Tribune Tower: The 1922 Competition That Shaped a Decade

Tribune Tower stands at 435 North Michigan Avenue, on the north bank of the Chicago River immediately east of the Wrigley Building. Four hundred and sixty-three feet to the top of the buttresses. Thirty-six floors. Indiana limestone over a steel frame. The crown is a ring of flying buttresses modeled on the lantern tower of Rouen Cathedral in France. It was completed in 1925. The architects were John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, who won an international competition staged by the Chicago Tribune in 1922.

The competition was the event. The tower is what got built. The thing that ran on for the rest of the decade in every American architecture office was not the Gothic crown on Michigan Avenue. It was the runner-up.

The competition

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune was approaching its seventy-fifth anniversary and wanted a new headquarters. The publisher, Robert R. McCormick, decided the building should be a public demonstration of the paper's status as a national institution. The Tribune offered a hundred thousand dollars in prize money, fifty thousand to the winner, in the largest architectural design competition that had ever been staged for a single building. Entries came from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. More than 260 designs were submitted from twenty-three countries.

The brief asked for a tower that would be the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world. The lot was a corner site, narrow on Michigan Avenue, deeper toward the east. The program was straightforward: a working newspaper headquarters, offices, printing facilities, lobbies. The architectural language was open. Entrants submitted Gothic towers, Beaux-Arts piles, Art Deco prisms, sculpted setbacks, geometric abstractions. Some entries were buildable; many were not. The competition was a global referendum on what a 1920s American skyscraper should look like.

The winner was the Howells and Hood Gothic design. The drawings show a sober vertical mass of Indiana limestone, restrained Gothic detail at every level, rising to the Rouen-cathedral buttress crown. The jury favored it for its dignity, its New York and Chicago lineage in the Woolworth Building style, its legibility as a serious commercial building dressed as a cathedral. McCormick announced the winner in December 1922. Construction began in 1923 and finished in 1925.

The runner-up

Second place went to the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, then largely unknown in the United States. His design was profoundly different. The Saarinen entry was a vertically articulated tower with no historicist ornament, rising in a series of stepped setbacks that pulled inward as the tower climbed. The verticality was emphasized by uninterrupted piers running the full height of each setback section. There was no Gothic vocabulary. There was no Beaux-Arts horizontal banding. The composition was abstract, massed, and almost cinematic in its movement upward.

Saarinen received twenty thousand dollars and the publication of his drawings in the competition catalogue. The catalogue circulated through every architecture school in the United States within months. Architects who had not yet drawn a setback tower drew one after seeing it. The drawing became a teaching reference.

The American architect Louis Sullivan, in a celebrated essay in Architectural Record in 1923, declared that Saarinen's design was the better of the two and would prove the more influential. Sullivan was, in this case, correct.

What the runner-up produced

Across the next decade, the dominant new American skyscraper form was a tower with stepped vertical setbacks pulling inward toward a slim crown. The shift was driven by several forces: the 1916 New York Zoning Resolution had introduced the regulatory setback envelope; structural improvements were enabling taller towers; the Art Deco aesthetic was emerging from Paris. But the visual template, the way architects drew the new tower, owed a substantial debt to the Saarinen drawing of 1922.

The Gulf Building in Houston, 1929. The American Radiator Building in New York, 1924, designed by Raymond Hood himself, the Tribune Tower's winning architect, in a vocabulary that owed more to Saarinen than to Hood's own Gothic drawing. The Chicago Board of Trade Building, 1930. The Empire State Building, 1931, in many of its setback decisions. The pattern repeats. The drawing the Tribune jury did not pick became the drawing every American skyscraper office referred to.

This is the unusual outcome the competition produced. The building that got built is a competent and well-loved Gothic tower that no one ever copied at scale. The drawing that did not get built is the visual ancestor of the next decade of the American skyline.

Hood himself never built another Gothic tower. After the Tribune was completed, he moved through the American Radiator Building, the Daily News Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and Rockefeller Center, in a steadily abstracting, increasingly modernist vocabulary. The architect who won the Tribune competition spent the rest of his career working in a vocabulary closer to the one he had beaten.

The stones

The other thing the Tribune Tower wears on its surface is a collection of fragments. Embedded in the lower exterior walls, at sidewalk level along the building's two main elevations, are roughly 150 stones collected by Tribune correspondents from monuments around the world. The Parthenon. The Great Wall of China. Notre-Dame de Paris. The Taj Mahal. Westminster Abbey. The Alamo. A fragment from the Berlin Wall, added later. A piece of the World Trade Center, added later.

The stones are a self-promotional gesture. They are also a documentary record of a particular American confidence in the 1920s about the country's place in world civilization. They read, more than a century on, as a slightly awkward and somewhat charming claim that the Tribune's headquarters had earned a place in the global heritage of monuments. Architects do not embed stones from the Parthenon in their buildings anymore. The 1920s did. The building is the most legible single artifact of that confidence in Chicago.

What to look for

Stand on the south side of Hubbard Street or on the river-bank Riverwalk and look up at the full elevation. The building reads as a vertical Gothic mass with restrained ornament. The crown is the most distinctive element. The flying buttresses are arranged in a ring around a small lantern tower. The shape is a faithful reduction of the Rouen butter tower, scaled and adapted for a 1925 commercial steel-frame building.

Now walk close to the lower wall, along the north side facing Hubbard. Look at the stones. Each one is labeled. Find the Parthenon fragment. Find the Great Wall piece. Notice how they are embedded as ordinary masonry units, integrated into the wall, not displayed on plinths. The wall is the display case.

Then look at the building immediately west, the Wrigley Building, completed four years before Tribune Tower in a creamy white terra cotta. The two buildings stand as the canonical adjacent pair on the north bank: same bridgehead, same decade, two different material systems. Stone here, terra cotta there. Gothic here, French Renaissance there. Howells and Hood here, Graham Anderson Probst and White there. The bridgehead was a national stage in the 1920s, and the two buildings are the two stars of the production.

Then think about the building that is not there. The Saarinen tower was never built. Its drawing was published once, in the 1923 competition catalogue, and then circulated for the rest of the decade. The buildings that descended from it are everywhere. The most ambitious Gothic skyscraper in Chicago stands here because the Tribune jury made one choice. The most influential American skyscraper drawing of the 1920s is the one they did not pick.