Tribune Tower

   

Tribune_Tower-Chicago.jpg
The Tribune Tower is a Gothic building located at 435 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. It is the home of the Chicago Tribune and the Tribune Corporation.

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune hosted a competition with a $50,000 prize to find an architectural firm to design its headquarters. The "most beautiful and eye-catching building in the world" was being sought. More than 260 entries were received, including a design by Eliel Saarinen, which however took second place. The winner of the competition was the gothic design by Raymond Hood and John Howells in a modernized Gothic idiom that had been a familiar skyscraper vehicle since the Woolworth Tower. There were protests from the Chicago architectural establishment, for Chicago had a reputation as a pace-setter for design. The second-place design from Saarinen and another design, from Walter gropius, received a good deal of publicity and went on to be more influential on skyscraper designs in the future— including Hood's own designs for Rockefeller Center.

The competition's details have furnished material for The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition : Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s by Katherine Solomonson and Richard A. Etlin, 2001.

There are carved images of Robin Hood and a howling dog near the entrance to commemorate the architects. The buttresses round the peak of the tower are especially telling when the tower is lit at night.

Construction began and the tower was completed in 1925 and reached a height of 462 feet (141 meters) above ground. Prior to the building of the Tribune Tower, correspondents for the Chicago Tribune brought back rocks and bricks from a variety of historically important sites throughout the world. Many of these reliefs have been incorporated into the lowest levels of the building and are labeled with their location of origin. These include the Taj Mahal, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall. In all, there are 136 fragments in the building. In more recent times a piece of rock brought back by astronauts from the moon was imbedded in the building.

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