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Chicago Tribune Tower

A perspective drawing of a skyscraper with beveled corners and some gothic ornament. The skyscraper fills the block it is on and tapers only in the top quarter, where flying buttresses support a small central tower.
A perspective drawing of a skyscraper with distinct corners. The verticality of the skyscraper is emphasized by narrow bands that run from bottom to top. Beginning about half way up from the ground level, the tower narrows every few stories in a stepped, setback fashon.
A perspective drawing of a modernist skyscraper. The tower appears to be made of a concrete grid with glass infill and balconies. The building is made up of three connected, boxy sections, the one at the front is 20 stories tall, a slender tower above adds another 12 floors above.
A perspective drawing of a dark-colored building that has a cube base with a regular grid of small windows. The base is about 11 stories high. Rising up from the base is the majority of the tower, another 21 stories, which looks like a column with flutes (carved vertical bands that run all the way up the column, giving it a ribbed texture, and windows in the spaces between the vertical ribs.) The column-shaped tower is topped by a simple Doric capital.
Raymond Hood, winning entry Eliel Saarinen, second prize Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, competition entry Adolf Loos, competition entry from The International Competition for a New Administration Building for the Chicago Tribune, MCMXXII; Containing All the Designs Submitted in Response to the Chicago Tribune’s $100,000 Offer Commemorating its Seventy Fifth Anniversary, June 10, 1922
Tribune Company, Chicago, 1923
12¾" × 8"
Images: Fleet Library at RISD Special Collections, Rhode Island School of Design

To commemorate its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Chicago Tribune newspaper hosted an international competition to design its new headquarters. The competition was a brilliant publicity stunt, with $100,000 in prizes available for the best entries.

The architect John Mead Howells had been invited to participate in the competition and hired Hood, who was forty years old and struggling to find commissions, to lead the design. Hood and Howells won the competition.

The competition attracted designs from more than 250 architects, including more than 70 entries from outside the United States. Prominent designs from abroad came from the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, from Bauhaus Director Walter Gropius with his chief designer Adolf Meyer, and from Austrian provocateur Adolf Loos, who suggested an architectural pun: a newspaper column.