The free plan versus the nostalgia of history:

The Chicago Tribune of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer versus the Chicago Tribune of Hood y Howells.

Abstract

In 1922 the competition for the construction of the new headquarters of the Chicago Tribune newspaper was to become the scene of the first great failure of the Modern Movement in Europe. In it, some of the best European and American architects of the time - including the winning team of Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells and the one formed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer - were to bear witness to an intellectual combat that, in times of the first European postwar period, would confront two ways of looking at architecture that were in reality two ways of looking at the world: Europe versus America, the free plan versus the segregation of the plan, the tabula rasa versus historicist nostalgia, and the vindication of a historical recommencement versus the need to vindicate a time that never existed.