On 29 January the Main Hall on our campus hosted the inaugural conference for the new edition of the Foros series, organised by the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture. Architect and lecturer Koldo Lus Arana, better known as “Klaus” his alter ego as a cartoonist, gave a talk entitled “Klaus: 10 years of architecture, satire, and cartoons”. 

Since the launch of his blog (Klaustoon), more than a decade ago, Klaus’ work has stood out due to its scathing critique of the old star system in architecture and the self-constructed image architects have of themselves. Klaus described his first steps as a cartoonist, which coincided with his time at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and, from there, his work evolved. The work he has published in architecture magazines such as Uncube, A10, Arquine and Architectural Design particularly stand out. “This talk has one objective: to answer the question of why someone spent seven years of their life studying and then practicing architecture, relatively successfully, and then made a huge change and got into cartoons” he said with irony at the start of his talk.  “There is a place for cartoonists and for satire in architecture, he insisted”.  

Klaus’ (Koldo Lus Arana) work has been published in numerous architecture magazines and exhibited in monographic and collective exhibitions.  As a lecturer in the Escuela de Ingeniería y Arquitectura (EINA) at the University of Zaragoza, he undertakes research on the interaction between architecture and the media, as will as urban visions of the future in terms of architecture and the visual arts. 

The title of Foros 2020 is “Co-benefits” and it is being organised by lecturers Guillem Carabí and Fredy Massad. The aim of this new edition is to reflect on the links and processes of cultural interaction between contemporary architecture and other artistic expressions such as dance, sculpture, cinema and cartoons.