In 1922, the Chicago Tribune’s owner launched a contest to design a towering new HQ for his paper – and changed high-rises for ever. Will the relaunch of the call-out by the Chicago Architecture Biennial produce such seismic results?

It was billed as “the greatest architectural contest in history”, a hunt for “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world” to house “the world’s greatest newspaper”. The Chicago Tribune’s owner, Colonel Robert R McCormick, had no shortage of ambition when he launched the open call to design a dazzling new HQ for his newspaper in 1922. And he wasn’t disappointed by the response.

The glamour of the brief, along with the lure of $100,000 in prize money (around $1.5m today), saw 263 architects submit designs from 23 countries around the world. The entries provide a fascinating cross-section of the aesthetic preoccupations of the day, ranging from neoclassical wedding cake confections to modernist slabs, reflecting a moment on the cusp of radical change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winner … an early shot of Tribune Tower, created by Raymond M Hood and John Mead Howells. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

The winning entry, which still stands proudly on the corner of Michigan Avenue, was a neo-gothic fantasy of stone piers and flying buttresses, a rocket ship conjured from 16th-century France. It remains one of the finest and most intriguing towers in Chicago, if not the world, its façade encrusted with rocks and chunks of other famous buildings brought back from exotic lands by the newspaper’s reporters. But it was the competition itself that had the bigger impact on the architectural imagination. The sheer range of entries sparked an international debate on what direction the future of the skyscraper should take, providing a stylistic smorgasbord for generations of towers to come.

It is a discussion that the curators of the second Chicago Architecture Biennial hope to reignite this month, with an exhibition that will restage the Tribune Tower competition, 95 years on, asking contemporary architects to respond to the brief.

Choosing as their theme “make new history”, co-curators of the biennial Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston set out to ask a new generation what a high-rise could be today. The LA-based duo, founding partners of Johnston Marklee architecture firm, say that coming to Chicago as outsiders, they “wanted to generate a discussion that would have an international resonance like the original competition did”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s proposal. Photograph: Rizzoli press

That 1922 contest was the ultimate battle of the styles. The majority of American architects, then still trained in the Beaux-Arts manner, favoured a traditionalist approach, their designs ranging from teetering romanesque campaniles to gothic piles. These were office buildings as cathedrals, their mighty stone shafts crowned with domes, globes and spires. Columns were piled on pilasters, rusticated plinths groaned under heaving cornices and every junction was elaborated with a twiddly moulding. It was the post-industrial capitalist society searching for legitimacy in the fancy dress of yore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bruno und Max Taut’s expressionist pyramid. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty

The European entries, by contrast, were much more diverse, ranging from colossal Art Deco monuments to stark steel frames stripped of all ornament. There was an expressionist pyramid by Bruno Taut, an asymmetrical planar composition by Bauhaus maestros Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer and, perhaps most famously of all, a tower in the shape of a gigantic doric column by Viennese provocateur Adolf Loos. On the eve of the publication of Le Corbusier’s seminal manifesto, Vers une Architecture, you can sense the palpable excitement about capturing the “spirit of the age” in glass and steel.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adolf Loos’s doric column-shaped tower. Photograph: Rizzoli press

The competition has echoed down the generations, and Johnston and Lee are not the first to revive the contest as a means of sampling the mood of the day. In 1980, Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman and Stuart Cohen invited “Late Entries” to the competition, asking such luminaries as Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry to submit designs. As Tigerman wrote: “The original competition occurred at a time that was near the end of one era and the beginning of another. This exhibition takes place during a time of revisionism in which Modernism is being safely relegated to its place in history.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tadao Ando’s characteristically minimalist idea for the 1980 version of the architectural contest. Photograph: Rizzoli press

The entries were a riotous postmodern hotch-potch of reference and collage. The designers sampled promiscuously from different periods and used their proposals as vehicles for critical commentary. Gaetano Pesce proposed a building as a fractured portrait of the newspaper, embodying “violence, liberty, politics and technology” in its sculpted facade. Helmut Jahn looked at exploiting the available air rights above the existing tower, building a mirror-glass doppelgänger of the Tribune on top of its gothic crown. Ando proposed a characteristically mute grid, while Gehry submitted a mad sketch of a tower topped with an eagle, from whose wings visitors could dangle in an aerial fairground ride.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank Gehry’s sketch for the 1980 Late Entries exhibition. Photograph: Frank Gehry

Just as the 1922 competition revealed a new generation of modernists, so the 1980 version celebrated the return of history and ornament, the “complexity and contradiction” called for by Robert Venturi. “Our own generation has gained new vitality,” wrote Tigerman, “through its desire to find formal meaning in our cultural origins now that the barrenness of Modernism is behind us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helmut Jahn’s 1980 entry. Photograph: Helmut Jahn

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So what will the 2017 edition tell us about the state of contemporary architecture? By limiting the selection to just 15 architects, all sampled from a similar-ish school of thought, it is unlikely to give the full picture. Rather than taking the temperature of global practice, the curators say they wanted to give a younger generation the chance to make a statement about building tall. There are none of the obvious big names – no globular “parametric” stalagmites from Zaha Hadid Architects, no Lego brick ziggurats from Bjarke Ingels, no mute stone obelisks from Peter Zumthor, no minimal white pillars from Sanaa. Instead, there will be a series of thoughtful, critical reflections on the Tribune competition, exhibited as an immersive grove of three-metre high scale models.

London architect Sam Jacob continues the witty strain of the 1980 competition. Referring to the archaeological fragments embedded in the façade of the existing tower, his proposal sees an octagonal cupola perched atop arched colonnades that in turn rest upon modernist grids. With this playful layer-cake of different buildings Jacob is reflecting on how “architecture is not something that we create but something that already exists, just waiting for us to discover it”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Chicago Pasticcio: Sam Jacob’s 2017 entry fuses Adolf Loos’ unbuilt 1922 proposal with the actual Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. Photograph: Sam Jacob Studio

Swiss practice Christ & Gantenbein have gone down the ready-made route too, choosing to recreate an automated concrete garage tower built in São Paulo in 1964, as a celebration of “the pristine architecture of pure tectonics”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christ & Gantembein’s 2017 proposal repurposes a 1964 concrete tower built in Sao Paulo. Photograph: Johnston Marklee (Chicago Architecture)

Others have rather lazily recycled previous projects of their own, with Mexico’s Productora stacking one of their framed proposals on top of another, and France’s Éric Lapierre scaling up a faceted column from a student housing block he’s built in Paris. 6a Architects follow a similar path, but with a more elaborate narrative, asking a number of American wood-turners to each lathe a section of their tower according to a series of profiles taken from their Raven Row gallery in London, whose Georgian interior was, for a while, on display in the Art Institute of Chicago.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Serie’s proposed vertiginous stack of pavilions in this year’s contest. Photograph: Chicago Architecture

The models will no doubt make for a series of diverting art pieces, but overall there seems to be too much interest in concocting a clever story and little attention given to actually designing a high-rise media headquarters for the 21st century.

Some entries touch on the changing media landscape, but don’t take it very far. Serie proposes a vertiginous stack of pavilions, like nested coffee tables gone awry, conceived as a landscape of “theatres, meeting zones, restful landscapes and hedonistic gardens: the true productive spaces for today’s media workers.” African architect Francis Kere imagines a mixed-use neighbourhood, with housing, workspace and cultural facilities arranged around a series of voids in a tower of cylinders. Mexico’s Tatiana Bilbao imagines a “vertical community” of 192 plots, given to a range of collaborators to design.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Francis Kéré Architect’s sketch for the 2017 contest. Photograph: Library of Congress/Kéré Architecture

Visitors expecting a cross-section of contemporary practice will be disappointed. But then again you only have to visit Manhattan to find Bob Stern building classical stone skyscrapers next to Herzog and de Meuron’s staggered glass Jenga tower. When every kind of high-rise imaginable is already being built, from Stefano Boeri’s vertical forests to Calatrava’s kilometre-high spider’s web in Dubai, it seems that many of the young practices here would rather retreat into the realms of commentary and critique than add to the melée.

As for the Chicago Tribune itself, the exhibition comes at a poignant moment. The newspaper recently announced that it is moving out of its iconic headquarters after its parent company sold the Tribune Tower to a Los Angeles developer for $240m. There are plans to convert it into luxury apartments and a hotel, a stark reminder that neither newspapers, nor architects, have the power they once enjoyed.