Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower design | |
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Eliel Saarinen's unbuilt 1922 skyscraper design
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Alternative names | Saarinen tower |
General information | |
Status | Never built |
Type | Commercial offices |
Technical details | |
Floor count | 29 |
Lifts/elevators | 12 |
Design and construction | |
Architect | Eliel Saarinen |
Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower design or the Saarinen tower are terms used to describe the unnamed and unbuilt design for a modernist skyscraper, created by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and submitted in 1922 for the Chicago Tribune's architectural competition for a new headquarters. The winning entry, the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower, was built in 1925. Saarinen's entry came in second place yet became influential in the design of a number of future buildings.
In 1921–22, the prominent Tribune Tower competition was held to design a new headquarters for the Chicago Tribune, a major US metropolitan newspaper. It attracted 260 entries. First place was awarded to a design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, a neo-Gothic building completed in 1925. Saarinen was awarded $20,000 for second place; his design was never constructed. Many observers felt that Saarinen's simplified yet soaring setback tower was the most appropriate entry, and his novel modernist design influenced many subsequent architectural projects.
Saarinen was a veteran architect but had never before designed a skyscraper. To arrive at his noteworthy design, he took as a starting place the upward sweep of Gothic architecture, but then advanced this sense of verticality as his primary design principle. He said that through "logical construction" each portion of the design was made to reflect the larger goal of verticality. He was 49 years old when he submitted the design; the next year he moved from Finland to the Chicago area. In the U.S., he contributed to an overall design for the Chicago lakefront, and he lectured at the University of Michigan, but none of his skyscraper designs were ever built. Instead, others found success by incorporating his vision. Tribune Tower competition co-winner Raymond Hood adopted Saarinen's skyscraper style for several of his subsequent projects, and Saarinen's design was emulated by other contemporary architects such as Timothy L. Pflueger, George W. Kelham, Hubbell and Benes, Holabird & Roche, Alfred C. Finn, and James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter, Jr., as well as later architect César Pelli.