Saturday, January 14, 2006

 

Castles in the Air

An interesting item from 1922 on eBay this week: the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition book. In the words of the seller:

The Tribune Company's famous 1922 competition to design the "World's Most Beautiful Office Building" as its headquarters captured the interest of an international audience of architects, business leaders, and the public at large. The Tribune's eccentric publisher Colonel Robert McCormick offered 100,000 Dollars as prize money and entries poured in from 22 countries. The competition was one of the largest, most important and most controversial design contests of the 1920's. The 263 entries for the design of the new Tribune Tower represented a broad constellation of approaches to the skyscraper at a time of transition. The competition was won by Raymond Hood - who would later build the Rockefeller Center.... This original first edition 1923 that came out after the competition contains all the designs submitted.... with multiple artist conception plates of all the 263 submitted building[s].

A similar collection of World Trade Center proposals was published by Rizzoli in 2004. It makes me curious -- has anyone ever published a collection entirely dedicated to unrealized architectural proposals?



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