Working for free has been a reality for architects for decades. The hallmark of the practice is the open competition—a scourge on the financial and cultural health of the profession. But the argument against them has always seemed moot: as long as clients keep launching them, architects will keep entering them. Choosing not to participate, for some, seemed like a pointless act of professional self-sabotage. — FastCo.Design
"But in New York...a group of AIA chapters have shown that architects do have the power to push back against the wasteful and inefficient culture of open competitions."
We've seen a lot of conversations about the culture surrounding competitions in 2016. Just a few weeks ago, a controversial call for proposals for a wall along the US/Mexico border generated a heated discussion in the architecture community.
For more on the issue, check out these links:
5 Comments
Wow, looks like the AIA finally has some backbone after all! Great example of a good compromise, unlike so many other competitions. The good side of competitions is it gives up and coming firms a chance to compete with the same three firms that get all the jobs.
I think the major sticking point about design competitions today is that by not paying any amount for the work that is being completed they are, in essence, devaluing architectural design and services as a whole.
These competitions are too few and far in between to devalue architecture. But maybe more a quest to find ideas other than SOM junk or BIG junk. As long as there is some $ involved in process. don't see how it's bad.
I defended shallow competitions in another thread, in the context of quickie ideas competitions where people use the genre of architectural design as a critique of culture or contemporary circumstances. Those are fine, and harm neither the profession nor the inhabitants of those neverbuilt works.
But that's not this. These are work competitions, which are stupid AND bad.
Stupid, because they depend on the silly notion that good architecture is good because it has some singular special idea, an idea so good that it transcends the whole process of working with a client to figure out the constraints. But good buildings (in terms of successfully meeting a client's objectives) are hard to figure out, usually because of things unknowable before getting into the work. An honest juror would have to admit you can't tell if an idea is good just by looking at the design as an unbuilt collection of drawings. Furthermore, a competition tells you nothing about the capacity of the architect to execute.
Maya Lin is cited as an example of a success of trawling for ideas - but her successful work was a memorial. Those aren't hard to work out. You don't really need some idea of how memorials work, nor much experience in selecting building systems to create a space like that. This isn't a diss on her work - it's just not the same
And competitions like this are bad, because they try to shortcut the process of figuring out what to design by saying: you, designer, if you're really so talented, you can figure this out by yourself. Quickly and free. It presumes that the only valuable part of the work is simply the initial idea - and then asks to have that for free.
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Nate, while unpaid open civic competitions aren't a large share of the work overall, they are a prominent part of it. It's distressing to presume that the more important the project, the less important the process of working with an architect will be.
And I'd add that many commercial projects worldwide (somewhat less in the US) do start with an invited competition. These may be paid, but it's rarely enough to cover costs - and they suffer from the same fallacy of ideas without process. For most clients' objectives, collaboration is more important than ingenuity in achieving a successful outcome. Competitions preclude that factor, the important one!
This particular competition was especially awful because it requires so much work with no chance of compensation, further work or even rights to own work. Crazy, but it was changed a bit.
Still, the main problem is the difference between design idea competitions and who can actually deliver a complex project such as this. If you have a great design vision, but work for a smaller firm, you should be able to partner with other consultants down the road if your design is good enough to match the big firms.
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