CARSON PIRIE SCOTT STORE


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.

CARRÈRE AND HASTINGS

Architecture firm, United States
Carrère and Hastings’ designs of the early 20th century evoked the essence of the
American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts classicism. Simple, understated forms as well as
their coherent use of materials resulted in elegant compositions and French classical
motifs.
John Mervin Carrère (1858–1911) left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to study architecture in
Switzerland and eventually in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met his future
partner. Hastings (1860–1929), a native New Yorker, joined the architectural division of
the furniture-making and decorating firm Herter Brothers after study at Columbia
University. He worked mainly under the guidance of Charles Atwood, who at that time
was busy designing W.H.Vanderbilt’s residence on Fifth Avenue. Both men settled in
New York City in 1883, where they worked for the firm of McKim, Mead and White.
It was not until 1886—when Henry Flagler commissioned Carrère and Hastings (not
McKim, Mead and White) to build a hotel in St. Augustine, Florida—that the new
partnership officially opened offices. The success of the hotel’s Spanish Renaissance
design established the firm and brought other commissions from Flagler, who along with
John D.Rockefeller had established the American institution of Standard Oil.
Carrère and Hastings would spend the next four years under Flagler’s wing as they
assisted in the creation of what the oil baron coined the “American Riviera.” The Ponce
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de Leon (1888) was followed shortly thereafter by the Alcazar (1888), in which Spanish
and Moorish motifs intermingled. The two architects not only looked to their past designs
but also employed other influences that were appropriate to St. Augustine’s Spanish past.
The historical background of the city, as well as the designers’ own interpretation of the
Spanish style, formed the basis for the structures. In addition to the unique design, the
construction was significant in that the architects used an innovative combination of
concrete and coquina stone (a mixture of shell and coral). Flagler could not pay the
architects in cash, and their fortune was secured when they were paid in Standard Oil
stock.
Carrère and Hastings were responsible for designing some of the most luxurious
country houses in the United States. Their work reached from Palm Beach, with Flagler’s
Whitehall mansion (1902), to Long Island, with the William K.Vanderbilt, Jr., residence
(1903) in Long Neck, both sumptuous buildings whose elaborate landscaping and
gardens existed as an extension of the house plans. The architecture was articulated by
conforming to the layout of the grounds; as a result, the design of the house was initially
conceived from within. The exterior elements, although important signifiers of style,
became a secondary consideration.
Despite their important business and personal connections, it was Carrère and Hastings’
ingenuity that ensured their professional success when they won the commission for the
New York Public Library in 1897 over rivals McKim, Mead and White. The New York
City Library was probably the most vital of Carrère and Hastings’ creations as it marked
the introduction of Beaux-Arts architecture into the realm of civic building. Unlike their
hotels in St. Augustine, the library competition guidelines were strict and therefore
required conservatism and political savvy; the architects’ solution was to embrace a
French Renaissance Revivalism. The French Beaux-Arts style was easily adapted for
such a project because of the general association with France and French culture, most
notably Henri Labrouste’s influential Bibliothèque Ste. Genevieve of 1851, a luxurious
edifice that had established a standard for library buildings.
Carrère and Hastings’ design was undoubtedly chosen because it best
combined the necessary structural elements into one unified mass,
achieved by using ornamental detail in a way that made the parts come
together in a harmonious whole, an effect that is evident in the
entranceway. The triple arcade within the central pavilion projects from
the mass of the building and is flanked by decorative niches that house
sculptural details. The large arched windows flanking each side of the
entrance indicate the location of the large reading rooms within and are
just one example of external design expressing internal

New York Public Library, New York
City, designed by John Carrère and
Thomas Hastings (1897–1911)

function. However, it is in the rear of the building where this concept is most
successful. The lower wall consists of divided windows housed in narrow slits that
illuminate the book stacks, and the iron stacks are duplicated on the facade by stackshaped
windows. This modernist cue was used to soften the otherwise conservative
design and symbolized Hastings’ architectural doctrine “that direct and honest treatment
of modern problems need not imply stark ugliness nor bizarre novelty of ornament.” The
firm spent 14 years building the New York Public Library. It was this commission, along
with Carrère’s involvement in the Pan-American Exposition, that substantiated the firm
and secured their national popularity. They subsequently secured other New York
commissions including Richmond Borough Hall (1906), the New Theater (1909), and the
design for the Manhattan Bridge (1911) as well as the House and Senate Office Buildings
(1906) in Washington, D.C. In the end, the opening of the library in 1911 would have
been a grand and auspicious occasion if not for the sudden death of Carrère, who had
died unexpectedly two months earlier, after being fatally injured by a taxicab.