Archinect - News

Tribune Tower voted Chicago’s best building in 2024

2024-04-11T12:53:00-04:00

Chicago’s Tribune Tower has been voted the best building in the city by readers of Urbanize Chicago. Thousands of votes were cast in the Urbanize Chicago People’s Choice Best Building 2024, with the Tribune Tower seeing off competition from the second-place Wrigley Building.

Designed by Howells and Hood and completed in 1925, the iconic Gothic Revival building was the result of an international design competition held by the Chicago Tribune newspaper. The winning design drew inspiration from the medieval Gothic cathedrals of Europe, reinterpreting their features for a modern skyscraper.

The tower rises to a height of 462 feet, culminating in a series of flying buttresses that crown its top. The building's façade is adorned with sculptural details and stone carvings that evoke the craftsmanship of Gothic architecture.

Related on Archinect: 16 designers to display new "Tribune Tower" models at the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennial. Image: Wikipedia

A notable feature of the tower is it...

Lattice-topped spire designed by Morris Adjmi nears completion in New York City

2020-09-04T12:00:00-04:00

A 39-story residential tower designed by Morris Adjmi Architects is nearing the end of construction in New York City, where work on the city's rising crop of luxury residential towers continues unabated.

The 92,000-square-foot project is wrapped in an expressive gridded structural system that takes on a woven lattice motif along the tower's upper levels.

Containing 42 units, the project is described by the architects as rising on "thin, ribbon-like piers" that create "bays of brass-colored, metal-framed windows, before interlacing to form an elegant lattice crown whose pointed arches recall Gothic windows and Art Deco details."

Construction on the tower is nearing later stages as cladding wrapping the tower's structural piers has been almost completely installed while upper level units await final installation of exterior curtain wall glazing.

The NYC Construction Photo Instagram account highlights the recent progress in a series of photos posted earlier this week:

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Wim Delvoye touches up building equipment with a Gothic spin

2019-04-24T20:43:00-04:00

If our recently published article featuring a computer mouse/Eames chair mashup didn't provoke you, this one might just do the trick. With his series of heavy utility trucks outfitted in Gothic ornament, artist Wim Delvoye conceived of a mashup of two elements nearly a full millennium apart.

Cement Truck, by Wim Delvoye

The series likely came about given a genuine similarity between modern automobiles and Gothic cathedrals; unquestionably, both are marvels of human engineering and craftsmanship; one pursued for the appeasement of a higher being, the other for the satisfaction of a consumptive economy.

Caterpillar no. 5, by Wim Delvoye

"Harry Potter effect": Christopher Hawthorne on America's Neo-Neo Gothic college architecture trend

2017-12-21T14:52:00-05:00

So what does the taste for Hogwarts-style dormitories say about the Yale or the USC of 2017? It says that the primary job of residential architecture on campus is to provide a sense of consistency and familiarity for donors and incoming students alike — to soften the edges of the college experience.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks back at 2017's resurgence of Neo Gothic and Neo-Gothic-ish college architecture and compares the newly completed USC Village and Yale residential complexes with architectural references of the manifestation of nostalgic Anglophilia, the wizard school Hogwarts, as found in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

"High school graduates on their way to college are hardly responsible for the architecture they find there, of course," Hawthorne writes. "Yale, USC and other wealthy and ambitious schools seem to be counting on a kind of double nostalgia, on the hope that this revival of the Gothic Revival will appeal both to incoming students and to wealthier alumni, who after all are the ones paying for and often helping dictate the architectural sensibility of new campus buildings."

Restoring, it needs

2013-11-23T10:25:00-05:00

Later it was the stamping ground of the 19th century’s version of today’s “starchitects,” including Andrew Jackson Downing and his disciples, like Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. Their work — grand Second Empire Victorian, Gothic revival and Queen Anne houses — is everywhere

Lisa Selin Davis profiles the town of Newburgh NY, which has grand but neglected architecture and is reminiscent of 1980s Brooklyn, before gentrification. The community is working to revitalize the troubled city and it's architecture. However, some doubt whether the recent influx of artists/new business such as the Newburgh Brewing Company, will be able to address long standing issues such as a lack of jobs and crime.