Just as Gothic ornament and Bauhaus modernism brushed cheeks during the 1922 competition, these represented a cross-section of contrasting ideas from some of the most radical thinkers of the late 20th Century. The “late entries” may have been offbeat, but Tigerman’s goal was to take the temperature of the architecture field during a moment of radical change. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien contributed a craggy volume perched atop four enormous boulders – prefiguring their monolithic designs for the Logan Center at the University of Chicago (completed in 2012) and the forthcoming Obama Library and Presidential Center. The book even featured a number of architects who would go on to shape the Chicago skyline in vastly different ways: Helmut Jahn, the designer of the Thompson Center, submitted a geometric tower that floated impossibly above the original building. Others riffed on the metaphors encoded in the statues, temples, signs and columns that topped earlier designs, replacing them with baby bottles, globes, trees, White Sox uniforms, and giant newspaper pages. Some of these designs drew directly on the older source material, like Arquitectonica’s red, white and blue obelisk. Image Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial Blog (Consortia) Save this picture! The “late entries” included fantastical designs by Helmut Jahn, Judith Di Maio, Arquitectonica, and Robert A.M. In a volume called Late Entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, he published the original designs alongside new drawings by the likes of Frank Gehry, Alison and Peter Smithson, Bernard Tschumi, and Tadao Ando. In 1980, the Chicago architect and Postmodern provocateur Stanley Tigerman organized a winking do-over of the original contest. A tongue-in-cheek proposal by Austrian architect Adolf Loos to turn the building into an enormous Doric column, playing on the “columns” that compose a newspaper, went on to inspire Postmodernist architects with its readymade look and its playful engagement with language.Īrchitects have remained so obsessed with the ideas of the unbuilt Tribune Towers that reimagining the competition has become something of a tradition in its own right. Eliel Saarinen’s design, a runner up, heavily influenced several North American skyscrapers built as late as the 1990s. Not only did echoes of the design of the winning skyscraper appear throughout the pre-war period, but several other entries resonated with later generations. Save this picture! Some of the more radical proposals for the Tribune Tower by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer Max Taut Adolf Loos and Bruno Taut, Walter Gunther, and Kurz Schutz. Some reduced the building to a single symbol an arch, an obelisk, a giant Native American figure, or even an enormous billboard spelling out the headlines of the day. Forward-thinking architects submitted sleeker designs modeled on factory architecture, Chicago’s existing masterpieces, or the angular ornamental motifs that would later be known as Art Deco. Some entries stretched the office tower’s vertical structure into extended Gothic arches with delicate tracery, while others segmented the facade into Neoclassical orders with stepped porticoes and colonnaded temples for crowns. More than 260 architects from 23 countries responded with designs in a dizzying range of styles. Hoping to project an aura of international prestige for his burgeoning media empire, the competition brief he compiled asked architects to create “the most beautiful office building in the world.” McCormick, the powerful publisher of the Chicago Tribune and a man who dominated local politics before the First World War. A groundbreaking skyscraper was the highest ambition of Colonel Robert R.
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