Chicago Tribune Tower Competition at 100

Stewart Hicks is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a cofounder of Design With Company (Dw/Co). His interests include how literature and architecture intersect in fiction, character, type, metaphor, etc. Dw/Co translates these themes into installations, speculative urban scenarios, temporary pavilions, and designs for buildings. The practice was recognized as a Next Progressive from Architect Magazine, Next Generation from Architectural Record, and a New Talent by Metropolis, and was featured in both Chicago Biennials. Stewart is also a MacDowell Fellow and former Hyde Chair of Excellence at the University of Nebraska.

Klaus is an architectural cartoonist active since the early 2000s. Focused on the critique of the architectural star system, the revision of the radical visions of the ’60s and ’70s, and the reinterpretation of the icons of architectural history, both within the discipline and the media, his cartoons have been published in magazines such as Architectural Design, Architectural Review, Arq, Arq'a, eVolo, Clog, Conditions, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine, J–A Jornal Arquitectos, MAS Context, STUDIO, The New City Reader, Volume, as well as several books. He has been a regular contributor to German magazine Uncube (“Numerus Klausus,” 2013–2016), A10: New European Architecture (“Interchange,” 2014–2016), and Arquine, where he writes and illustrates his section “ArquiNoir” since 2013. His work has been exhibited in cities such as Naples, Venice, Santiago (Chile), Mexico D.F., and Chicago, among others. In his other life he is also Luis Miguel (Koldo) Lus Arana, Associate Professor in the Theory and History of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza, where he teaches and writes about the intersections of architecture, media, and popular culture.

Katherine Solomonson is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota College of Design, where she teaches the history of the built environment in the School of Architecture. She is also affiliated with the Departments of American Studies, Art History, and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Her teaching and scholarship address the interplay between buildings and landscapes and the cultural values, social practices, and power relations that shape and are shaped by them. Her book, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), examines the ways in which the competition and resulting building became engaged in the growth of consumer culture and the production of national identity. The book received the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award.