Looking Up: One Last Look at Carson Pirie Scott.

So we’re going to do one more post on Carson’s and then we’re going to move on. This column was supposed to be a building a week – I realize this – it’s just that this building in particular is such a beautiful example of everything that was going on in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s; the tripartite divisions, the wish to have a “local” look to our buildings, the idea of a tall building actually realizing its verticality. All of this is due to Mr. Sullivan.

So just a few final things … the building actually had an addition put on in 1905. And frighteningly enough, Burnham was the man chosen to do the addition. I can’t imagine what Louis must have thought about this addition being put on to his building. We know he was quite passionate about what he built and possessive as well, and we have an inkling about his feelings towards Burnham, which were not favorable.

You can see on the building where the addition is. Burnham kept with the uniform look of the building but he did not exactly keep to the details outlined by Sullivan. If you’re standing on the State Street side of the building, look at the inside of the windows on the northern half of the building. You’ll see there that Sullivan added some decoration on the inside of window frame. Now look to the south and you will see that Burnham did not keep up with this detail. I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because Burnham either 1. Didn’t care about detail or 2. Just wanted to frost the hides or architecture buffs to come.

There’s one more thing about Carson’s that is so cool, and unfortunately now will be hard to see, but hopefully not for long.

If you walk into the lobby of Carson’s, not all the way inside the actual store, but just inside the doors (see if you can peek in when you’re walking by next) and notice the inside. It’s all deep colored brown with two huge columns that look like trees with flowers on the top. The cast iron from the outside of the building kind of hangs over the windows, and on a nice sunny day the sun shines through it and makes it seem like you’re standing a sun dappled forest. It’s just more of Sullivan trying to bring a nature aesthetic to our busy urban lives.

The inside of the store is not much to see, more columns with lots of flowering on top, but for Sullivan, the beauty was intended for the outside of his building, the inside was to be used for actual retailing.

Next week we’ll see how Burnham did his department store.

And then, I promise, we will move on from Burnham and Sullivan, but it’s important to see where these two men stood in relation to each other, to see how buildings progressed past them.

Looking Up: Meet Louis Sullivan

Last week we discussed Louis Sullivan building a new kind of building, the mighty skyscraper. We learned about tripartite division and how pretty much everyone followed Mr. Sullivan’s suit and built their skyscrapers much like Sullivan did.

But even though they were following his blueprint, no one was building quite like Sullivan.

Sullivan was a philosopher, he thought long and hard about his buildings artistically and structurally. While Burnham was building the prettiest buildings he could, Sullivan was building his the only way they could be. They were organic, built out of the ground (Just as a little literary aside, Ayn Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” was based loosely off of Sullivan and his student, Frank Lloyd Wright, that’s why Howard Roark’s buildings are so organic and look like they “grew” out of the ground).

Sullivan coined the term “Form Follows Function”. If you look at Carson’s, you can really see his philosophy straight up. Look at the intense cast iron ornament surrounding the windows on the sidewalk. Sullivan didn’t want old Greek ornament, but he did want ornament! His ornate work on the bottom of Carson’s is all prairie land flowers and leaves, local fauna. With all that seemingly superfluous design, he basically made a picture frame to highlight what was going on in the windows.

Also, if you look at the side of Carson’s, you’ll see that Sullivan really emphasized the horizontal. If you look at the spandrels (the horizontal lines that run across the building) you’ll see that they’re wide and large and the vertical lines (the piers) are thinner. Sullivan knew this was going to be a department store, so by framing the windows and making the building more horizontal, his form is following his function, yes?

NOW! Look at the corner of the building, the rounded corner (left). Sullivan put the entrance on the corner to make it easier to come in and out, but what really stands out is the verticality on the side of the building (note how the piers are now emphasized to draw your eye upwards). Carson’s (it was first the Schlessinger and Mayer department store) in its day was definitely a skyscraper and Sullivan said (in an intense essay on skyscrapers that the skyscraper is “lofty. ... It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.”

A proud and soaring thing. I love that. So now we see why Sullivan made sure to add some verticality to his building. To allow it to be a proud and soaring thing.

There is still even more to see on Sullivan’s building, and I’m in no rush. Take in what you can, look at this building now that it’s shut down and wonder for a moment what Sullivan might have wanted done with this space, now that it’s not a department store. What will go into those beautifully framed windows? Let’s hope it’s not a condo conversion and a stuffy old lobby. I fear Sullivan would come back and kick some ass.

Looking Up: The Triparte Division.

Okay , now is when this stuff starts to get really interesting.

Last week we talked about why Chicago was really the first to start building skyscrapers, and we’ve touched a little on why Burnham made Louis Sullivan so frackin’ mad. While Burnham relied on his go-to Grecian style, Sullivan wanted to build something...organic, something new, something no one had ever done before. (That last sentence, by the by, is a direct quote from Eddie and the Cruisers. I know Sullivan would approve).

Sullivan was very influenced by nature. He wanted to bring the beauty of nature back to the dark, black, dirty city of Chicago. He believed a building should grow much like a tree does. And like an acorn, he believed a building was going to be what it was before he even started. Confusing? A bit. But lets start with an example, the Carson Pirie Scott Building finished in 1898 (right).

Sullivan designed his buildings in three parts, officially called a “tripartite division”. Sullivan’s skyscrapers had a base (or roots) usually with big windows for retail stores, the shaft, or “trunk” of the building where the design remained the same, and the cornice, or the “flowering” on the top. The cornice is the top of the building, the part of the roof that usually overhangs the building.

Once Sullivan applied this type of design to his skyscrapers, other architects did the same thing. Most of Chicago’s historic skyscrapers (including Mr. Burnham’s, I mean come on, wha...he’s NOT going to do what everyone else is doing?) are designed in a tripartite division.

Check out this building, the aptly named Chicago Building at 7 W. Madison designed by Holabird and Roche in 1904 (left). You can clearly see the three divisions in the building. Also, the Chicago Building is one of the only buildings with the original cornice in tact.

Or lets go back to the Marquette building, also by Holabird and Roche….

Or lets even go back to the People’s Gas Building…even Burnham’s building has this tripartite division.
The tripartite division is one the hallmarks of the “Chicago School” of architecture. We’ll learn more attributes as we go on, but this one is essential.

Alas, I cannot even begin to explain the beauty of Carson’s in one entry, so we’ll come back to Carson’s next week to examine Sullivan’s philosophy of “Form Follows Function”.

Looking Up: An Introduction to Steel Frame Structures.

We’ve talked a lot about Burnham and how he struggled with developing the “Chicago School of Architecture” because he was so stuck in the architecture of the past.

You may have heard the term before, The “Chicago School”, but what does it mean? What do I mean when I say that Sullivan was building in a whole new way? What was going on here that wasn’t going on in New York or Boston?

Well it all started with the fire of 1871. Previous to the fire, most of the buildings were cast iron or wood. When the fire hit, 70,000 buildings burned, 300 people died. It scared the city, and new builders were told to only build fireproof buildings.

NYC and Boston weren’t nearly as scared of fire as we were, and our fear of fire led to the innovation of what is now known as “steel frame structure”. William LeBaron Jenney built the first steel framed structure building in 1885, (The Home Insurance Building. Alas, it no longer stands), meaning the skeleton of the metal frame was actually holding up the building. Previously to this, the walls bore the load of the building (known as “load bearing” buildings, imagine that). When building a load bearing structure, the walls had to get thicker as the building got higher. For example, check out the Monadnock building at 53 W. Jackson (above), designed by Daniel Burnham and John Root. The higher the building goes, the thicker its walls get. You can see how thick they are through the windows. (left) The Monadnock is still the tallest, occupied load-bearing structure in the world.


But once the skeleton could hold up the walls, the buildings could grow higher.

When Jenney built his skeleton frame, he basically hung the walls of the building onto the skeleton. Even today, the cladding of a building is called the "curtain wall", because you’re just hanging it right off the frame. We mostly used terra cotta as the cladding, because it was fireproof.

So, boom, in Chicago we’re building buildings no one had ever seen before...Skyscrapers. With the invention of the elevator and the revolving door (which regulated wind and heat in the building), the buildings got higher and higher. Initially, people were generally afraid of these higher buildings, so when you look at historic Chicago skyscrapers, they tend to look boxy, and big, and sturdy.

Check out the Marquette building designed by Holabird and Roche in 1895 at 140 S. Dearborn, notice how dark and heavy it is. (left)

Next week we’ll learn how Louis Sullivan managed to influence almost the entire city (including Burnham himself) with his plan to build these new-fangled skyscrapers.

Looking Up: On Vacation in Las Vegas.

Editor's Note: The regular contributor to "Looking Up" is actually in Las Vegas this week, "looking up" and around the Neon City. The regular column will resume next week. In the interim, the CPC shares with you some of our favorite pics of the Windy City, as taken by amateur photographer contributors to the CPC. Perhaps these pictures of Summer in Chicago will help to remove the sheen of Permafrost that currently blankets the entire city.

Looking Up: The People's Gas Building.

So is everyone looking up? Seriously, one of the hardest habits I had to break before really studying architecture was to actually look up. I know how it is, you’re staring at the ground looking for cash someone dropped, but trust me, you will gain more knowledge by actually just…looking up.

Okay, I want to piggyback on my last post about The Art Institute and its Beaux Arts design. Remember how I said Daniel Burnham designed the Columbian Exposition in the Beaux Arts style, and how some of the Chicago architects were pissed because Burnham was taking the easy way out? ‘Member?

Well Burnham was a business man; he was gregarious and outgoing and would happily change something on the design of his buildings if you wanted him to. He was a forward thinker, but when it came to his designs, he usually played it safe. While Louis Sullivan was designing a brand new kind of building (the skyscraper), Burnham was doing the same thing, but building these distinctively American buildings (seriously, the skyscraper is truly one of the only American art forms) in the same way he had built the worlds fair, Beaux Arts style.



Check out this building, the People’s Gas Building at the corner of Adams and Michigan. Designed in 1910, this is one of the later buildings in Burnham’s career, but look closely at his beautiful (and HUMONGOUS) skyscraper, and you will see a visual representation of Burnham’s fear. He built a skyscraper holding on for dear life to the Beaux Arts aesthetic.

We all know the People’s Gas building, probably passed by it a million times, it holds the worlds busiest Bennigans, and unfortunately, that’s about as far as most people’s knowledge goes. But next time you’re out, take a look at this amazing building and notice a few things.

First, Burnham manages to cling to his forever love, the Greek Column. In fact, he lines his buildings entrance with them, 26 feet high and 30 tons of ‘em. Also notice Burnham uses them again at the top or “cornice” of the building; he sure does love his columns. Burnham also adds some lovely animals, lions separate light globes above the columns which we know from our Art Institute lions is a very Beauxy step.

The People’s Gas Building is a really great building to watch Burnham’s style. He took the “newfangled” skyscraper and made it look as classic as possible. We end up with one of the most beautiful and opulent skyscrapers on the Michigan Avenue Cliff, but we know too, that the beauty came from what Burnham already knew how to build, not any kind of real innovation, that, he left to his partners. More on that next week.

Looking Up: The Art Institute.

The ancient Greeks called architecture the “mother of all arts”. Architecture is the way we tell our stories, the way we rebel against the status quo, the way we bring beauty to the earth in the most visible way possible. But in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, Victor Hugo wrote that “the book will destroy the building” insinuating that we will tell our stories on paper, instead of stone.

I don’t believe it.

So with this column I will attempt to reveal to you the history and the story behind the buildings that you see around you every day.

The first building on our mother-of-arts tour holds art itself, the aptly named Art Institute.



The Art Institute was designed by Sheply, Rutan and Coolidge and finished in 1893, the same year as the Columbian Exposition, the first of two World’s Fairs held in Chicago. The building is done in the “Beaux Arts” style, as most buildings of that time were. If you were an architect in the 1890’s, you had one school to go to, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and they would teach you to design a building exactly like the Art Institute: three arched doorways, Corinthian columns, the names of artists that run across the top of the building under the cornice line, a grand entryway and the use of animals are all features of a Beaux Arts building.

Take a close look at the lions. They’re different! The northern one is called “On The Prowl” and the southern one is called “In The Attitude Of Defiance”. They were designed by Edward Kemeys for the Worlds Fair and moved from Jackson Park to their current locations.

The real story of the Institute is what it represents. Daniel Burnham, designer of the Worlds Fair, decided to go with a classic Beaux Arts design in the Court of Honor for the Exposition. Some, like Chicago’s own Louis Sullivan, were horrified by his decision, believing that Burnham was taking the safe route. At the time, Chicago architects were building a new kind of building that didn’t rely on the outdated architecture of the Greeks and the Romans, and Sullivan believed that the Worlds Fair would set architecture back 50 years.

Burnham and Sullivan, oil and vinegar.

Here’s the best quote ever, Charles Hutchinson, the president of the Art Institute in 1893 said “We have made our money in pigs, but is that any reason why we should not spend it on paintings?”

Right on Mr. Hutchinson, right on.