Epic scale, interrogable detail and obsessive and visionary nature of Luis-Miguel Lus Arana’s Eye Line entry wins him first place, practitioner, in 2024 Eye Line
First place, Practitioner
Luis-Miguel Lus Arana
Professor, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zaragoza, Spain
‘As much a publicity stunt as an architectural competition’, says Eye Line practitioner winner professor Lus Arana of the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower international competition, to build ‘the most beautiful building in the world’ – a campaign that generated worldwide press coverage, attracting 278 entries from 23 countries.
Won by John Mead Howells and Raymond M Hood, the designs mostly ranged ‘from beautifully elegant to hilariously wacky’, says Lus Arana, and have been lost to collective imagination. So, despite entries from prominent architects of the time, including Eliel Saarinen, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Jan Duiker, it’s perhaps only Adolf Loos’ huge, fantastical column that is readily called to mind.
In an epic hand-drawing that stretches to over 3m in length, Lus Arana has sought to address this failure of architectural recollection, by choosing 60 of his favourite losing entries (you’ll see Loos at the back there somewhere) to create ‘Tribuneville’, his fictional new quarter of Chicago. It was a Herculean task to bring them together and Lus Arana has done some curatorial masterplanning too, creating design districts in his city quarter – ‘the Doric Village, Cartoonists’ Alley, Obelisk Drive… up to the Modern Quarter.’
Not just that; he’s created ‘fake news’ of his own, collaging in references to Guimard, Horta, Louis Sullivan, Buckminster Fuller and Gerrit Rietveld to create a cityscape that is a heady mix of fact, fantasy and more fantasy.
The judges loved the epic scale, interrogable detail, obsessive and visionary nature of the endeavour. Chia-Yi Chou was fascinated by ‘the way he’s brought all of them together, and more, to tell the story of a moment of architectural history – all rendered as if it’s real but which is in fact a work of complete fiction’. Jan-Carlos Kucharek called it a ‘Soanic pasticcio in drawn form’, to which Sarah Wigglesworth added that the piece can be understood ‘in the historical context of JM Gandy’s painterly efforts to represent the pantheon of Soane’s built and unbuilt works’.
Knut Ramstad appreciated how ‘it’s not just about the level of detail of the drawing but the layering of the Chicago story that leaves you able to study the drawing for hours’. It left everyone wishing to experience the drawing at its real size – what Kucharek called ‘this elephant’s graveyard of competition entries’.
Eye Line award winning drawings from this and previous years