damaged pieces, repainting the cast-iron
base to approximate Sullivan’s original treatment, and restoring the main corner
vestibule’s interior. The structure has been in continuous use as a department store since
it opened over a century ago.
When it was first completed, the Schlesinger and Mayer Store was considered a model
for a modern department store and a major work in Sullivan’s oeuvre. Sullivan’s style of
ornamental ironwork along the base was related to the processes of show-window display
and newspaper advertising of women’s apparel, whose seasonal variations and elaborate
lacework corresponded to the ornament’s foliate motifs and intricate design. Like other
stores nearby, the first- and second-story plate-glass show windows also had upper lights
filled with Luxfer prismatic glass to refract daylight into the depths of the sales floors.
Originally, the store’s architectural interiors included a third-floor ladies waiting and
writing room and an eighth-floor restaurant featuring ornamentally elaborate sawed
mahogany screens and columns with capitals of ornamental plasterwork, like the capitals
visible atop the columns of the corner vestibule and the first, second, third, and fourth
sales floors.
The need to maximize spatial openness and interior daylight for shopping
(in an era when arc lamps were still the principal interior electrical fixtures
for such buildings) led to Sullivan’s design for the upper exterior
elevations of Chicago windows (a wide, central, fixed glass pane flanked
on either side by an operable sash window). Sullivan’s upper fenestration
is distinguished by its precise proportions (windows twice as wide as they
are high, columns one-sixth the width of windows, and lintels between
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stories one-half the height of windows) and reveals of ornamental terracotta,
a detail not reproduced in the Burnham bays down State Street.
Overall, the Carson Pirie Scott Store exemplified Sullivan’s often stated
commitment to a modern American architecture wherein forms followed
functions, in this case meaning the criteria of a department store as a novel
building type then undergoing rapid development in metropolitan centers
such as Chicago’s State Street. Like Adler and Sullivan’s and Sullivan’s
own earlier tall office buildings of the 1890s, as well as Sullivan’s series
of later bank buildings from 1906, Carson Pirie Scott exhibits the
characteristics of Sullivan’s architectural style: clear, simple massing; consistently precise proportions; forthright constructive
expression; and botanically inspired ornament rendered in a variety of materials inside
and out. This style embodied his broader aim of creating a modern architecture that
eschewed dependence on historical styles and that would be culturally appropriate for the
United States of the early 20th century.
