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building, but it did not change the way in which architects saw the office building; therefore it has less historical significance, even though it might (arguably) be a finer work of art. The buildings that we tend to call ‘great’ are those which change the course of events, so they mark out the next chapter in the story that is being told, and for that reason in retrospect they always look ‘ahead of their time’. This is not at all the same thing as supposing that buildings that try to look futuristic are historically important. It is impossible to tell in advance which way things are going to develop, so we cannot always predict which buildings are going to be the historically important ones. It is necessary for them to have some degree of accomplishment, but there are so many buildings around that it would be impossible to tell a story that included even all the reasonably good buildings.

20. Chicago Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois (1923–5); architects: John Mead Howells (1868–1959) and Raymond Hood (1881–1934). In 1922 the proprietor of the Chicago Tribune organized an international competition to find a design that would make the finest office building in the world for his newspaper’s headquarters. It attracted entries from prominent architects around the world, and there was a touring exhibition of the entries, so the winning design, by Raymond Hood, was immediately well known and influential. It was on a prominent site in Chicago, a city that is built on absolutely flat ground, which makes almost every site seem rather neutral. The tower is on the city’s main street, Michigan Avenue, close to the Chicago River, the city’s only natural feature, with a plaza between the building and the river. The design put everything into the idea of making the building tower, and made use of Gothic ornamentation, in order to make the whole building look as if it is soaring up to the complex arrangement of masonry that makes the distinctive crown – modelled on the 13th-century Butter Tower at Rouen Cathedral, but very much larger than the original. The building’s steel frame made it possible, but it is nowhere visible, because it is covered in limestone. It is therefore a technically advanced building that was stylistically conservative. Looking to historic buildings to give an idea of soaring verticality took Howells and Hood clearly enough to the Gothic cathedrals, where this had been an aim. A less inspired sort of Gothic had also been the style adopted by Cass Gilbert for the Woolworth Building in New York, which was the tallest building in the world at the time of the competition. Howells and Hood had first met while studying at the highly traditional École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and Howells set up practice in New York, establishing a reputation such that he was one of the ten American architects invited to enter the competition. He enlisted Hood’s help, and Hood is generally remembered as the building’s designer. He was certainly the more flamboyant character, and at the time of the competition was living deeply in debt. When the firm won the competition, Hood’s wife Elsie borrowed the cheque, hired a taxi, and took it round New York to show to the various creditors.

Towards a new architecture

In the 19th century there were calls to invent a new architecture for the 19th century, that did not involve dressing buildings up in styles derived from the buildings of earlier centuries. Why couldn’t there be an original ‘19th-century’ style? Viollet-le-Duc for example argued that the new architecture would derive from the new ways of constructing buildings. It did not happen convincingly until the 20th century was already under way, and people like Mies and Le Corbusier devised ways of making architecture look as if it had shaken off historical ornament in order to adopt a modern way of doing things, using new materials – the steel frame and the concrete slab. It seemed as if they had managed to fulfil the 19th-century prophecies, which were by then deeply ingrained in the culture of architecture. Their ways of thinking