American Radiator Building

Abstract

EACH MAJOR work in Raymond Hood’s compressed, prolific career—cut short by his death at 53—is a fascinating metamorphosis from the skyscraper’s Gothic roots to his early championship of the International Style in America. Hood and his collaborator John Mead Howell’s winning entry for the highly visible Chicago Tribune Building competition in 1922 was a 36-story, 460-foot-tall version of Rouen Cathedral’s Butter Tower in France, complete with eight overscaled flying buttresses. Sensitive to criticism that Eliel Saarinen’s stripped-down, “styleless” (read modern) second-place entry was the superior design, Hood combined Gothic and modern styles in his American Radiator Building (though designed after the Tribune Building, the Radiator was actually completed a year earlier).