click to enlarge
Throughout the last year, Gabriele Neri, professor at the Schools of Architecture of Torino and Mendrisio, has been publishing the section ‘Archisatire’ in Domus Magazine. Among many other things, Gabriele is an architectural historian and architect who authored Caricature Architettoniche (2015), a review of the History of architectural cartoons, together with Capolavori in miniatura. Pier Luigi Nervi e la modellazione strutturale (Mendrisio, 2014), Pier Luigi Nervi in Africa (Macerata and Cape Town, 2021), and has curated the exhibitions Umberto Riva. La vie des formes (2023), Vico Magistretti. The Conquest of Space (2023, with M. Cassani, and L. Poncellini), Pietro Lingeri. Abstraction and Construction (2021), Vico Magistretti Architetto milanese (2021), Umberto Riva. Forme (2019), Louis Kahn and Venezia (2018, with E. Barizza), and Forme: Umberto Riva architetto designer (2019). His last exhibition, RICCARDO DALISI. Radicalmente, (with an installation design by Novembre Studio) is currently on display at the MAXXI, in Rome.
In between all the things in his busy schedule, Gabriele also took some time to accept an invitation to guest co-edit an upcoming issue of scholarly journal RA – Revista de Arquitectura on architecture and humor, ‘Juste pour Rire. Laughter, Humor, Satire, Architecture, and Everything in Between’ whose CFP was just launched, and to include my work in his Archisatire series. You can read the text below or, better, buy a physical copy of the magazine:
………………………………………………………………..
As the scarcity of big names at the 2023 Venice Biennale further showed, over the last 20 years there seems to have been a downsizing in the idolisation of architects as geniuses and demiurges of our time. Satire has also played a part in this process, deploying its special weapons to deflate the overly celebratory portrayals that we were used to seeing at the start of the 21st century. An interesting case is [CENSORED]. An architect and professor in [CENSORED AGAIN], but also a talented cartoonist with the pen name ‘Klaus’, he has long been mocking the gripes, obsessions and narcissisms of his own professional category. Around 2008, during a stint at Harvard rubbing shoulders with the architecture elite, Klaus began producing hilarious cartoons that mocked and denuded the majesty of starchitects. One of the most incisive was the cartoon of Rem Koolhaas after one of his lectures on sustainability, which was so banal as to seem almost self-deprecating. In Klaus’s parody, the Dutch architect reads Wikipedia to the audience. Another successful series is dedicated to Peter Eisenman, who is imprisoned in one of his houses inspired by structuralism.
According to Klaus, architects suffer from an atavistic inferiority complex. Neither philosophers nor artists nor engineers, they resort to these disciplines when it suits them, often with an alarming superficiality. In 2012, he depicted Chinese Pritzker Prizewinner Wang Shu as an idol surrounded by worshiping figures, to reflect once again on the mechanisms of architecture’s glorification. Both the strength and intrinsic limitation of Klaus’s satire is that it acts from within the system: published mainly in architecture journals, it is aimed at an audience of insiders. While his gibes have the valuable role of dismantling hagiographies, they also risk being easily digested. Some architects have tried to buy the originals of the cartoons dedicated to them, and others have even offered him jobs. As is well known, in an image-obsessed society, being seen matters more than substance, so much so that the reputation of the “victim” can paradoxically even be strengthened.
Klaus is perfectly aware of this dynamic. He tackles it by persistently drawing increasingly complex projects, both graphically and mentally, such as The Pneumatic Passage. These illustrated stories seem to reread Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, mixing architecture, cinema and cyberpunk comics; Reyner Banham and François Schuiten; Lebbeus Woods and Blade Runner; Moebius and Borges. “It’s all about having fun,” he says, as his pencil invents fantasy worlds where the cartoonist exalts and teases the architect, and to an extent also himself.
Gabriele Neri: ‘The Fantasy Worlds of Klaus that Make Fun of Architects’
Domus 1085, December 2023.
Klaustoon 
Leave a comment