MULTISTORY* Guest Lecture Klaus Toons Thursday 28th February 6pm | Events

We are pleased to announce a MULTISTORY* guest lecture by

Klaus Toons // Architectural Cartoonist

Thursday 28th February 2019 // Lecture 6pm

From the mid 2000s onwards, and particularly since the creation of Klaustoon's Blog in 2009, Klaus has enjoyed poking fun at the architectural status quo. Created at first as a tongue-in-cheek chronicle of the life at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Klaus's cartoons soon evolved towards a general satire of the architectural scene, its foremost stars and current events, but also disparate its present, future and History, exploring both obscure corners of architectural Theory and its contemporary issues with an equal absence of any intellectual criteria.

In the ten years since it opened, many have been the personalities that have passed through the blog, from distinguished GSD faculty members to Pritzker award winners such as Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor, or Kazuyo Sejima, younger superstars such as Bjarke Ingels, but also figures from the past and the periphery of the discipline, such as Reyner Banham, Bruno Latour, Buckminster Fuller... all mixed with an endless array of references to comics, cinema, science fiction, and popular media. Among all those, a place of honor corresponds, of course, to Rem Koolhaas, whose different cartoonizations have been a recurrent source for celebration and joy amongst the followers of the site and a sure trigger for future lawsuits.

Much to his surprise, in this lapse, Klaus’s cartoons have made their way into many architectural publications such as Aequus, eVolo, (In)forma, Clog, Conditions, Harvard Design Magazine, MAS Context, STUDIO, PRAXIS, MIT's Threshold Journal, The Architectural Review or Architectural Design, and have been featured in small installations and bigger exhibitions, both in Europe and the US, and even more importantly, they made their way to OMA’s canteen. Among his most steady collaborations we can mention his work for Joseph Grima & Kazys Varnelis-edited newspaper-performance “The New City Reader”, his section 'Numerus Klausus' for online magazine Uncube, and his cartoons for the 'Interchange' series in A10 Magazine (all those magazines have since ceased publication). Since 2014, he has been producing the column 'Arquinoir' for Mexico's leading magazine Arquine, where he combines cartoons done in a demodé Franco-Belgian style with texts in the fashion of Reyner Banham's articles for New Society. In Spanish.

When he is not busy being Klaus, he is also Luis Miguel Lus Arana, an architect, PhD and lecturer in Theory and History of architecture whose research deals with the History of architectural Utopia and the images of the future city, and the interactions between architecture and mass media. He holds an architecture degree and a PhD from the University of Navarra, and an Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University. He has also been the recipient of several academic awards and post-graduate scholarships, and his work has been published internationally. But that's less interesting.

For more information: https://klaustoon.wordpress.com/

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MULTISTORY* is a student and alumni led guest lecture programme series at Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts. It seeks to invite architects, designers, writers, curators, photographers and artists to speak about their work.