Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building

Schlesinger and Mayer hired Sullivan to modernize their State Street store in stages between 1899 and 1904, and what he gave them was less a facade than an argument for the shop window: broad steel-framed openings, since nicknamed Chicago windows, run almost corner to corner, flanked by narrow strips of white terracotta cut into a grid so fine it reads as texture rather than ornament from across the street. At the rounded corner entrance, where cast iron was practical at pedestrian height, Sullivan let his invention run loose: a two-storey screen of intertwined foliate ironwork with no real precedent in his own earlier work. Daniel Burnham's firm extended the design east along Madison Street in 1906 after Sullivan, no longer in demand, lost the commission for the addition. Carson Pirie Scott bought the store in 1904 and traded there for a century before closing in 2007; the building, now called the Sullivan Center, holds offices, a design school and, since 2012, a Target store behind Sullivan's own ironwork.