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The Tribune Tower is a , 36-floor neo-Gothic skyscraper located at 435 Magnificent Mile in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The early 1920s international design competition for the tower became a historic event in 20th-century architecture. Built for Chicago Tribune owner Robert R. McCormick, since 2018 it has been converted into luxury residences and in 2023 won a Driehaus Prize for architectural preservation and adaptive reuse from Landmarks Illinois.
The tower was the home of the Tribune and the related Tribune Media, Tribune Broadcasting, and Tribune Publishing. WGN Radio (720 kHz) originated broadcasts from the building until June 18, 2018. CNN's Chicago bureau was also located in the building. It is listed as a Chicago Landmark and is a contributing property to the Michigan–Wacker Historic District. One of its predecessors, the first "Tribune Tower", had been built in 1868 and was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
The winner was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, with near the top.
The entry that many perceived as the best, by the Finland architect Eliel Saarinen, took second place and received $20,000. Saarinen's tower was preferred by architects like Louis Sullivan, and was a strong influence on the next generation of skyscrapers, including Raymond Hood's own subsequent work on the McGraw-Hill Building and the Rockefeller Center. The 1929 Gulf Building in Houston, Texas, designed by architects Alfred C. Finn, Kenneth Franzheim, and J. E. R. Carpenter, is a close realization of that Saarinen design. César Pelli's 181 West Madison Street Building in Chicago is also thought to be inspired by Saarinen's design.
Other Tribune tower entries by figures like Walter Gropius, Bertram Goodhue, Walter Burley Griffin, Bruno Taut, and Adolf Loos remain intriguing suggestions of what might have been, but perhaps not as intriguing as the one surmounted by a Mount Rushmore-like head of an American Indian. These entries were originally published by the Tribune Company in 1923 under the title Tribune Tower Competition and later in The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s by Katherine Solomonson, 2001.
In the 1980 book entitled The Tribune Tower Competition published by Rizzoli, authors Robert A. M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman as well as Bruce Abbey and other architects jokingly submitted "late entries" in Volume II of the work.
Archival materials regarding the competition and the building are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tribune Tower has participated in Chicago Architecture Foundation's event Open House Chicago every year, starting in 2011. This annual opportunity allows visitors to tour the interior of the building for free.
The Chicago Tribune, the building's main tenant since it opened, moved out in June 2018, in order for the building to be converted to condos. The conversion of the building is set to cost more than $500 million. The conversion has run into some legal troubles regarding the sign: the Chicago Tribune contends that the sign is their intellectual property, so it can not remain on the building, but the developers stated that they had a contractual agreement to buy the sign for one dollar. Col. Robert R. McCormick's former iconic office on the 24th floor will be turned into offices. In the former parking lot for Tribune Tower, there are plans to build Tribune Tower East, a super-tall skyscraper that would become the city's second-tallest.
In 2025, the investment firm North American Real Estate bought the Tribune Tower's retail space.
As was the case with most of Hood's projects, the sculptures and decorations were made by the American artist Rene Paul Chambellan. The tower features carved images of Robin Hood (Hood) and a howling dog (Howells) near the main entrance to commemorate the architects. The top of the tower is designed after the Tour de beurre (″butter tower″) of the Rouen Cathedral in France, which is characteristic of the Late-Gothic style, that is to say, without a spire but with a crown-shaped top.
Rene Paul Chambellan contributed his sculpture talents to the buildings ornamentation, gargoyles and the ' Screen over the main entrance doors. Rene Chambellan worked on other projects with Raymond Hood including the American Radiator Building and Rockefeller Center in New York City. Also, among the gargoyles on the Tribune Tower is one of a frog. That piece was created by Rene Chambellan to represent himself jokingly as he is of French ancestry.
The building's lobby also serves as a hall of inscriptions, with quotations about liberty and the freedom of the press taken from the work of Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Euripides, Voltaire, Daniel Webster, and others, carved into the walls. This includes Thomas Jefferson's “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that can not be limited without being lost.”
In 1999, during a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin presented a rock brought from the Moon, which was displayed in a window in the Tribune gift store (it could not be added to the wall, as NASA owns a large majority of the Apollo Moon rocks, and this one was merely on loan to the Tribune). The rock was removed in 2011 due to an outdated display. A new rock display is planned but has not been installed . A piece of steel recovered from the World Trade Center has been added to the wall. Tiles from the Sydney Opera House were added in 2006.
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