In the past decade we have seen an explosion of honors and awards for the most innovative and forward thinking solutions. Yet no one recognizes the projects that have caused harm to the environment - designs that are helping shorten our existence on this planet. This is why we created the DEAD prize. Let's recognize the bad, honor the failures and hopefully do something to rectify these designs against humanity. — The Dead Prize
The Dead Prize may be the first ever anti-prize in architecture. Launched by Cameron Sinclair, the Executive Director of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation and co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, Dead Prize opened its nominations today for architecture that has caused remarkable environmental harm. The goal is to create an anti-standard, by which architects can understand what makes a design harmful, how to not repeat that harm, and hopefully, how to form solutions to the winning Dead Prize design. To curate a set of "worst practices" in architecture.
The Prize's website makes clear that this is a satirical mix of serious and tongue-in-cheek commentary on the architecture profession. Once a winner is chosen, sometime in early 2015, the Dead Prize committee will reach out to the designer for their side of the story, to gain the widest angle on why things went wrong.
If the Prize acquires sufficient funding, a complementary competition will be launched to design a solution to a Dead Prize winner. Nominations can be submitted to @deadprize until November 1, 2014 (All Soul's Day).
13 Comments
Oh man. I love this. I'll have to think on it.
My first thought is all the huge stadiums, including my local Lucas Oil Stadium. The building itself isn't, perhaps, directly an environmental disaster, though its sponsor is an oil and automotive additive company, and our car culture has wrought an extreme environmental crisis. I'm thinking more about public financing of infrastructure privately held by the extremely wealthy, in a city that somehow can't afford to have either a decent public school system or any kind of functional mass transit, and what a public health disaster *that* outcome of this design project has become.
Qatar!
Didn't Brazil clear-cut a remote section of the amazon for a giant stadium? Besides that, Qatar is a strong contender.
I will surely follow this.
I think I would add just about every "big box" store (most start with a W or M). They seem to always pick a plot of land on the furthest edge of the suburbs and "assist" in the further extending and developing of those burbs...appearing to be inefficient and poor utilizers of natural resources and further reinforcing the poor mass transit systems of so many communities.
Donna, I think you may have revealed a firestorm of deadprize nominees. ;) I was thinking of Dallas Stadium, a big Jerry Jones monstrosity built big just to be big. At least Lucas has context of a warehouse appearance in a former warehouse part of town, not that I would be willing to defend it or remove it from this list.
But surely there are other "ducks" out there that can be revealed. This should be a fun contest and award to watch develop.
Cheers!
The spirit of this prize is dead on (no pun intended): let's be honest about mistakes to learn from them and see how we can do better in the future.
Politicians, urban planning, lobbyists, an entrenched system of corruption and exploitation, both of natural and human resources, and that is just the tip of the big, oily iceberg.
Does every architect who designed a suburban dental office or a spec-retail strip mall get one of these, or do we realize that they are most likely just trying to feed their families in a system that rewards playing along?
Do they give one to Zaha's Qatar project, but hold faultless the Qatari government? What about FIFA? What about the European Comission, which should be overseeing, erm rooting out corruption in FIFA?
I think it is very rare that a single high-profile project can really stand for or as "the worst" in architecture, because very rarely are signature buildings or sites "the worst" - that is reserved for the daily banality surrounding every American city, now exported to Aus, New Zealand, the Middle East, most of Europe, China, and the rest of the world. They need millions of these prizes.
itll probably devolve into the same ol same argument between 'I cant get it' 'signature' work and shapeless hay bale 'but its sustainable for like pedestrians' work 'for the childrens!' I wont hold my breath.
As an addendum to my last post, architects are *really* good at criticizing projects and complaining about things, and I see this prize as a way to put that critical attitude (what Maria Semple calls an "ugliness of spirit") to positive use. I always argue we're critical because we're optimistic - we KNOW the world can be better!
Archanonymous I can help with this. Lets take Qatar for example. After the politics nothing has been designed yet, but they need stadiums. They go out and hire a bunch of firms. I had no idea what the other stadiums looked like until after the HBO Real Sports did a bit on the poor working conditions. Apparently Zaha is the most well known, so unless the other designers do something horrific Zaha is now our designer that represents the entire Qatar situation from politics to worker conditions in a design of a Building. I can not remember the exact figures but the wages of these workers are so low that Zaha's fee would probably cover the workers and their families cost of living for a few years. Ok, so she doesn't want to give up her fee, that is understandable right, she needs the money, overhead etc... But what if she offered to design and maybe moved a piece of the stadiums funds to workers housing? What if she convinced the officials to bring Architecture for Humanity or something in and on outside funds cover improvements for workers. Maybe she will when the project is in too far along to fire her? To win this award we will get instead a giant parametric vagina that will cause the death of many migrant workers. The guy on the HBO bit estimated 4000 workers will die for this whole thing. If Zaha was nobody she probably wouldn't be such a good candidate. Her project is a prime candidate for this prize.
This is excellent. Bravo Cameron! I nominate the recently announced 5pointz in Long Island City (New Renderings of What Will Replace Grafitti Art Mecca 5Pointz Emerge | News | Archinect ) There are probably more projects that deserve to be on the dead list than ones to be celebrated :)
DEAD = detrimental architecture, engineering, design. So it's not only for buildings but here we will likely talk more about buildings than other designed objects.
That said, I nominate blister packs and plastic clamshell packaging. In addition to the environmental nightmare of trillions of packages being tossed in landfills, apparently 60,000 people go the hospital every year with injuries sustained from opening plastic food packaging.
I can put several building by the firm i work for in here
Why this instead of Architecture for Humanity? Sinclair went from PBS to Fox News in one step. Wonder if his agent CAA was consulted on this: http://caaspeakers.com/cameron-sinclair/ ?
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