As it happens, the Tribune has a distinguished history in the contest department, and nobody knows it better than the architects. To them the newspaper’s name is synonymous with its glamorous 1922 competition to design “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.” The winning entry evolved into Chicago’s landmark Tribune Tower; the far more influential losers inspired a whole generation of skyscrapers, among them the Empire State Building. But if the crush of early registrants is any clue, designers are drawn by the new contest’s altruistic bent. “We have plenty of big buildings,” complains Vincent Scully, architecture historian at Yale and Miami universities. “We need to design communities again.”
Not that this contest will necessarily lead to the laying of a single brick. Douglas Balz, a Tribune arts editor who dreamed up the competition, admits the unlikelihood of finding “one brilliant design to solve the problems of public housing.” Besides, with government budgets so strapped, even brilliant designs face real-world prospects that fall between slim and none. Balz conceived the contest as a tribute to Dantrell-to whom it’s dedicated-and a centenary nod to the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a Chicago world’s fair that prophetically focused on making cities livable. “We’re saying to the community that we’re all in this together,” Balz says.
A nice sentiment but not one that’s heard much around the projects themselves. “This place is an island,” says architect Daniel Coffey, who’s plotting his own contest entry. Cabrini-Green, named for a saint and a labor leader, is now an urbanologist’s nightmare: its 6,935 residents, most in single-parent families, live in households with average incomes of $6,000. Occupancy has slipped to 68 percent, with warring gang-bangers squatting in the empty apartments.
The Tribune wants entrants to remember that the often vilified high-rises are also people’s homes. The contest is open to anyone-architect, student or ambitious hobbyist-who writes the Tribune, at 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, 60611, by April 1. (Entries are due June 1.) The newspaper has already fielded 600 requests for contest rules. The prize is a handshake and a wealth of publicity; in 1922 the Tribune paid out $50,000-a colonel’s ransom. That, of course, was before the company was publicly traded.
CHA director Lane, who is one of the Tribune’s seven judges, still hopes to go beyond sympathetic gestures. He wants to level a few high-rises, replace them with short-stack buildings and lure working families back into Cabrini-Green. But many residents fear that a little demolition will lead to a lot: Cabrini-Green abuts the city’s posh Gold Coast neighborhood, and as cleared land it might be worth $100 million or more to private developers. Last month Ruby Givens, head of one residents’ group, emerged from a meeting with the housing authority to tell reporters, “It’s a land grab, and we know it.”
Can the blueprint crowd that. created high-rise public housing finally redeem itself? Lawrence Amstadter, now 71, would like to try. In 1953 he designed 15 of the 23 high-rises at Cabrini-Green. Amstadter makes a convincing case that his buildings were the best options then available. “We thought we were doing a helluva good job,” he says. Not that he doesn’t want to outdo himself by designing better housing this time. Everybody, says Amstadter, deserves a second chance.
