Tribune Tower spotlight
A social post revisited Chicago’s 1925 Tribune Tower — the Gothic Revival prize by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood that won a $100,000 'most beautiful building' competition and still reads as an ornate outlier with flying buttresses and gargoyles. The thread is getting renewed attention for its architecture-history visuals. (x.com)
The Tribune’s international design contest was formally announced on June 10, 1922, as part of the paper’s 75th-anniversary events. (chicago.gov) Organizers offered $100,000 in total prize money but structured awards with a $50,000 first prize, $20,000 second and $10,000 third, and they paid ten invited firms $2,000 each to submit entries. (old.skyscraper.org) The field numbered roughly 260–263 submissions from 23 countries, and high-profile modernists such as Walter Gropius and Adolf Loos were among the entrants whose schemes reshaped debates about skyscraper form. (old.skyscraper.org) Eliel Saarinen’s second-place design earned $20,000 and helped finance his 1923 move to the United States, where his tower proposal went on to influence a generation of modern skyscrapers. (center.cranbrook.edu) Municipal code changes in April 1923 allowed extra height that led the winning team to add four floors before construction began that year, and the building formally opened to the public on July 6, 1925 after a build that cost about $8.5 million. (raymond-hood-exhibition.brown.edu) The tower’s base and lobby host a near‑150-piece “history stones” collection—149 labeled fragments plus a moon rock—sourced from sites including the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon and the Berlin Wall. (chicagology.com) Developers CIM Group and Golub & Company acquired the property in 2016 and completed an adaptive‑reuse conversion that produced 162 residential units and roughly 47,000 square feet of street‑level retail, a project honored by Landmarks Illinois with a 2023 Driehaus preservation award. (golubandcompany.com)
