A Cartoonist's Immersive Vision of What Chicago's Architecture Could Have Been Is on Display in One of the City's New Icons

“For Chicago, the most beautiful building in the world.” That was the goal of the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition for a new headquarters to be built at the prime location of Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River. An ornate neo-Gothic design by the American architects Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells was chosen and built, but there were 262 other entries from architects both acclaimed and little-known, representing 23 countries. What would Chicago look like if those had been constructed?

That’s the hypothetical behind “Welcome to Tribuneville: An Imaginary Vision of an Old Chicago That Could Have Been,” a highly detailed drawing of a retro-futuristic cityscape consisting of 60 of the entries from the Tribune competition. Created by the architectural cartoonist Klaus and presented by 150 Media Stream and the Chicago architectural nonprofit MAS Context, it’s currently on display on the crenellated digital screens of 150 Media Stream at 150 N. Riverside. The dynamic art piece is available to view by the public on weekdays from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm and Saturdays from 1:00 to 10:00 pm through December 30.

“If they had picked another option, probably the history of American architecture would have been affected,” says Luis Miguel Lus-Arana, aka Klaus, of the competition. A refined glass-and-metal submission by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer could have ushered in an era of International Style modernism in America earlier, presaging the arrival of the modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. The competition’s second-place design, an ornamented tower consisting of tiered setbacks by Eliel Saarinen, was widely admired by architects and embodied a new era of American skyscraper.

A visitor to 150 Media Stream can observe the details of these designs up close on the 150-foot by 22-foot digital display in the lobby of 150 N. Riverside, an innovative building that is itself an “architectural achievement that is part of the architecture legacy of Chicago,” as Yuge Zhou, the curator of 150 Media Stream, points out. 150 N. Riverside, which stands like a pencil on a narrow pedestal, is even included in the drawing as an Easter egg. You’ll have to search it out in Klaus’ animated cartoon, which allows a viewer vantage points from close-ups of architectural detail to a streetscape vista. 

“Every time I look at it, I discover something new,” Zhou says, adding that it’s one of the more popular pieces that have been displayed by 150 Media Stream. 

“Because of the format, because of the animation, because it’s done as a cartoon, people who have no knowledge of architecture can come here and be curious,” says Iker Gil, a partner at MAS Context who helped bring “Welcome to Tribuneville” to 150 Media Stream. “We’re always interested in saying, ‘How can we talk about architecture in a different medium? How do we bring that history and that knowledge into public spaces?’” he says. “Welcome to Tribuneville” “lowers the entry point.”

The Tribune competition “is the most important competition in the history of modern architecture,” says Lus-Arana, who is a professor of theory and history of architecture at the University of Zaragoza in Spain in his non-cartooning life. The submitted designs were published in a book and featured in a traveling exhibition; the Tribune dreamt the whole thing up not just as a way to choose a new headquarters but also as a publicity stunt. Submissions came in a wide range of styles, from highly ornamented buildings similar to the neo-Gothic winner to functionalist modernist beacons to ridiculous impossibilities. “Welcome to Tribuneville” groups them into “neighborhoods” that share stylistic traits: the Art Deco District, Obelisk Drive, a Byzantine section.

“There are many wacky proposals,” Lus-Arana says. “Some of them are very exuberant and actually they’re very good designs. You have some others which are exuberant and would be horrible as buildings,” for example, a proposal by the Italian architect Saverio Dioguardi for a globe-topped classical arch. “It would have been terrible as an office building,” Lus-Arana says, “but it’s actually very nice, and if you could cross it with an elevated sidewalk, that would have been fantastic.”

“Welcome to Tribuneville” allows such impracticalities to exist next to pragmatic buildings and even tongue-in-cheek designs such as a robot-shaped building conceived after the competition by a Tribune cartoonist, or a giant column by the influential Austrian architect Adolf Loos, which may have been a joking reference to newspaper columns. The whimsy of these designs extends to the imaginary city of the cartoon, in which dirigibles dock at the tops of towers and other flying vehicles float between buildings.

“I arrived at architecture through the mass media, from the production stuff that was being done for cinema or in comics or illustration in general,” Lus-Arana says, and his research as a scholar has explored imagined cities. He argues that such creative fictions have influenced actual architecture and urban design, so it made sense for him to include a fantastical vision of the future in his imaginary “Tribuneville.”

“It’s about recovering this part of the architectural heritage, which is not pedigreed, but is also part of what architects were being fed,” he says. He cites the architectural historian Carol Willis as arguing that “the image of the future was being built at the same time by architects and newspaper illustrators or commercial illustrators,” in his words.

“When you do a competition, you are doing it from your moment, but you are also projecting what the future can be,” says Gil. “To me the lesson is that we can imagine what we want Chicago to be.”

A reception and conversation featuring Lus-Arana, Gil, and Zhou will take place at 150 N. Riverside on October 8 at 6:00 pm. Lus-Arana will give a lecture on “Welcome to Tribuneville” at the Society of Architectural Historians, 1365 N. Astor St. in Chicago, on October 10 at 6:00 pm.