Welcome to Tribuneville: An Imaginary Vision of an Old Chicago That Could Have Been

MAS Context and 150 Media Stream are thrilled to co-present “Welcome to Tribuneville: An Imaginary Vision of an Old Chicago That Could Have Been” by architectural cartoonist Klaus.

The hand-drawn animation, installed on 150 Media Stream’s giant media wall—a 150 ft x 22 ft series of 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.

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.”

With $50,000, $20,000, and $10,000 prizes for first, second, and third place respectively, plus a $2,000 honorarium paid to ten firms that had been invited to submit their designs, the competition was an unquestionable success that earned it a storied place in the history of architecture. As much an architectural competition as a publicity stunt for the newspaper, “The International Competition for a New Administration Building for the Chicago Tribune” was part of a massive campaign that generated worldwide press coverage, attracting 263 entries from twenty-three countries, which were subsequently published in a book and featured in a traveling exhibition.

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?”