Klaus: Welcome to Tribuneville

Welcome to Tribuneville is a limited-run set of 10 prints by architectural cartoonist Klaus that were produced to accompany the installation of the same name co-presented by MAS Context and 150 Media Stream between June 17 and December 30, 2024.

In June 1922, the Chicago Tribune launched an international architectural competition for the building that would house its new headquarters with the ambitious goal of constructing “the most beautiful office building in the world.”

In addition to the winning entry by John Mead Howells and Raymond M. Hood, and Eliel Saarinen’s proposal—a second place that many felt should have won—the competition attracted designs from some of the most prominent architects of the time, both within the US and from the international scene, such as Walter Gropius, Adolf Loos, Bruno Taut, Max Taut, Jan Duiker, and Ludwig Hilberseimer. While most of the designs have been lost to the collective imagination, the parade of inventive proposals ranges from the beautifully elegant to the hilariously wacky, from the neo-Gothic to the Beaux Arts, from the hyper-ornamental Art Nouveau to the beautifully crafted Art Deco, from spiky Expressionism to naked functionalism, and beyond. Feeling it a shame that such a display of architectural imagination remains mostly unknown, Klaus took it upon himself to recover his favorite among these unbuilt entries and imagine a Chicago that could have been.

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?”