Competition Grid

Experimenting With and Within Architecture Competitions

Maria Theodorou, Antigoni Katsakou, Maria Theodorou, Antigoni Katsakou

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000701357
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Competition Grid: Experimenting With and Within Architecture Competitions is a comprehensive review of architectural competitions. Each section features international research overviews as well as lively discussions with experts that draw on first-hand experience of the competition process.

Part 1
The Rules of the Game

1 THE EVOLUTION OF THE UK COMPETITION SYSTEM

Judith Strong

2 ON COMPETITION RHETORIC AND CONTEMPORARY TRENDS

Elisabeth Tostrup

3 INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1948–1975) AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNION OF ARCHITECTS

Aymone Nicolas

DISCUSSIONS / PART 1

4 COMPETITION PRACTICES IN THE UK AND THE ROLE OF RIBA

Discussion with Paul Crosby

5 RIBA-USA: A DIFFERENT TAKE ON COMPETITIONS

Discussion with Jonathan Wimpenny, Tim Clark, Angela Brady and Phil Allsopp

Chapter 1
The Evolution of the UK Competition System

Judith Strong

Introduction

Founded in 1834, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) was one of the earliest professional architectural associations, and one of the first to seek to regulate the way its members competed for work. The foundations for what is often described as the traditional architectural competition can be traced back to the rules drawn up by the RIBA Council at the beginning of the last century.

The UK, however, has never developed a competition culture comparable with those of many other European countries, and no UK legislation exists, now or in the past, requiring architects for public buildings to be appointed through a formal competition procedure. Repeated attempts to promote open design competitions have met with limited success. Over the years, advocates of the competition system have increasingly had to rely more on persuasion than control.

This essay looks at the factors which have impacted the way architects and design teams are selected and appointed, and how they have changed the way competitions are organised in the UK. It describes recent initiatives to promote a more flexible system, while retaining the safeguards for architects, clients and the public that the more formal structures aim to secure.

Early attempts to regulate competitive work

The practice of asking a number of architects to submit plans and drawings before being awarded a commission is certainly not a new phenomenon. In the UK, more than 2,500 competitions were held between 1850 and 1900, producing numerous prestigious buildings, but doing so in an atmosphere of increasing controversy, with accusations of incompetence and general corruption being levelled at both clients and competing architects. In 1880, a petition¹ was drawn up asking the RIBA Council to devise a remedy, its 1,300 signatories pledging refusal to participate in any competition without a professional adviser. In 1907, a regulatory system was introduced requiring qualified assessment, reasonable rewards and a commitment to the winner. RIBA members were prohibited from responding to invitations to submit designs in any competition which did not follow these rules.

Throughout the following 110 years, government legislation, initiatives and lobby groups within the design and construction industries, as well as the procurement directives introduced by the European Union, have all had their effect on how clients procure design services, and how architects compete for work in the UK. During the first half of the last century, the profession tightened its grip on competitive work. Regulations were introduced requiring the promoter to appoint an all-architect jury nominated by the president of RIBA, and to build the design that the jury recommended (or pay compensation of 1.5% of the estimated building cost). These restrictions tended to deter clients from opting for the competition system, but the way the architectural profession was structured also played a role. When building work resumed after the Second World War, commissions tended to go to the larger, more established practices, or be carried out ‘in house’ by public and local authority architects’ departments. To give one example, the Royal Festival Hall (1951) and adjacent arts buildings on the South Bank of the river Thames (opened 1967) in London were all designed by specialist teams within the former London County Council architects’ department.

Elsewhere in Europe, the system was being more widely used, with many of the buildings which resulted from competitions being featured in design magazines. Inspired by these examples, a group of architects began to push RIBA to revise its rules and to promote the competition system in order to provide opportunities for younger members of the profession, and to raise the quality of what was being designed and built. Towards the end of the 1960s, RIBA drew up a new set of regulations² and standard conditions giving clients a greater role in the competition process, but with architects forming the majority of the selection panel, anonymity closely protected, and the architects of the winning design being appointed for the commission (or paid standard fees for the work already undertaken). The documentation was picked up by the UIA and applied to the international competition system.³

Quality assurance was overseen by RIBA, which would only approve competitions that followed its regulations, including the use of standard forms of conditions setting out the terms of appointment. The process, however, was dependent on RIBA having control over the way architects sought commissions, and how they charged for their services. Speculative design work was prohibited; if clients wanted to look at how different architects might approach a problem, they had to pay each of them the standard fee for the work or promote an approved architectural competition.

Government interventions weaken RIBA control

Everything changed in the 1980s when the Thatcher government,⁴ committed to the concept of a market-led economy, started to look at what it regarded as the protective practices of professional institutions. Increasing pressure from both the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Office of Fair Trading meant that RIBA initially lost its control over members competing for work, and subsequently abandoned any attempt to maintain even a recommended fee scale. Clients were free to define their own procurement systems – including the system of fee bidding.

Many more clients chose to organise procedures requiring outline designs to be submitted. While some were well run and produced good results, others were less satisfactory. Common failings included inadequate preparation and poor briefing, lack of relevant expertise on selection panels, demands for excessive amounts of work for little or no payment, and no guarantee that the architect would be appointed to take his or her design through to completion. All such projects tended to be labelled as competitions by the media, regardless of whether they followed recommended processes or not, and this led to unwarranted criticisms of the approved competition system, and a reluctance by many in the architectural profession to see an increase in its use.

The perceived difficulties were highlighted by the introduction of the National Lottery⁵ in 1994. Initially, much of the money raised was earmarked for capital projects, with a number of distributing bodies being appointed from within the charity, heritage, arts and sport sectors to oversee the process. Arts England, which had ‘quality of architecture’ within its remit, pushed for all lottery projects to be the subject of architectural competitions, the other distributing bodies followed suit. The amount of money being invested during a time of relative recession within the construction industry meant that a significant proportion of the architectural profession looked to secure commissions to design lottery-funded projects.

The impact of EU procurement legislation

By chance, the launch of the National Lottery coincided with the issue of EU procurement directives which extended jurisdiction from goods to services – including the services of architects and the design team professions. These directives⁶ covered contracts entered into by public bodies or projects funded in whole or in part (over 50%) from public sources. The rules came into effect when a commission passed a given threshold figure. The vast majority of lottery projects relied on putting together funding packages from a variety of publicly financed organisations, which meant that most commissions would have needed to follow EU procurement rules.

When the EU directives were first introduced, they identified three basic formats: open, restricted or (in limited circumstances) negotiated. Contracts were to be advertised and selection made against published criteria, with the emphasis being placed on ‘the most economically advantageous’. A fourth route was to hold a ‘design contest’, organised along the lines of the traditional architectural competition system prevalent in much of Europe.

Unlike many EU countries, the UK had still not been able to establish a competition culture, and public bodies were wary of making appointments ‘unseen’, ie on the basis of the designs alone. They wanted assurances about the capability and compatibility of those who would work with them to deliver the projects. ‘In the UK the emphasis for the majority of projects is for contracting authorities to select an architect with whom they can work effectively.’⁷ At the same time, architects feared that a requirement for design contests to be mandatory would lead to unsustainable levels of unpaid design works. But they were also worried by the alternatives offered by the EU, believing that the term ‘economically advantageous’ would lead to an escalation in fee bidding.

Introducing interviews into the competition system

In response, the RIBA Council sought to bring in a selection procedure which would respond to the lottery-distributing bodies’ desire for competitions, limit the demands on the profession, avoid simple fee bidding, and meet the requirements set by the EU directives. The aim was to ‘provide clients with a comparatively fast, inexpensive and efficient method of selecting a design team by means of competition’. What emerged was the ‘competitive interview’.⁸ There was no question of anonymity or a requirement for an independent jury, although it was recommended that a professional adviser be appointed to guide the client. Prizes and ‘honoraria’ (discretionary payments) were only given when design work was required.

The system came to be used either for selecting an architect/design team for appointment or for shortlisting applicants before asking a small number to prepare designs, the latter process effectively replacing the initial design-based selection stage of a traditional two-stage competition.

It worked as follows:

• Advertise to invite Expressions of Interest (EOIs), providing an outline brief, establishing the criteria for selection, and specifying the information to be submitted.
• Draw up an initial shortlist on the basis of the information submitted in response.
• Organise interviews at which each of the shortlisted teams is required to make a presentation outlining its approach and demonstrating the expertise available within the team.
• Draw up a more detailed brief and ask a limited number to prepare designs.

Various other techniques have been introduced as part of both the briefing and selection processes, including guided site visits, open question-and-answer sessions, visits to buildings and architects’ offices, discussions with previous clients, community workshops and wider-ranging seminars. While this more flexible approach suited many clients and produced good outcomes, there were very few competitions organised according to design contest rules. The open competition was also a rarity. A report⁹ on trends in the procurement of design services states that there were only two open competitions held during the years 2008–14, although this figure may refer solely to competitions which were subject to EU procurement rules.

When introduced, the RIBA competitive interview and its variations were seen as falling within the EU ‘restricted’ designation. In 2004, at the instigation of the UK government, the EU added the ‘competitive dialogue’,¹⁰ designated as an alternative t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES
• SPONSORING PARTNER
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 – THE RULES OF THE GAME
• PART 2 – EXPERIMENTING WITHIN ARCHITECTURAL COMPETITIONS
• PART 3 – EXPERIMENTING WITH ARCHITECTURAL COMPETITIONS
• PART 4 – REVISITING ARCHITECTURAL COMPETITIONS’ STRUCTURES AND FORMS
• AFTERWORD
• INDEX
• PICTURE CREDITS