The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: The formation of a corporate icon.

摘要

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune held an international competition for the design of its new corporate headquarters. With 263 entries, the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition became one of the largest and best known competitions in architectural history. This study focuses on the negotiated process through which the Tribune's two editors, Robert R. McCormick and Joseph M. Patterson, used the competition to shape a monument to represent the Tribune's corporate values.; The first part of this study explores how the Tribune set up the competition and presented it to the public. In conducting the competition, the Tribune asserted an unusual degree of control, flouting A.I.A. guidelines in order to direct it toward an outcome that fulfilled its ideological goals. In representing it to the public, the editors mixed education with entertainment, blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture in order to publicize the newspaper, imbue the proposed building with meaning, and present their ideas about the future course of commercial architecture.; Between World War I and 1930, corporations, including the Tribune, led the way in the transformation of Chicago from a city of densely-packed blocks to a city of soaring towers. The second part of this study explores the shifting conditions of patronage underlying this change and how the new imagery, as represented by the Tribune Tower, lent itself to advertising and public relations. By considering the connotations associated with the Tower's Gothic style and with the functional divisions of its exterior, I explore how the building codifies and reinforces contemporary business values and social relations.; Because this study is concerned with the Tribune's efforts to produce a building with broad cultural meaning, references include archival materials and articles in architectural journals as well as a range of sources that reveal popular values and attitudes toward architectural form and meaning. By exploring the process through which the Tribune endeavored to shape a corporate icon and the social matrix in which the competition was embedded, this study may contribute to our understanding of the impact of corporate patronage on skyscraper design as a vehicle for meaning.