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By the 1920s, Chicago had clearly lost the race for urban supremacy, and the second city complex began to take over. New buildings imitated styles from New York and elsewhere. In the big bank lobbies, Sullivan's functionalism gave way to a vulgar grandiosity. One of the worst offenders was the winner of the $50,000 competition to design an office tower for the Chicago Tribune, an exercise in wedding-cake gothic chosen over a visionary design submitted by Eliel Saarinen. |
Chicago Tribune Building(click here)
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But even Chicago's mediocre buildings seem to have a majesty that their cousins in New York lack. Sullivan explains the reason for this in The Autobiography of an Idea, published in 1924. In New York's narrow streets, skyscrapers crowded next to each other become "mutually destructive." The buildings form canyons and are individually invisible. On Chicago's wider avenues with vistas open to every side, by contrast, skyscrapers retain "the element of loftiness, in the suggestion of slenderness and aspiration, the soaring quality as a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance," as Sullivan puts it. The fact that you actually see tall buildings in Chicago and don't in New York goes a way toward explaining why the one city has a thriving popular culture of architecture and the other doesn't. (This difference also explains why Chicago is a far better city for outdoor sculpture.)
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