Resolved: the Wrigley Building is a beautiful, beloved jewel of Chicago, though not great architecture. Discuss.

“Beautiful” is a value judgment, one I endorse fully. Glazed terra cotta in six shades of white, shifting toward creamy yellow as it nears the top. Festooned with dragons, griffins, cherubs, rams. That four-faced clock, 20 feet tall.

“Beloved” is not open to debate — any survey of popular Chicago buildings includes the Wrigley Building.

Opinion

“It was made to be liked,” said Robert Sharoff, whose new coffee table book, “The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon,” (Rizzoli Electa) with photographs by William Zbaren and commentaries by Tim Samuelson, shines a spotlight on a structure that’s been well-illuminated for over a century.

“The more I shot it, the more joyous it became,” said Zbaren. “It’s so playful.”

Starting with it being in reality two buildings, built at different times, with different addresses, 400 and 410 N. Michigan, connected at the 14th floor by that metal skybridge, a rococo detail that seems pulled from those dreamlike early 1900s fantasies of the urban future, with plump zeppelins and streamlined elevated trains and mustachioed gentlemen in bowler hats pedaling through the air on penny-farthing bicycles with wings.

“The Wrigley Building” bristles with glorious facts that even I didn’t know, starting with the clock initially being hand-wound by someone turning an enormous crank, winching up weights that once drove the mechanism.

The authors come down firmly in favor of “great architecture,” not surprising in a book bankrolled by Wrigley Building owner Joe Mansueto. Though they insist the Morningstar billionaire gave them a free hand, which they use to massage the life of the architect, Charles Beersman, who does not have a deep portfolio — his other building of note is Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. Both of his signature structures are riffs on the Giralda Tower in Spain, with notes of New York’s Municipal Building stirred into Wrigley.

To me, he had one idea, and it was someone else’s. But in this book, Beersman might as well be Michelangelo — we’re given nine of his 11 childhood addresses in San Francisco, in a note.

What we get far less of are the critics who lined up over the years to give the Wrigley Building the backhand. Lewis Mumford referred to its “safe mediocrity.” The Wrigley Building is “just what the name implies,” sniffed Frank Lloyd Wright — admittedly not famous for kindness toward other architects — noting it “illustrates the principle that an ugly building by day, if illuminated, will be ugly by night as well.”

F.K. Plous wrote in the Sun-Times in 1972 that Chicagoans are “embarrassed and depressed” by how visitors gush over “that Michigan Av. wedding cake, the Wrigley Building. The purist’s nose goes up another inch while his spirits sink accordingly.”

Why?

“Ornate, a bit old-fashioned ...” Plous wrote, “unallied with any known school.”

Sharoff brushes away such criticism (and Samuelson dismisses the enduring skybridge mystery in a few chicken-crossing-the-road sentences: It was built in 1931 to get to the other side).

“Does this mean that the Wrigley Building is nothing but a collection of spare parts?” he asks. “Not at all.”

“It’s not a pastiche,” insisted Sharoff, in an interview. “It’s the real thing. It’s American Beaux-Arts, which was a movement unto itself.”

Sure it is. And a strange hill to die on. If the only way you can love the Wrigley Building is to deem it significant architecture, fine. But that misses the point. You can love the White Sox without pretending they won 121 games last year instead of losing them. I love my mother, too, but would never write a book arguing that this makes her Joan of Arc.

Still, “The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon” deserves a place of pride on your coffee table, flaws and all. Zbaren’s photos are gorgeous; Mansueto got his money’s worth.

Who reads coffee table books anyway? Honestly, the most significant and wonderful aspect of the Wrigley Building is eloquently laid out in the photo on page 177, reproduced above, and requiring little elaboration. They built the tallest building in Chicago, at the time, north of the Chicago River when all around was a smoky industrial nowhere of low factories and warehouses. The Wrigley Building is a bold expression of faith in the future of Chicago, a throw of the dice that paid off. That alone is reason to love it.