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Rocket ships, eagles and marriage patties: the Chicago contest that led to a skyscraper blowup

In 1922, the Chicago Tribunes owner launched a contest to design a towering brand-new HQ for his paper and changed high-rises for ever. Will the relaunch of the call-out by the Chicago Architecture Biennial render such seismic makes?

It was legislation as” the greatest architectural rivalry in record”, a hunt for” the most beautiful and unique office building in the world” to home” the world’s greatest newspaper “. The Chicago Tribune’s owner, Colonel Robert R McCormick, “havent had” shortage of ambition where reference is launched the open call to design a stunning new HQ for his newspaper in 1922. And he wasn’t disappointed by the response.

The glamour of the summary, along with the bait of $100,000 in prize money( around $1.5 m today ), met 263 inventors submit patterns from 23 “the worlds”. The enters cater a fascinating cross-section of the aesthetic preoccupations of the working day, wandering from neoclassical uniting cake confections to modernist slab, manifesting a few moments on the cusp of radical change.

Winner … an early film of Tribune Tower, created by Raymond M Hood and John Mead Howells. Image: Keystone-France/ Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

The winning entry, which still sits proudly on the corner of Michigan Avenue, was a neo-gothic fantasy of stone wharves and operating buttress, a rocket ship conjured from 16 th-century France. It was still of the most significant and most exciting towers in Chicago, if not the world, its facade encrusted with boulders and globs of other famous buildings brought back from exotic estates by the newspaper’s reporters. But it was the competition itself that had the bigger impact on the architectural imagination. The sheer straddle of entryways triggered an international dispute on what tack the future of the skyscraper should take, catering a stylistic smorgasbord for generations of towers to come.

It is a discussion that the curators of the second Chicago Architecture Biennialhope to reignite this month, with an exhibition that will restage the Tribune Tower rivalry, 95 years on, asking contemporary inventors to respond to the brief.

Choosing as their theme ” manufacture new history”, co-curators of the biennial Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston set out to ask a new generation what a high-rise could be today. The L-Abased duo, founding partners of Johnston Marklee architecture firm, say that coming to Chicago as strangers, they” wanted to generate a discussion that would have an international resonance like the original competition did “.

Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s suggestion. Picture: Rizzoli press

That 1922 rivalry was the ultimate combat of the styles. The majority of American designers, then still trained in the Beaux-Arts manner, privileged a traditionalist approach, their patterns ranging from teetering romanesque campaniles to gothic accumulations. These were office structures as cathedrals, their mighty stone jibes crowned with domes, worlds and spires. Columns were piled on pilasters, rusticated plinths cried under heaving cornices and every conjugation was elaborated with a twiddly moulding. It was the post-industrial financier civilization sought for legality in the fancy dress of yore.

Bruno und Max Taut’s expressionist pyramid. Picture: Ullstein Bild/ Getty

The European introductions, by differ, were much more diverse, straying from gigantic Art Deco statues to stark sword chassis stripped of all ornament. There was an expressionist pyramid by Bruno Taut, an asymmetrical planar composition by Bauhaus maestroes Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer and, perhaps most famously of all, a tower in the forms of a gigantic doric editorial by Viennese provocateur Adolf Loos. On the eve of the publication of Le Corbusier’s seminal manifesto, Vers une Architecture, you can sense the evident excitement about captivating the” tone of the age” in glass and steel.

Adolf Loos’s doric column-shaped tower. Photograph: Rizzoli press

The competition has resembled down the generations, and Johnston and Lee are not the first to revive the competition as a means of sampling the climate of the day. In 1980, Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman and Stuart Cohen invited” Late Entries” to the tournament, asking such luminaries as Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry to submit patterns. As Tigerman wrote:” The original rivalry occurred at a time that was near the end of one era and the opening up of another. This exhibition takes lieu during a era of revisionism in which Modernism is being safely demoted to its lieu in biography .”

Tadao Ando’s characteristically minimalist meaning for the 1980 form of the architectural struggle. Image: Rizzoli press

The entryways were a riotous postmodern hotch-potch of cite and collage. The designers sampled promiscuously from different periods and used its own proposal as vehicles for critical commentary. Gaetano Pesce proposed a build as a fractured likenes of the newspaper, personifying” savagery, autonomy, politics and technology” in its sculpted facade. Helmut Jahn looked at manipulating the available air rights above the existing tower, building a mirror-glass doppelganger of the Tribune on top of its gothic treetop. Ando proposed a characteristically mute grid, while Gehry deferred a mad sketch of a tower surfaced with an eagle, from whose backstages tourists could hang in an aerial fairground ride.

Frank Gehry’s sketch for the 1980 Late Entryways exhibition. Image: Frank Gehry

Just as the 1922 competition discovered a new generation of modernists, so the 1980 form celebrated the revert of history and decorate, the” complexity and incongruity” called for by Robert Venturi.” Our own generation has gained brand-new verve ,” wrote Tigerman,” through its desire to find formal gist in our culture parentages now that the barrenness of Modernism is behind us .”

Helmut Jahn’s 1980 introduction. Photograph: Helmut Jahn

So what will the 2017 copy tell us about the country of contemporary structure? By limiting the selection to only 15 designers, all sampled from a similar-ish school of thought, it is unlikely to give the complete picture. Rather than participate in the temperature of world rule, the curators say they wanted to give a younger generation the chance to make a statement about improving tall. There are none of the obvious big names- no spherical “parametric” stalagmites from Zaha Hadid Architects , no Lego brick ziggurats from Bjarke Ingels , no mute stone obelisks from Peter Zumthor , no minimal white pillars from Sanaa. Instead, there will be a series of astute, critical thinkings on the Tribune competition, exhibited as an immersive plantation of three-metre high magnitude models.

London architect Sam Jacob continues the whimsical sprain of the 1980 rivalry. Directing to the archaeological fragments embedded in the facade of the existing tower, his proposal investigates an octagonal cupola roosted atop arched colonnades that in turn rest upon modernist grids. With this lively layer-cake of different buildings Jacob is reflecting on how” building is not something that we generate but something that are present, just waiting for us to discover it “.

The Chicago Pasticcio: Sam Jacob’s 2017 enter fuses Adolf Loos’ unbuilt 1922 overture with the actual Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. Picture: Sam Jacob Studio

Swiss practice Christ& Gantenbein have gone down the ready-made itinerary more, choosing to recreate an automated concrete garage tower built in Sao Paulo in 1964, as a celebration of” the pristine architecture of pure tectonics “.

Christ& Gantembein’s 2017 suggestion repurposes a 1964 concrete tower built in Sao Paulo. Photograph: Johnston Marklee( Chicago Architecture)

Others have preferably lazily recycled previous campaigns of their own, with Mexico’s Productora stacking one of their framed suggestions on top of another, and France’s Eric Lapierre scaling up a faceted line from a student housing stymie he’s building up Paris. 6a Architectsfollow a same course, but with a more elaborated narrative, asking a number of American wood-turners to each lathe a section of their tower according to a series of charts taken from their Raven Row gallery in London, whose Georgian interior was, for a while, on display in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Serie’s proposed vertiginous stack of pavilions in this year’s competition. Photograph: Chicago Architecture

The frameworks will no doubt make for a series of diverting artistry sections, but overall there seems to be too much interest in devising a cunning narrative and little attention given to actually designing a high-rise media headquarters for the 21 st century. Some entries touch on the changing media landscape, but don’t take it very far. Serie proposes a vertiginous stack of pavilions, like nested coffee counters extended awry, imagined as a landscape of” theaters, filling zones, restful landscapes and hedonistic plots: the real productive spaces for today’s media workers .” African architect Francis Kere suspects a mixed-use neighbourhood, with home, workspace and cultural facilities set around a series of spaces in a tower of cylinders. Mexico’s Tatiana Bilbao supposes a” vertical community” of 192 stories, paid attention to a range of collaborators to design.

Francis Kere Architect’s sketch for the 2017 contest. Image: Library of Congress/ Kere Architecture

Visitors expecting a cross-section of contemporary rehearsal will be thwarted. But then again you simply have to visit Manhattan to find Bob Stern construct classical stone skyscrapers next to Herzog and de Meuron’s overwhelmed glass Jenga tower. When all kinds of high-rise imaginable is already being built, from Stefano Boeri’s vertical groves to Calatrava’s kilometre-high spider’s network in Dubai, it seems that many of the young patterns here would rather retreat into the realms of note and criticism than add to the melee.

As for the Chicago Tribune itself, the exhibition comes at a poignant minute. The newspaper recently announced that it is moving out of its iconic headquarters after its parent company exchanged the Tribune Tower to a Los Angeles developer for $240 m. There are plans to convert it into luxury accommodations and a hotel, a stark remember that neither newspapers , nor inventors, have the strength they formerly enjoyed.

Vertical City will be on display at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, 16 September to 7 January.

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