The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition:
Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s
By Katherine Solomonson
Cambridge University Press, 370 pages, $80
For readers of the Chicago Tribune, 1922 was a banner headline year. Announcing the international competition to design its new skyscraper, the paper declared the structure would be “the ultimate in civic expression–the world’s most beautiful office building.”
Rarely has architecture been thrust so insistently into public view. Compared to the media frenzy of this self-structured event, the recent design wars over Frank Gehry’s and Renzo Piano’s schemes for The New York Times’ new headquarters are nothing. For six months, the Tribune regaled its readers with the progress of the competition, which was run like an advertising campaign. It offered prize money of $100,000 (more than $800,000 today), and it detailed the competition’s every phase, featuring alternative designs, offering lessons in architectural history and encouraging readers to submit their own designs. After the winner was chosen, it published a picture book–“The International Competition for a New Administration Building”–with perspective sketches of all but three of the 260 entries, and an exhibition of the drawings traveled to museums throughout the country. When the building opened, 20,000 people toured the entire interior, admiring the lobby, riding the elevator and taking in the view from the top.
The Tribune’s efforts to acquire readers by publicizing its building project found a ready audience. As Katherine Solomonson shows in “The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s,” the public was fascinated by tall buildings during this period. The distinctive towers of company headquarters such as the Montgomery Ward Building, as well as the Wrigley Building across Michigan Avenue from the site of Tribune Tower, were featured as souvenirs, on postcards and in product ads. Their memorable forms provided the best possible advertising for companies who wanted to elevate their image above the level of crass commercialism by means of “spiritual ideals” and “artistic beauty.” But because regulations limited inhabited building height, Chicago had few such towers. Thus the Tribune could tap into the public’s interest as a powerful means of self-publication, a weapon for increasing circulation at the expense of its great rival, the Chicago Herald and Examiner.
Solomonson devotes a chapter to the competition process, which was the personal project of Robert McCormick, co-editor of the paper with Joseph Patterson. Succeeding chapters decode the significance of the 260 entries. Solomonson assembles a many-sided picture of the forces leading to the design and construction of the building.
Although it followed guidelines of the American Institute of Architects, only one architect sat on the judges panel, and McCormick exercised far more control over the decision process than the institute would have liked. The paper made much of the fact that it was an international competition, but two of the three top prize winners were, if not predetermined, certainly well-known to the jury. All three designs were neo-Gothic in style. The first-prize winners, the New York collaboration of John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, were famous for Gothic buildings at East Coast colleges. Second prize went to Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, whose stripped-down Gothic style appealed to modernists and traditionalists. Third prize went to the Chicago firm of Holabird and Roche, which had designed the Tribune’s existing building in the Loop.
The choice of Howells and Hood was portrayed as a national victory for the U.S. This result has been a disappointment to many architects, however, who see the building in terms of what it could have been. Modernists have longed to see the pure geometries of Walter Gropius’ constructivist scheme on the Chicago skyline, whereas postmodernists have been wistful about the opportunity to construct Adolf Loos’ Corinthian column. But Solomonson’s careful account of the many factors influencing the competition demonstrates that, within its own national and civic context, these latterly famous entries were not the most significant ones–in fact most of the international entries arrived too late to be considered.
The reasons for the choice of a neo-Gothic design did not reside in the possibly venal arrangements for picking a winner. As Solomonson shows, the winning scheme’s Gothic forms were polysemic. In architectural circles, they stood for the skeleton steel structure of skyscrapers as well as a return to a unified and organic society with spiritual values. In the eyes of the Tribune’s editors–and, they hoped, the public–a Gothic building had value as the symbol of European civilization saved by brave American soldiers in World War I and as a rival to New York’s skyscrapers. Modeled on the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral in France and the Cathedral of St. Rombaut in Mechelen, Belgium, the tower also stood for artistic tradition. While Chicago School architects condemned its pastiche of historical influences, the Tribune saw the flying buttresses and masonry arches as embodying historical continuity.
The Tribune promoted its tower design as expressive of the unity of commercial efficiency, civic contribution and spiritual values. But some observers viewed its individualism as anti-civic. During this period, the balance between civic and commercial activity in Chicago was slanted overwhelmingly toward business. The recommendations of Burnham’s and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago for a grand civic center to dominate the skyline had been ignored, as had its recommendation that building mass be subordinated to a larger vision of city form. Chicago’s new City Hall was far overshadowed in size and grandeur by its commercial counterparts.
In this emphasis on the commercial over the civic, however, Chicago was not alone. Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City for Three Million, designed at the same time, proposed as a utopian possibility the same dominance of business. His city center was composed of corporate towers but contained no governmental center. According to its critics, Tribune Tower contributed to Chicago’s repudiation of the idea of an overall civic order. Because property in the Loop was scarce, it was located at the bridgehead of North Michigan Avenue where it crossed the Chicago River. While this special location did constitute a gateway to a new commercial district, the tower’s assertive verticality contradicted Burnham’s and Bennett’s concept that commerce be subordinated to the civic realm.
In Solomonson’s careful and many-sided account, Tribune Tower becomes a pole around which the whole pattern of a society turns. Building up from details, she draws together a fascinating social and material history. The implicit effect of her measured presentation of the competition entries in relation to their political, social and intellectual context is to question the way architects have viewed the competition results. Not only Tribune editors but also Tribune readers understood the form and symbolism of the tower in terms of expression–expression of commercial identity, spiritual values and civic status. Architecture’s meanings were created within a complex dialogue about ideas and values, and they were directed by media. Form was not understood as such, but acquired meanings at the intersections of many different discourses.
Part of the fascination of this book lies in the detail with which Solomonson backs up this complex view of the role of building in society. But this very munificence also presents something of a problem. Although the introduction and the end of each chapter outline Solomonson’s historical and theoretical points, one sometimes loses sight of them in the accumulation of evidence. Competition entries appear and reappear under different themes, making it difficult to keep them straight. A stronger emphasis on the storyline–taking a cue from the Tribune’s own treatment of the competition–might have helped.
Nonetheless, the book represents a landmark effort to connect architectural discourse to the larger culture of which it is a part. While the Tribune building competition–deeply embedded in the ideas and values of 1920s Chicago and powerfully controlled by the newspaper–is a special case, this fine social history offers an exemplary model for anyone seeking to understand what buildings mean to people.
