TRIBUNE TOWER BY ADOLF LOOS
Adolf Loos, 1922
A Tower in the Form of a Classical Column
Among the 260 architects who entered the competition to design the Chicago Tribune tower in 1922 were a number from outside the USA. Altogether, architects from twenty-three countries sent in designs. Some of them were ultra-modern plans, others drew heavily on the architecture of the past, such as the winner, the Gothic tower designed by John Mead Howells and Raymond M. Hood. The winner took medieval architecture for its inspiration, but others used even older sources, drawing on the Classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps, the most surprising of all the designs was by one of the European entrants – Czech-born and Vienna-based Adolf Loos. His drawings show a skyscraper in the form of an enormous Classical column, square for the eleven floors of its pedestal and base, circular for the rest of its height, with a simple, square, slab-like top. The circular part of the building is clad in gleaming, black granite while the lower part is of brick and terracotta.
This design is surprising today because we are used to thinking of tall buildings as quintessentially modern and as structures that take advantage of the latest in technology and design to get them to the heights they need to be. Modern office buildings are not usually in an antique style. To be sure, some of the early skyscrapers of Chicago and New York are in the Gothic style, and others are richly decorated, though often in a twentieth-century style – some of the most famous, such as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York, are pure Art Deco. A Doric column seems to come from another world.
The surprise was even greater because of the source of the design. Loos was a famous Modernist. In 1910, he had given a lecture (later published as an essay) called ‘Ornament and crime’, in which he had rejected the old ways of design, decrying all kinds of architectural ornament as criminal. Ornament, said Loos, derives from the same sensibility as the work of the graffiti artist or the criminal with a tattooed chest. Loos preferred buildings that did not take their cue from outward appearance but were driven by the users’ needs. He seemed to be the last person in the world to be reaching into the history books for the design of a skyscraper.
The Chicago column was not quite as surprising to contemporaries, however. They did not see an absolute break between ancient and modern architecture. People even compared skyscrapers to columns, likening the main body of the building to the column’s main portion or shaft, the entrance level, treated slightly differently visually, to the column’s base, and the cornice at the top to its capital. This metaphor was coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan, a noted influence on Loos – the European architect was almost certainly aware of Sullivan’s notion.
But Sullivan was not advocating building a tower in the precise form of a column – he was just making a comparison and pointing out how architects might make use of the similarities in the details of a design. Several of the entrants of the Chicago competition, though, did take the idea to its logical conclusion. A number of them produced designs with a column-like element, although none of these was as uncompromising as the one by Loos, and his rivals were crude by comparison.
Loos had a slightly different take and another rationale. He took his cue, like any good competition entrant, from the brief. The Tribune wanted the most beautiful office building in the world, and one that would act as a monument for the city of Chicago. The notion of a monument set Loos thinking. If a structure was to have a monumental form it would need different treatment from, say, a house, which could have a plain facade, with features such as windows placed where they were needed, or a regular office block, which could have a simple, flat facade, with regular fenestration. A monument, by contrast, should be striking, memorable, lasting and distinctive.
How should an architect go about creating a memorable, lasting monument for Chicago? In a report he wrote to accompany the design, Loos considered the possibilities. One way would be to make the building taller than any other – but someone could come along and build still taller, and in any case the Tribune had ruled this out by imposing a height restriction: they wanted the tower to be 394ft (120m) tall or less. Another possibility would be to invent a new style, to create something that was newer-looking than anything else in the neighbourhood. But the new soon turns into the old – as Loos puts it: ‘the fashion in forms changes very quickly, just like that of clothing’. Such a building would not be distinctive for long.
Drawing on tradition and harking back to monumental structures such as Trajan’s Column in Rome seemed to Loos a better idea. So he took one of the most simple Classical column types – the Doric – and enlarged it into an office tower. The floors in the main part of the building are round, with a central lift shaft giving access to a series of wedge-shaped or trapezoidal rooms. It seemed to work, giving the newspaper the memorable building it wanted, while also accommodating the required office space. At the top of the tower, instead of the statue that many monumental columns bear, is a simple plain abacus – the tower itself is the monument, and some critics have seen the lack of a statue as a way of saying that its occupant – the newspaper – was a true pillar of the community. The structure’s round form and shiny cladding also made it unusual enough – some would say unsubtle and bizarre enough – to stand out in Chicago, a city already bristling with tall buildings.
The judges did not share Loos’s logic, and his design did not even gain second or third place after the winning Gothic tower by Hood and Howells. It is not known whether they were put off by the outward appearance of the building, or by the odd-shaped rooms inside. Loos probably knew he was an outsider with little chance in this big architectural race. But the final part of his report shows his confidence in his design, and his pre-emptive defiance: ‘The big Greek column will be built, if not for the Chicago Tribune then elsewhere, if not by me then by some other architect.’ Loos never got another chance to build his tower, or to design on such a large scale. In his last years, he worked mainly on houses for middle-class clients in central Europe, buildings that are still admired – for their artful planning and their modernity, not for any references to the ancient world.
