Architecture Competition

Project Design and the Building Process

Ignaz Strebel, Jan Silberberger, Ignaz Strebel, Jan Silberberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317179559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Much valuedby design professionals, controversially discussed in the media, regularlymisunderstood by the public and systematically regulated by public procurement; in recent years, architecture competitions have become projection screens for various and often incommensurable desires and hopes.

Almost all texts on architectural competition engage it for particular reasons, whether these be for celebration of the procedure, or dismissal. Moving on from such polarised views, Architecture Competition is a revelatory study on what really happens when competitions take place. But the story is not just about architecture and design; it is about the whole construction process, from the definition of the spatial programme, to judgement and selection of projects and the realization of the building.

This book explores the competition in the building process as it takes place, but also before and after its execution. It demonstrates that competitions are not just one step of many to be taken, but that competitive design procedures shape the entire process. Along the way the book exposes, among others, one of the key evolutions of design competitions – that competition procedures need to be regulated in order to respond to public awarding rules and need to integrate an increasing amount of given standards regarding, for example, efficiency, fire safety and thermal comfort. These notions force competing architects to respond to inflexible and overloaded competition programmes instead of focusing on genuinely crafting an architectural project.

If the architecture competition wants to be more highly valued as a design tool, it should pay attention to the iterative nature of design and to the fact that perspectives on the problem often change in process.

Part I

Managing the procedure

1Two geographical logics in architectural competitions

Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the role of architectural competitions in contemporary, and often global, planning and design procedures. While we will argue that these competitions shape both architectural practice and urban form, we will explicitly use a geographical lens, one interested in and attentive to the spatial logics and relations of the practices that come together in competitions and the consequent influence they have in shaping actual urban morphologies. As we will see, buildings that arise from architectural proposals generated in and through competition processes are mediated and assembled by the competition process itself. This reminds us of the collaborative nature of architectural agency. Within the profession of architecture the competition has attracted many, largely unchallenged plaudits (de Jong and Mattie, 1994a; 1994b; Spreiregen, 1979). In professional associations, for example, the competition is regarded as an ‘engine of progress standing for quality and innovation’¹ or as ‘contribut[ing] outstandingly to the creation of quality architecture’.² Despite the apparent consensus that competitions are an excellent way to select the right design solution for a specific architectural brief, there is relatively little known about how they work. How are competitions, international or others, bound to local contexts? Who participates in them and why? How do they transport ideas and concepts? What, exactly, is their innovation potential? Do competitions really ensure the best designs and solutions are selected for appropriate places? In the introduction to this volume, we have already mentioned that the existing scholarly work on competitions is largely uncritical and even idealizes the power of the process to improve the quality of the architectural designs and maximize the outcomes for the soliciting clients and/or context. In this literature a good deal of attention has been given to how competitions have been seminal processes for innovations in architectural style (de Jong and Mattie, 1994a; 1994b; de Haan and Haagsma, 1988). Assuming this positive role, other scholars have looked to improve the regulations and standards of competition procedures (see, for example, Alexander et al., 1987; see also the Introduction to this volume).

More recently, the scholarship on architectural competitions has begun to diversify. Some have started to think about its role in design practices (Chupin, 2011; 2010), others have looked at the sociological networks competitions create and rely upon (Katsakou, 2011; Paisiou, 2011; Frey and Kolecek, 1995), still others have focused on forms of knowledge creation (Kreiner et al., 2011; Lipstadt, 2010; Silberberger et al., 2010; Nasar, 1999). It is now understood that the architectural competition is a component in a wider complexification of planning associated with new transnational geographies of city building and new private-public development partnerships (Van Wezemael, 2011; Van Wezemael et al., 2011; Malmberg, 2006). The competition format is not used for all and every component of city building, but it is especially prevalent with projects of a certain scale and profile. So routine is the competition that architectural historians have started to realize that they generate a significant number of not built schemes, themselves deserving of critical attention and archiving (Strebel et al., 2012; Chupin, 2008; Gomes Alves; 2008; Frey, 1998). As this existing scholarship suggests, and the chapter here aims to show, an architectural competition is more than simply a sieve of discernment that separates the wheat from the chaff, the good scheme from the not-so-good schemes. The ways competitions shape architecture are far more complex and furthermore they involve a range of geographical processes and outcomes. For example, awarding authorities routinely select construction sites and frame building briefs conceptually and programmatically. In return, many architectural offices now organize their work places to adequately resource the often fast-paced, high-pressure deadlines of competition opportunities. And as the arbiters of what does and does not get built, competitions articulate and stabilize mutually shared understandings of excellence in architecture. As Chupin (2011, p. 177) argues, competition jury boards actively shape and even design the projects they are assessing, evaluating and selecting during their meetings:

[J]‌urors can be considered as the re-designers of the potential winning project, as if the judgement process required jurors to converge on a project, to the point where they can appropriate it, to make it theirs in a common decision. Since the winner is the ‘product’ of the judgement process, we can say that it is logically the ‘project of the jury’, as if the jury had designed it.

In what follows we want to focus on emergent geographies of architectural competitions. By this we mean, on the one hand, the spatial relations that competitions use to perform and, on the other hand, the spatial relations that competitive design procedures shape in process. We will do so by looking at jury board meeting from various angles, as they are the places were relevant spatial relations are tied together and maintained. Specifically, we address the procurement and administrative systems in which current competition practices are embedded in Switzerland, where we encounter the specificity of a highly regulated and standardized competition practice. This allows showing that understanding the geographical logic of the competition means going beyond regulations and norms, understanding them as practical in essence and looking at how they are made and sometimes unmade. Therefore, the chapter draws on data collected on the practices of twelve clients and competition organizers in Switzerland (Strebel et al., 2012; Silberberger and Strebel, 2011). In Switzerland, as in many other countries that are signatories to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), every public awarding authority has to organize an international bidding as soon as estimated architects fees for a proposed scheme exceed an amount of CHF 350,000. As such the architectural competition is a forced part of the realization of publicly funded built schemes of a certain scale and value. In this context, our research aimed to understand competition regulations and instructions ‘in action’ (Suchman, 1987). The data was gathered in a study on the work practices of competition organizers, analysing internal documents, field notes from participatory observation and transcripts of interviews. We focused on a range of components in the competition process: how they are advertised, organized, monitored, participated in, publicized and sometimes aborted. This methodology enabled us to detail the local practices necessary to appropriately run and participate in competitions and, through this lens we have been able to better grasp how competition regulations and instructions are used and accomplished in the work situations studied (see for this approach: Lynch, 2002; 1993). In existing studies of architectural design and their regulatory contexts there is an emphasis on the ‘normative’ role of regulations, understood primarily through instructions given by professional associations and governmental institutions (Imrie and Street, 2011). Our approach brings into view a more complex and intimate relationship between design and regulation, at least in the context of competition systems.

The chapter highlights two selected geographical logics for how competitions and architecture are reciprocally and constitutively linked. Each reveals something about how instructions, rules and standards are used in competition procedures; how they are respected and adapted, as well as sometimes misused. The first geographical logic is how architectural competitions structure their field of participants, a part of which entails managing the interface between international market regulations and local labour markets. The second geographical logic relates to how the competition operates as a place of knowledge production. It is attentive to the spatial environment that jury boards use to take their decisions.

Structuring the field of participants: between international market regulations and local labour markets

One of the core arguments in support of the architectural competition is the way it opens a specific and necessarily localized building and design project to a global architectural community of expertise. Indeed, some would argue that it is only when a competition is globally open, that it can fully realize its potential as a device for enhancing the quality and innovation of architectural solutions proposed in response to a given brief. Interestingly, such claims made in purely design terms are not in conflict with the international regime for regulating public procurement processes. In contrast, as shown, the international competition is often at odds with local politics and regional markets. As noted earlier, in Switzerland any government procurement that exceeds a value of 350,000 CHF must be opened to international competition of tendering. That this is the case is an outcome of the Swiss government signing the GPA in 1996. As the WTO states: ‘In most countries the government, and the agencies it controls, are together the biggest purchasers of goods of all kinds, ranging from basic commodities to high-technology equipment.’ This market is, as the WTO notes, susceptible to ‘political pressure to favour domestic suppliers over their foreign competitors’.³ This statement captures the double rationalization of the GPA, which entered into force in January 1981. In the first instance the scale of public procurement is such that regulating this expenditure is a ready way the WTO can intervene in contexts where there is impropriety and inefficiency in the use of public funds, circumstances that in turn can impact negatively on confidence in government and good governance more generally. Second, as the WTO notes, ‘public procurement of goods and services represents a major part of a country’s market for foreign suppliers’, so intervening in such procurement is also an instrument in expanding free trade into local markets through international competitive tendering.

As it happens, in the Swiss case, and as a brief look into the main architectural competitions carried out in 2011 reveals, only a small number actually displays a fully international field of participants. In fact, as we will show, actual competition practice falls short of the internationalizing goals of free trade frameworks enshrined by the regulation of public procurement under liberal market agreements. As we will see, this is not because of a wrong application of the rules, but due to local constraints set by the practical context of competition participation. In understanding this situation, Schmiedeknecht’s (2010, p. 155) distinction between the ‘routine’ and ‘exceptional’ architectural competition is a helpful starting point. For Schmiedeknecht ‘routine’ competitions concern everyday or ordinary projects, which are not considered to be ‘particularly glamorous’, and where it is more important to ‘fulfil functional requirements’ than ‘find spectacular formal solutions’. Housing schemes are a good example of routine competitions. In contrast, ‘exceptional’ competitions are ‘perceived to be the place where the [architectural] avant-garde can show their credentials’. In Switzerland, we observe a different geography to routine and exceptional competitions. The former, which comprise the vast majority of competitions, have a larger proportion of national participants even though they are open for international bids as well. The latter often feature a truly international field of participating architectural offices.

This distinctive geography of participation is due to a number of reasons. First, a call for tenders is usually published in the official register of the city or the county or, as is the case in Switzerland, on a national online platform of public procurement (for example, www.simap.ch). Although the regulatory framework of the GPA requires an international reach in this call for tender stage the official advertisement of public competitions uses historically grown, and often parochial, advertising structures, which create difficulties for reaching potential competition participants abroad. These standard communication methods are thus very limiting, and it is common practice among organizers of exceptional architectural competitions (who want to enlarge and diversify their field of participants) to contact international firms and invest resources in a direct pitch of their competition opportunity. Organizers of routine competitions seldom take such initiatives. Nor would they, for example, bother to translate the competition brief into other languages. Second, participation in a competition is often linked to available architectural knowledge regarding local building law and the urban context. Participants also tend to base their decision to participate in a competition on ‘sociological’ knowledge about the client as well as the jury members. These fields of familiarity (with the competition clients and the local building and planning regimes) operate not only as a filter on who tenders for what kind of competition brief, but also as a shaper of the jury judgement. And they operate most potently with respect to ‘routine’ tenders. For certain kinds of international firm the resource demands of such required local knowledge are not outweighed by the budget or potential notoriety that might be gained through participation in a tender for a ‘routine’ competition. Furthermore, clients and organizers of routine competitions are prone to assume that local architecture offices better provide for local knowledge and organizational convenience (proximity, common language and building culture), and favour such firms. While routine competitions usually activate the local context, organizers of exceptional competitions – be they publicly or privately awarded – often actively and consciously generate and use an international field of participants in order to increase the visibility of their project and to ‘sell’ their design to the public (Sorkin, 2005; Collyer, 2004). So it happens that organizers of certain kinds of architectural comp...