Here's a rhetorical question that's way too existential for the first five seconds of
a YouTube video: why do we want things to look nice?
Artwork, Architecture, Literature – WHY?
When there are hundreds of other practical considerations at hand, why do we go out of
our way, at great expense and effort, to make things beautiful?
Well that’s easy, obvious even – so abundantly clear as day that it cuts beyond words and
reaches the innate passion for creative expression that distinguishes and defines us as humans.
But…
it is also kinda hard to explain that with words.
And when we think about the masterpieces of world culture that make History so fun to
explore, it likewise seems obvious that every society will strive toward some form of excellence,
but in any present moment it’s hard to say where that leap should be taken.
For instance, a Cathedral can be expected to soar up towards the heavens with majestic
spires and good domes… but what about an office for a newspaper?
Is that out of the question and I’m stupid for asking, or is there something here we
can work with?
Well, in 1922, the Chicago Tribune newspaper asked exactly that as it set about creating
a new office building.
So, to see how Chicago helped define the style of skyscrapers and wound up with perhaps the
most beautiful building in the modern world, let’s do some history!
Now, the thing is, cities had been getting
along just fine for thousands of years without skyscrapers, so what suddenly made them so
prevalent?
Well in 1871 Chicago’s downtown got a little toasty, and after blaming it on an innocent
cow, the city needed to fill the gaping hole in its grid plan in a way that accommodated
the growing urban density after the Civil War.
So taking advantage of new technologies, they built upward and created the first skyscrapers.
Several architects took up the task, and collectively developed the Chicago School of Architecture,
which is a style not a literal school but eh names are dumb.
Comprising of fireproof metal internal structures rather than brick or stone, the exteriors
featured a 3-phase design reminiscent of a Greek Column: at the base was an inviting
entry level, then a repeating façade leading up towards a decorative cap at the very top.
Clean design, maximizes interior floor space for practical use, and critically, easy to
replicate fast when you’ve got a whole city to rebuild.
But Chicago wasn’t alone in its pursuit
of elevation.
Up to this point, the domain of Tall Stuff was almost exclusively cathedrals and The
Pyramids, but now civic projects like the Washington Monument and Eiffel Tower were
setting records for height, and in 1894 Philadelphia City Hall became the tallest inhabitable building,
followed in 1908 by the Singer Building in New York.
And with that, it’s a race.
Architects worked feverishly to outdo each other, so as the record changed hands and
the stakes literally got higher, the challenge became designing a building that could withstand
not just its own weight but also the lateral force of wind, while also making said-record-setting-edifice
not look like a bland boring box.
The 200-meter-tall Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower solved the latter by directly
copying Saint Mark’s belltower in Venice, and I’m only mad that I didn’t realize
that sooner.
But while New York was building up and up and up, eventually capping the Great Skyscraper
Race with the Art Deco-styled Empire State Building in 1931, Chicago had long since quit
the game.
Four decades back, concerns over visibility down at street level and an occupancy crunch
during a financial panic in 1893 led to the city banning all new construction above 45
meters – the same height as its original skyscrapers.
New York by contrast was such a hotbed of construction specifically because they had
more open zoning rules, including the immensely clever requirement from 1916 that buildings
“step back” and get thinner as they get taller.
This improved air quality and preserved light at street level, but it also just looks really
elegant.
Chicago finally doubled its height allowance after the First World War and adopted a version
of New York’s tapering rule, bitterly swallowing their pride to admit that New York was right
about something.
And this is where Chicago Tribune owner Robert
McCormick found himself in 1922.
His newspaper just celebrated its 75th anniversary and was bigger than ever, the 20’s were
a-roarin’, and the city just gave him 120 vertical meters to play.
SO, he held a contest to design a new headquarter office building, and put out a call to every
architect on earth to “Make for the Tribune a picture of the most beautiful building in
the modern world”.
Design competitions were commonplace as far back as the Middle Ages, but this was the
first to take on the question of the Skyscraper, and the results were astounding.
The over-260 submissions spanned traditional Beaux Artes styles from the turn of the century,
neogothic, early swings at Art Deco, a preview of Bauhaus modernism, and plenty of designs
that are utterly impossible to categorize.
Hilariously, European and American designers tended to understand the prompt very differently,
as Europeans created explorable monuments while Americans focused on maximizing usable
floor-space.
A French design made a ginormous Doric column, while Italian architect Saverio Dioguardi
designed a skyscraper in the style of a Triumphal arch.
The raw artistic concept here is absolutely gorgeous but god save you if you need to be
on the other half of the 17th floor and can’t because there’s an ARCH in the way.
Even several American architects got thrown by the prompt and submitted giant obelisks
with office-windows, which isn’t awful, but the shapes on these just do not fit together.
And all that said, the second-place design went to Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen,
who’s Goth-Deco tower is an absolute thing of beauty.
Proportionality in design is obscenely hard to explain with words, but when you see a
building that just looks awkward, you notice it, and Saarinen’s design is so deceptively
elegant because it is immaculately proportioned.
The tapering creates a waterfall of stone pouring from the capital down to the base.
This design was never built, but Saarinen’s vision had a colossal impact on American architecture,
even the winners of the Tribune contest were so captivated by it that they emulated Saarinen
for their next project, the American Radiator Building in New York, as well as in later
contributions on 30 Rockefeller center.
But alas, even Saarinen’s design had come
in second after John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, a vision the Tribune’s editors said
would lift their new home “out of the category of commercial profit-makers and make it an
ornament and an inspiration to the city we love.”
A statement as bold as it is true, because holy hell, damn oh damn, this thing is good.
It got practicality points for optimizing inside space, but ornament indeed, the exterior
façade follows early art deco principles, hiding horizontal lines and emphasizing the
vertical to point upwards to the Gothic crown on top.
This stops the side of the building from looking like graph paper, and since the building’s
corners are rounded rather than square, every side looks like the front and no part of the
design becomes too boxy, especially not the top.
That capital emulates the Rouen Cathedral
belltower and its circle of flying buttresses, but the Tribune is streamlined and cleverly
adapted for the dimensions of a modern skyscraper, so the silhouette stays distinct and grand
even way up high.
The flying buttresses here don’t serve their intended structural purpose, but they work
exquisitely by tapering from the body of the building and creating an airy negative space
at the top – since they’re octagonal, there’s no awkward angles, and you can always
see the light peeking through the arches as the crown gives way to the sky.
Plus, the belltower reference at a newspaper office becomes a thematic statement, a metaphor
for the Tribune’s role as a communicator to the city’s people.
Despite this tower being Capitalist Corpo-Trash rather than a cathedral or a civic monument,
the Tribune showed how to become rhetorically-beautiful by matching design to message to purpose.
And this philosophical message permeated the
Tribune Tower, as the inside is engraved with quotes about the virtue of honest journalism,
the entryway to the lobby features a gorgeously carved relief of scenes from Aesop’s fable
as praise for the craft of storytelling, and as a declaration of the tower’s place in
architectural history and the reach of the Chicago Tribune, the outside walls at street
level are peppered with bricks and stones from famous sites and buildings all around
the world – limestone from the Pyramids, marble from St Peters, sandstone from Ta Prohm,
gargoyles from British parliament, and a hundred more.
Think of a place; odds are it’s on there… and this conveys some rather imperialistic
attitudes about taking stuff that you’d like to be yours, but the overall effect is
precisely what Robert McCormick wanted it to be: a unification of the newspaper and
its new home into a greater artistic and moral purpose.
One century later, the Tribune Tower is still one of if not the most gorgeous edifice in
a city renowned for exquisite architecture, and the legacy of not only its design but
the designs brought about through its competition remain a monumental force in the shape of
modern cities.
So I ask you, why build the most beautiful office building in the world?
Why the absolute hell not?
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