Welcome to Tribuneville. Original pencil drawing. Summer 2023 version [excerpt]
Back in early 2022, personally a terrible year, but also a year full of significant anniversaries, I was making my usual list of possible topics for my next Arquinoir columns for Arquine Magazine. These included the 40th anniversary of Blade Runner (which I discarded), and John Carpenter’s The Thing, the 10th anniversary of Jean Giraud/Moebius’s passing, and, most important of all, the 100th anniversary of THE architectural competition. That is: the competition that you’ll inevitably find in any book on the History of (modern) Architecture, if only one is mentioned —perhaps, only perhaps, with the Palace of Soviets competition(s) throughout the 1930s as a not-that-close second in line.
Searching online, however, I was shocked to notice how little-to-none attention was been paid to this landmark of architectural history, with most architectural media —or generalist media, for that matter— apparently oblivious of it —or definitely uninterested. Of course, some of this media apathy stemmed from the different revisitings of the competition that have taken place in recent years, most notably at the 2017 Chicago Biennial . Nevertheless, the lack of any mention, other than a couple scholarly articles, was definitely depressing. So, shocked and slightly offended by this negligence, I wrapped myself in my architectural historian robe, took my phone —this is the way my mind remembers it— and called my favorite archicultural agitator in Chicago, Iker Gil, to discuss what could be done to amend this. Finally, an online event, titled Chicago Tribune Tower Competition at 100 was organized on November 21, 2022 within the MAS Context Fall 2022 Lecture Series. In it, Stewart Hicks, Katherine Solomonson (author of The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and yours truly, discussed the competition, its background and its legacy. Among some notable attendees was Stuart E. Cohen, who, together with Stanley Tigerman, organized the Late Entries to the Chicago Tribune Exhibition back in 1980. In the video below you can watch the entire event, although I’d strongly suggest skipping my intervention, which starts at around the 34′ mark and goes on for some 10 minutes.
Chicago Tribune Tower Competition at 100. MAS Context Fall 2022 Lecture Series, November 21, 2022.
My excuse to have a part at all in this (other than the telephone call where it started) was to provide the poster image for the event, which had been conceived as the background of a forthcoming Arquinoir cartoon. The drawing was designed as a new entry in my ‘Pneumatic Passage’ sub-series (more on that at some point), speculating with the possibility of an alternative Chicago where the 200+ proposals submitted to the competition would have made their way into built reality throughout the years. As I explained at the event, the drawing, which organized some of the proposals in different ‘neighborhoods’, was intended to be much larger (see sketches below). It was also meant to be inked, but my proverbial slowness prevented that from happening, as well —even in the published cartoon (coming soon)…
…and further expansions of it (coming soon, too).
Oh, we also made an animation out of it (forthcoming blog entry)
Klaustoon 
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