Sullivan Center
- Architect
- Louis Sullivan
- Style
- Chicago School
- City
- Chicago, IL
- Collections
- adler & sullivanthe chicago school
The Sullivan Center, originally the Schlesinger & Mayer store and later Carson Pirie Scott, is a State Street department store Louis Sullivan designed in 1899 and later expanded for the dry-goods partnership of Leopold Schlesinger and David Mayer, who had met working together before the Chicago Fire of 1871 and opened their store in 1872. H.G. Selfridge & Co. bought the building in 1904 but sold it within weeks to Otto Young, who leased it to Carson Pirie Scott at $7,000 a month — a tenancy that lasted until 2006. Daniel Burnham added to the building in 1906 and Holabird & Root in 1961.
the building
The curved corner entrance. Sullivan wrapped the building's State-and-Madison corner in an elaborately ornamented cast-iron entrance, curving the facade around the intersection rather than meeting it at a hard angle — the building's most photographed feature, worked in intricate organic ornament over the storefront windows.
Cast iron over steel. Behind Sullivan's cast-iron ornamental screen, the building is a straightforward steel-frame department store; the decoration is applied at the base and around the windows rather than structural, concentrating Sullivan's famous organic ornament where pedestrians would actually see it.
the style
Sullivan's ornament here is his most fully developed expression of the organic, plant-derived ironwork that became his signature — used not as historicist costume but as a modern material, cast iron, shaped into forms meant to feel grown rather than applied.
More on Chicago Schoolthe architect
Louis Sullivan, a founding figure of the Chicago School and mentor to a young Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the original 1899 store for Schlesinger & Mayer; Daniel Burnham and Holabird & Root each added to the building in later decades without altering Sullivan's original streetfront.
More on Louis Sullivansignificance
The Sullivan Center has been a Chicago Landmark since 1975, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a National Historic Landmark. It's also part of the Loop Retail Historic District. Carson Pirie Scott occupied the building for more than a century, from the early 1900s until 2006.
more by Louis Sullivan
nearby
- Chicago Building
- Carson Pirie Scott & Company Building
- Silversmith Hotel
- One North State
- Inland Steel Building
- Reliance Building