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...

Architecture critic Blair Kamin is leaving the Chicago Tribune after 33 years

2021-01-11T13:22:00-05:00

Blair Kamin, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has announced that after 33 years, and nearly three decades in the role of the critic, he is leaving the paper.

Kamin published this Twitter thread on Friday, January 8:

1/7 After 33 years at Chicago Tribune, 28 as architecture critic, I’m taking a buyout + leaving the newspaper. It’s been an honor to cover + critique designs in the first city of American architecture + to continue the tradition begun by Paul Gapp, my Pulitzer-winning predecessor
— Blair Kamin (@BlairKamin) January 8, 2021

After 33 years at Chicago Tribune, 28 as architecture critic, I’m taking a buyout + leaving the newspaper. It’s been an honor to cover + critique designs in the first city of American architecture + to continue the tradition begun by Paul Gapp, my Pulitzer-winning predecessor.

During these 28 years, I have chronicled an astonishing time of change, both in Chicago and around the world. From the horrors of 9...

16 designers to display new "Tribune Tower" models at the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennial

2017-03-07T19:41:00-05:00

The 1922 contest drew 263 entries from 23 countries and led to the construction of a landmark neo-Gothic skyscraper. In 1980, Chicago architects Stanley Tigerman and Stuart Cohen organized a "Late Entries" version of the legendary contest...Now, the curators of this year's Chicago Architecture Biennial are putting together what might be called the "Late Late Entries" to the Tribune Tower competition.

Although the names of the sixteen designers picked to create a new "Tribune Tower" at the Chicago Architecture Biennial haven't been announced quite yet, according to this article their designs are already being value-engineered in order to be as feasible as possible for potential construction. Whichever design may ultimately go on to the big time of 1:1 scale, the Biennial will be a delightful experience for all of those who still enjoy enormous physical models of both the built and the unbuilt variety:

In addition to the 16 new versions of Tribune Tower, the curators are commissioning two other 16-foot-tall models of designs for the skyscraper from early in the last century. One is a famous, columnlike version by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos that was part of the 1922 competition. The other, which was not officially entered, is a gridded modernist design by the German architect and urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer.

A Friend in Deed: Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin discusses his rocky relationship with Donald Trump, on Archinect Sessions #86

2016-10-20T15:37:00-04:00

Blair Kamin, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has had a tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump for years. As a developer working in Chicago, Trump's buildings have been critiqued by Kamin, and as often happens when Trump is criticized, he does not shy away from firing back personal attacks—calling him "dopey" and "a lightweight" when Kamin decried the developer's decision to slap a 20-foot-tall "TRUMP" sign on his downtown Chicago hotel. But instances like the "sign feud" aside, Kamin has also experienced Trump's kinder side, and can attest to the complex (to say the least) personality of the business man both before and after his profoundly strange pivot onto the national political stage.

We invited Kamin on the podcast to discuss his relationship with the developer-candidate, how it's impacted his role as a critic, and how the 2016 campaign has invoked issues related to the built environment (or not).

Listen to episode 86 of Archinect Session...

Chicago Tribune Tower sale closes; mixed-use redevelopment likely

2016-08-31T13:42:00-04:00

Los Angeles-based developer CIM Group has agreed to buy Tribune Tower for up to $240 million, marking the end of media ownership for the historic North Michigan Avenue building and the beginning of a new chapter, likely as part of a mixed-use redevelopment. [...] Tribune Media unveiled conceptual plans last year to redevelop the parcel, adding several buildings to maximize the space with residential, retail and hotel components.

The Tribune Tower sale previously in the Archinect news: Chicago Tribune Tower inches closer to hotel & residential redevelopment

Chicago Tribune Tower inches closer to hotel & residential redevelopment

2016-05-20T19:34:00-04:00

A group of developers on the short list to buy Tribune Tower want to convert the Gothic Michigan Avenue landmark into condominiums, apartments and even a hotel [...] The property also comes with something all developers love: land for new buildings. A buyer could build one or two more towers on the parking lot next door and on space created by demolishing some of the existing Tribune building that is not landmarked. [...]

In other recent Chi-Town news on Archinect:

Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin on why his profession isn't dead

2015-07-21T13:06:00-04:00

Clearly, the days of the critic’s hegemony are done. [...] Yet as I know from years of blogging and tweeting, there is often wisdom in the crowd. The people who live in a neighborhood or work in a building often know more about it than the lazy critic who makes only a cursory inspection. My take on all this is that architecture criticism is not dead ... They fail to recognize that the circumstances of our time offer promise as well as peril.

In a speech delivered this past spring at Chicago's Society of Architectural Historians, Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, addressed the nature of architecture criticism in today's media landscape. The talk came after Kamin's contentious Twitter exchange with "comb-over vulgarian" (Kamin's words) and now Presidential contender, Donald Trump, prompting a discussion of the critic's influence when their subjects (or anyone) can launch rebukes on social media.

Nieman Reports has collected select excerpts from his talk, covering not only Kamin's approach and ideology towards architecture criticism, but why calling it "dead" is short-sighted. Here, Kamin outlines the five core questions he asks himself when assessing a structure:

"First, quality: Does the design elevate prosaic materials to visual poetry, as does the extraordinary brickwork of Henry Hobson Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard? Or, like Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the Universit...