Klaus: Welcome to Tribuneville

During this event, Luis Miguel Lus Arana talked about the background and development of the installation and its historical framework, his scholarly research on architecture and the history of visionary urban design in popular media, and the relationship of both with his two-decade long cartooning work under the pseudonym “Klaus.”

The hand-drawn “Welcome to Tribuneville” animation, installed on 150 Media Stream’s giant media wall—a series of 150 ft x 22 ft LED screens—features sixty of the most inventive building designs entered in the famed 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower architectural competition, as well as flying machines, elevated walkways, monorail tramways, and other fantastical details dreamed up by the artist.

With “Welcome to Tribuneville,” Klaus creates an alternative vision of Chicago by asking, “what if all the entries to the 1922 Tribune Tower Competition had been built?”

In June, the 10-foot long hand-drawing by Klaus that serves as the base for the animation won first prize, practitioner, in RIBAJ's annual Eye Line drawing competition.

“Welcome to Tribuneville: Behind the Scenes.” Video edited by Andrés Jiménez Lobera.

This event is related to the installation Welcome to Tribuneville: An Imaginary Vision of an Old Chicago That Could Have Been on display at 150 Media Stream between June 17 and December 30, 2024.

Video shot and edited by Matt Goetz of Omni Media & Marketing.

INTRODUCTION BY STEWART HICKS

By way of introduction, I’d like to share a preliminary diagnosis of the patient. I haven’t witnessed a case this severe since my days as an undergraduate architecture student.

Back then, professors normalized the idea that your head and your hands can connect to the point the two body parts become indistinguishable.

They believed that interacting with tools and controlling their movement, will cause you to enter a type of flow-state where thinking and creating is happening simultaneously and distributed across the flesh between the brain, through to the fingers. In essence, thinking with your hands.

Supposedly, constructing a drawing with a pencil contorts your wrist in such a way that your brain can feel where a column or a door should go. Or, so they say.

Initially, my conclusion was these folks developed a brain abnormality either through genetic predisposition or reinforced behavior. Neurons are crossing and short circuiting, rendering the sensation their hands are thinking. You know, like Alien Hand Syndrome or Thing on the Addams Family. Clearly, I’m immune to such afflictions and am therefore in the unique position to diagnose it.

Then I found out that my architectural hero, James Wines, actually attributes his “best” ideas to something he calls “mind-to-hand drawings.” And by Best I mean that they are both fantastic, as well as created during the design process of his Best brand Department stores. It’s also how Wines dreamed up such amazing scenarios as his Highrise of Homes—an imaginary skyscraper filled with suburban houses, each one unique.

Klaus, my critical architectural comic hero, and our patient today, spends months making drawings of architects and architecture by hand. He does this while other critics can pen a column in a few days. And by column, I mean both a magazine column and an architectural one.

Lebbeus Woods confirms that, “all the great works of Western thought—from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Locke to Einstein—were formulated by putting a hand-held stylus to parchment or, later, to paper. The keyword here is ‘formulated,’ he says, because the act of writing is the act of thinking.”

Klaus’s hand/head affliction has resulted in formulations akin to an exceptionally astute critic. When he is drawing a comic by hand, he is apparently also thinking with his mind and ultimately writing. His dedication to this unconventional language allows him to speak eloquently on issues and pursue concepts that traditional and less practiced critics tend to avoid.

That’s why his works have been published internationally in magazines such as AD, Architectural Review, Harvard Design Magazine, and, of course, MAS Context. And, he maintains a regular column in the magazine Arquine.

When questioned, the patient self-diagnoses with a different illness than the one I’ve initially identified. On the Klaustoon website, and I am not making this up, he claims to be afflicted with a syndrome called “architecture” which he is, “still struggling to recover” from.

We can track this struggle throughout the comics Klaus has drawn, as he often renders himself in each scene. It’s the weird little frenetic guy with disheveled hair that wraps over his face like a Zorro mask. It’s notable that this figure is drawn much shorter than the real life Klaus.

The autobiographical character is a perennial outsider and reacts to the strange architectural world he finds himself within by expressing a range of emotions from confusion, to fear. However, the patient presents himself as eager to please and continuously seeking recognition for his work. This character also serves as a projectional surrogate for the audience reading the comic. Readers connect with the short frenzied guy, as we too feel confusion from the rhetoric of architects.

But the real pathology of Klaus, which we may be able to address in today’s session, is revealed just after the line on the website about the architecture syndrome. There, it mentions Klaus’s “other self,” who is “camouflaged as an architect and architectural scholar.”

After some digging, I’ve discovered this person’s name is Koldo, but I suspect that’s another fake name. He has a PhD, and he’s an Associate Professor in the Theory and History of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza.

In my non-professional opinion, Koldo or Klaus may be suffering from a form of dissociative identity disorder, or he may be pretending to for a reason yet to be revealed.

If we take his latest creation, Tribuneville as evidence, this condition may be pathological. I mean, it’s an imaginary city where 60 different building designs, with 60 different architects, are all redrawn with Klaus’s hand. Klaus successfully incorporates dozens of discordant voices and packages them into a single body.

Tribuneville is like a fever dream of a Chicago that never was and never could be. It’s a slice through a moment in time where subjective iterations of the city’s possible future are collapsed into one place.

Klaus’s normally static comics have been re-interpreted as an immersive animated world. It’s not only incredible, but we’re unimaginably lucky that Chicago is the subject of the work as well as the site for experiencing it at 150 N Riverside.

We are also lucky to hear more about how and why Klaus’s brainy hands created the sensational installation, even though he will be quick to tell you he isn’t the one who did the animating.

To be honest, I don’t know who is with us today, Klaus or Koldo. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that, just like Diego Vego to Zorro, or Clark Kent to Superman, the mask that distinguishes the superhero from the alter ego is just a comically thin veil at this point. The hair and beard isn’t fooling us anymore, and we’re all eager to welcome him to the podium.

So, here he is folks, to save the day. Klaus or Koldo!