“Review of *Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store*, by Joseph Siry”

AboutRobert Twombly reviews Joseph Siry's *Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store* (University of Chicago Press, 1989), a study of Sullivan's last major built commission (1898–1903). Twombly praises Siry's use of newly discovered archival sources and his extensive, often previously unpublished illustrations, singling out Siry's comparison of the building's architectural ornament with its adaptation in contemporary advertising graphics as illuminating the marketing strategies of Chicago's State Street dry-goods merchants. He summarizes the book's structure: a first chapter tracing State Street's development as a retail district from Potter Palmer's 1852 arrival to Sullivan's design; a second chapter he calls the definitive account of the building's conception and execution; and a final chapter dissecting the store's show windows, ornament, entryways, and circulation to reconstruct it as a unified work of art expressing Sullivan's philosophy of form following function. Twombly frames Siry's achievement as recasting Carson Pirie Scott not as a mere precursor to Miesian structural rationalism but as Sullivan's own interpretation of American commercial culture, situating the book within a broader wave of Sullivan scholarship since 1985 that he judges has substantially enriched a previously thin literature.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28198912%2976%3A3%3C955%3ACPSLSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q