ABSTRACT
On 10 June 1922-the occasion of the newspaper’s diamond (75th) anniversary-the Chicago Tribune announced a competition for the building of a new headquarters. Given the title “The Tribune Tower Competition,” the competition was conceived of as a vehicle for commemorating the substantial growth and achievements of both the newspaper and the city of Chicago. In statements accompanying the program, site, and submission requirements, the Tribune Building Corporation-the stated “Owner” in the competition documents-hoped for something even grander: an architectural representation of a new time and place befitting the postwar era of limitless and boundless opportunity. Viewing the submissions for the competition, Louis I. Sullivan, the well-known member of the so-called Chicago School of Architecture, registered his own messianic hopes for the future of architecture in an issue of Architectural Record. Equating architecture with humanity’s redemption, Sullivan gave voice to the highly romanticized, Nietzschean spirit of the time:
The craving for beauty thus set forth by The Tribune is imbued with romance; both that high Romance which is the essence, the vital impulse, that inheres in all the great works of man in all places and all times, that vibrates in his loftiest thoughts, his heroic deeds, his otherwise inexplicable sacrifices, and which forms the halo of his great compassions, and of the tragedy within the depths of his sorrows. So deeply seated, so persistent, so perennial in the heart of humanity is this ineffable presence, that, suppressed in us, we decay and die. For man is not born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward; he is born to hope and to achieve.
