{"product_id":"chicago-tribune-sign","title":"Chicago Tribune Sign","description":"\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eADDRESS: 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL  \u003cbr\u003eARCHITECTS: John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood  \u003cbr\u003eYEARS BUILT: 1923-25\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNobody builds signs like this anymore.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe \"CHICAGO TRIBUNE\" sign on the south face of the printing plant building adjacent to Tribune Tower was not designed to be beautiful. It was built in 1964 from heavy-gauge steel sheet stock. Industrial fabrication. The same logic as a water tower or a loading dock. Put the name where people can see it. Make it out of something that survives Chicago winters. Do not overthink it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat you see in this photograph is the result of that thinking, plus sixty years of weather doing its work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo understand what the sign is, you have to understand what it was not.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe story begins with a competition. In 1922, the Chicago Tribune announced that it would build \"the most beautiful office building in the world.\" This was Colonel Robert R. McCormick speaking, a man who had served artillery in World War I and ran his paper with the same conviction that you aim a cannon: once you commit to the trajectory, you do not apologize for where the shell lands. More than 260 entries arrived from 23 countries. Architects from Europe, America, and Asia sent their visions of what a newspaper's home should look like. The winning design came from New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood. They chose Gothic. Soaring vertical lines. Flying buttresses. A crown of stone tracery reaching toward the sky.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe six-story printing plant building directly attached to the Tribune Tower made no such argument. It was an industrial engine, the place where the paper was actually printed, where the presses ran, and the trucks loaded and the ink dried. The sign on its south face was a corporate broadcast, not a civic monument. It said: this block belongs to the Tribune. It said: we are here, we are large, we are not going anywhere.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe typeface is not accidental. The Gothic lettering mirrors the Tribune's masthead, the nameplate the paper has used since the 1850s. Blackletter font, formally speaking. The same family of letterforms that medieval scribes used to copy scripture, that Gutenberg chose for his first Bible, and that American newspapers adopted in the 19th century to signal gravity over gossip and record over rumor.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you scale that letterform up to the size of a building, something unexpected happens. The Gothic script that reads as institutional at newspaper dimensions reads as monumental at architectural scale. The sign was built for visibility, but its letterforms gave it a quality that outlasted the purely functional intention. You cannot look at those letters lit at night over the Chicago River and think: this is an advertisement. You think: it’s a statement.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat is not what the designers intended. It is what sixty years of weather and civic memory produced.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe steel deteriorates. The seams open. Decades of freeze and thaw leave their marks in rust and oxidation, in the slight warping of metal that has expanded and contracted through hundreds of Chicago winters. What the photograph records is not the sign as it was installed but the sign as it lived: marked by time, carrying its age visibly, the way all honest things do.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost cities would have repainted it. Would have patched the surface, touched up the lettering, kept it looking new. Chicago left it alone. The weathering is not neglect. It is evidence. It tells you the sign has been standing there through all of it, through every winter and every morning edition, through the whole long history of a city writing itself down and distributing the result by truck and train across the Midwest.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI made this photograph back in 2015, before the renovation, when the newspaper was still in the building. The letters were there. Heavy, Gothic, industrial. Not polished, not restored, not optimized for the residential amenity area that will eventually occupy the space beneath them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJust the sign. Just the name. Just steel in the sky over the Chicago River, doing what it was built to do, still visible from exactly where it was meant to be seen.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey built it to last. And it did.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","offers":[{"title":"MATTED \/ 08x10","offer_id":51074533392662,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MATTED \/ 16x20","offer_id":51074533425430,"sku":null,"price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 16x16","offer_id":51074533458198,"sku":null,"price":200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 24x24","offer_id":51074533490966,"sku":null,"price":450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 32x32","offer_id":51074533523734,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 44x44","offer_id":51074533556502,"sku":null,"price":2200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 24x24","offer_id":51074533589270,"sku":null,"price":325.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 32x32","offer_id":51074533622038,"sku":null,"price":525.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 44x44","offer_id":51074533654806,"sku":null,"price":1450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 60x60","offer_id":51074533687574,"sku":null,"price":3950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 90x90","offer_id":51074533720342,"sku":null,"price":8750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 120x120","offer_id":51074533753110,"sku":null,"price":14950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1306\/7343\/files\/ChicagoTribuneTowerSigncopy.jpg?v=1772558372","url":"https:\/\/www.menaker.com\/products\/chicago-tribune-sign","provider":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","version":"1.0","type":"link"}