1·6-8 Chicago's Schlesinger & Mayer
Department Store ( 1899-1904; now Carson
Pirie Scott) combined Sullivan's geometry
and his love of graceful ornamentation.

For Sullivan "loftiness" was expressed in the
sheer, rising verticals of piers and mullions. But
Sullivan also insisted that the building have its
grace notes of ornament. It is on this last point that
modern architects have most often parted company
with Sullivan. A puritan mood was about to sweep
over architecture, with a stern emphasis on utility
and the clear expression of structure. As a sensitive
artist, Sullivan was aware of this. "A building
quite devoid of ornament may convey a noble and
dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and pro-
portion," he admitted. "I should say that it would
be greatly for our esthetic good if we would refrain
entirely from the use of ornament for a period of
years, in order that our thoughts might concentrate
acutely upon the production of buildings well
formed and comely in the nude." ⁵

What such buildings would actually look like
Sullivan himself demonstrated in the last of his
great buildings, the Schlesinger & Mayer Depart-
ment Store (now Carson Pirie Scott) in Chicago.
On the ground floor, where Sullivan was faced
with the problem of embellishing the setting for
elegant window displays, he gave full vent to his
love of rich ornament (Figure 1·6). But on the
upper stories, Sullivan left the façade a pure state-
ment of structure (Figure 1·7), revealing the hor-
izontal and vertical grid with a purity and rhythm
later architects were to refine but rarely surpass.

The panic of 1893 brought to an end the fruit-
ful partnership of Dankmar Adler and Sullivan.
For nearly a decade afterward Sullivan continued
in his office atop the Auditorium Building, but
success gradually eluded him. His final thirty years
were spent in the shadow of failure and neglect.
In his bitterness, Sullivan blamed the large Eastern
architectural firms who had turned Chicago's Co-
lumbian Exposition of 1893 into a showcase for
classic-revival structures. The effect was to identify
classic forms with pomp and dignity, and sig-
nificantly nearly every state capitol designed after
this date employs the classic dome and portico.
"Architecture, be it known, is dead," Sullivan
wrote bitterly. ⁶ It was a complaint Frank Lloyd
Wright was in turn to utter in his uphill battle to
win recognition for his own native genius. "They
buried Sullivan and they almost buried me,"
Wright said in later years. ⁷

But if Sullivan in 1924 died obscurely, he left
behind him an enduring monument, the skyscraper.
Under his hand it had found its place along with
the other great architectural types of the past.

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