Where design competitions matter: Architectural artefacts and discursive events

Design competitions as discursive events

For Larson (1994), design competitions present a unique situation to architects: a discursive event. Larson considers discourse to be ‘all the statements that a particular category of agents issue in a specific capacity and in a definable thematic area’ (p. 473). Framed this way, competition entries provide the capacity for architects to make statements and give these statements a thematic backdrop. They are discursive par excellence. While Larson does not define the ‘event’ as an analytic category, she emphasizes its singularity and publicity. Events happen once and reach an audience. In other words, ‘Architectural competitions are discursive events because they have the potential of changing … authorized notions of what architecture is, for those who listen to the specialized discourse of architecture’ (p. 472, emphases in original). What is noteworthy about the notion of the discursive event is the claim that it distinguishes the design competition from other moments of architecture. The discursive event is a space apart, in which statements, particularly artistic statements, become efficacious.

Scholars have continued to characterize the design competition as a privileged discursive field. Lipstadt (2009: 18) says that a design competition is ‘the space in which architects can act as if, and believe themselves to be, full-fledged, relatively autonomous creators’. Jones (2011: 35) observes that ‘When entering a design competition for a major building, high profile architects are engaged in a normative debate about why the world is the way it is and what should be done to change it.’ Introducing a special journal issue, Van Wezemael (2011: 2) says that the design competition ‘can be regarded as a “site” marking the convergence of diverse interests … findings from various fields of research … and discourses from very diverse societal fields’. Van Wezemael emphasizes again the design competition’s role as a space in which statements, abstracted from objects and materials, form relations with other statements. In these analyses, architectural discourses (and often discourses from other fields, e.g. in Paisiou, 2011; Van Wezemael et al., 2011b), converge in unique configurations, as novel possibilities for making claims.

Other studies show how design competitions are as much a discursive event for juries as for architects (see Kreiner, 2009, 2013; Kreiner, Jacobsen and Jensen, 2011; Silberberger, 2011). Competitions present a struggle for jury members to make claims and broadcast them to architects. Competitions are designed by clients and consultants with explicit claims about how a selection process will proceed (Kreiner et al., 2011) and the ways architects will respond to a design brief (Silberberger, 2011). Designers work to represent both the intentions of the client team and, in relation, the ‘concept’ they will design (see Kreiner, 2009, 2013). Criteria for selection not only enter a brief, but they emerge in the course of the deliberation itself (Van Wezemael et al., 2011a). When juries produce reports, they proceed from the competition entries to make claims about, for instance, the statehood of Switzerland in the 19th century (Van Wezemael et al., 2011b), climate change (Cucuzzella and Chupin, 2013), innovation (Katsakou, 2009) and monumentality (Tostrup, 2009). The jury does not merely carry out a selection process, but does so through an effortful practice of making and communicating claims about architecture.

Taking these studies together, we see the design competition as a ‘discursive event’ to the extent that it puts the discursive capacities of architects together in an arena with the discursive capacities of jurors, brokering a result based on statements, particularly artistic statements, acting through their own efficacy.

Discursive events and the entanglements of architects

If design competitions are discursive events, they present an image of architecture that seems incompatible with another, one we see in recent anthropologies of architecture. This is a critique of architecture as an interior, mental activity of conceiving ideas, grounded in anthropological analysis of everyday practice (see, for instance, Ingold, 2013; Marchand, 2007; Yaneva, 2009a, 2009b). Here, anthropologists of architecture show how even the ‘design process’ is entangled within a world of objects, materials and colleagues. In other words, to frame the design competition as a ‘discursive event’ is to reassert the vision of architecture that anthropologists have criticized.

One common critique of architecture is that the disciplinary terrain of architects is not autonomously ‘artistic’, as architects have asserted since the Renaissance (Robbins, 1994: 10–20), but is instead fixed in relations with clients, consultants and markets (e.g. see Cuff, 1992: 28–35; Lorne, 2017); the contingency of buildings (Till, 2009); or ad hoc collective work (Turnbull, 1993). What is unique about recent anthropological studies of architects is that they situate this critique in descriptions of everyday encounters between architects and their objects (see Latour and Yaneva, 2008). Anthropologists of architecture have long emphasized the building process and its role in producing the social (for reviews of architectural anthropology throughout its development, see Amerlinck, 2001; Bille and Sørensen, 2016; Buchli, 2013; Vellinga, 2007; Verkaaik, 2016). What anthropological studies of professional architects have done is to take the putatively abstract, mental process of conceiving ideas about buildings and situated it within processes that are material and relational (see Houdart and Minato, 2009; Ivarsson, 2010; Loukissas, 2012; Murphy, 2004, 2011; Yaneva, 2005, 2009a, 2009b). Architects in these studies are entangled not only with clients or markets, but with the very stuff of design: drawings, models, documents, software and so on.

The anthropological case against architectural autonomy has at least three components. First, designs for buildings do not issue from the ‘mind’s-eye’ of a solitary thinker–artist, but emerge through many collective adjustments. Drawings, models and renders become opportunities to talk and make changes (Ivarsson, 2010; Yaneva, 2005), tell stories (Murphy, 2004, 2011) or exchange notes (Rose et al., 2014). When architects discuss concepts, they may do so as collectively produced collages (Houdart and Minato, 2009: 84–87). Architects produce multiple computer simulations as alternatives to discuss with clients (Loukissas, 2012: 81–106). The design for a building cannot be reduced to a set of initial artistic statements, but instead emerges out of its own specific history of small transformations at the work of many hands.

Second, architecture is responsive rather than deterministic. Architects proceed through a project as a process of learning. To learn in this case is to multiply versions of a building: at different scales, with different shapes, presenting different views (see especially Houdart and Minato, 2009; Yaneva, 2005, 2009a). Architects might visit a site to learn about patterns and concepts (Houdart and Minato, 2009: 152–157) or produce models and drawings that represent a particular aspect of a site and its ‘users’, including zoning laws (Yaneva, 2009a: 69–74), religious practice (Proctor, 2011) or the image of a city itself (Yaneva, 2016). Architects anticipate the surprise that can come from making models (Yaneva, 2009b: 53–63). The challenge for architects is not to implement a set of declarations, but to understand the thing that they are designing and all of its determinations: site, building, clients and so on.

Third, models, drawings and renders not only accumulate in a process of experimentation and discovery, but become a means of persuasion. This is not simply the delivery of an idea into the world, but an act of making something convincingly real. Architects struggle to make perspectival renderings not precise accounts of reality, but ‘false or unfaithful and still to transport the client away from his world into a new one’ (Houdart, 2008: 54, emphasis in original; see also Rose et al., 2014). Presentation as a process of convincing the client of a building’s reality becomes an architectural task with its own demands for skill (see Stark and Paravel, 2008; Yaneva, 2009a: 177–187). At first glance, images produced for presentations resemble discursive events as Larson (1994) describes them. Since drawings have their own rhetorical capacities, they allow architects to ‘join the large cultural discourse about architectural ideas and possibilities’ (Robbins, 1994: 30). What is significant here, however, is that drawings become a way to enter relations, rather than shed them in the name of artistic autonomy. Drawings of buildings that remain unbuilt become ways of justifying an architectural firm’s position as producer of art, separate from contractors (Cuff, 1992: 35–41; Robbins, 1994: 29–31). Architects evaluate the persuasiveness of their drawings in so far as the drawings can persuade a client.

In these cases, entanglements are the condition for design, rather than its impediment. A ‘building’ comes to exist for a team of architects once they stabilize among themselves a body of knowledge. This is a process of research. Architects determine what a building will be like only in the course of gradual adjustments, as architects respond to colleagues, to building sites and to clients. In this picture of the profession, relations are the very grounds for designing a building, the means through which any transformations take place at all.

The problem of the design competition for anthropologies of architecture

Studies of design competitions give us a different picture of architecture from the one we see in anthropology. In design competitions, architects position their artistic claims against those of others. In architectural practice as we see it in anthropology, architecture proceeds from nothing as integral as a ‘statement’; architecture is a bricolage, patched together along the course of its own movement.

At the same time, if the design competition does indeed present a singular moment that configures architecture as a discursive event, such a unique moment has had little discussion within anthropology. So far, recent ethnographies among architects have tended either to follow projects that have resulted from a direct commission (see Yaneva 2005, 2009a), or to discuss more general practices of one or several firms (see Houdart and Minato, 2009; Loukissas, 2012; Yaneva, 2009b; Whyte et al., 2007). Other studies examine single moments of activity in order to tease out their internal dynamics (e.g. Houdart, 2008; Luck, 2012; Murphy, 2004, 2011; Schmidt et al., 2012), moments that have not yet included the preparation of a competition entry. We have seen little if any research in the recent anthropological tradition that has focused on a design competition in terms of everyday productive work.

Thus it may be the case that studies of design competitions as forums for artistic claims are compatible with the recent anthropological literature. Lipstadt (2009) suggests as much by noting how the design competition encourages architects to act as though they were autonomous, even as they encounter the constraints of market relations. Competition entries may presuppose an autonomous creator for a jury and for a public regardless of their actual histories. It may be the case that some ‘artistic’ claims become organizing points for the designers’ work (as they do in Kreiner, 2013) even as the building-to-be remains subject to iterations and adjustments. The question remains, then, of how architects’ artistic claims encounter the entanglements of architecture within the ‘event’ (Larson, 1994) of the design competition.

The brief as a drawing

During my visit, two of the architects work in the Computer Aided Design software AutoCAD, transforming the ‘options’ from the previous week into diagrams, ‘plans’ that plot an overhead view of walls and floors. Each digital drawing is equivalent to a different massing option. Wei works on the angular scheme while Eleni works on the cylindrical one. This is not a straightforward procedure, but requires a skilful adjustment of elements within the plan. The two architects create, move and rotate lines in AutoCAD while consulting models and diagrams next to their keyboards. For the architects, the plans show the arrangements of elements at different storeys. But more importantly, the plans indicate whether a massing option complies with the client’s brief. This work of making-equivalent becomes a test, suggesting how the architects might develop an option, whether they will develop it further.

At one moment, Eleni is looking for a place to put a hotel. She tells me some parameters she is responding to. First, she says, with the building’s cylindrical volume jutting in front of a taller, rectangular one, the current scheme runs the risk of resembling a toilet, and she is looking for an alternative. Second, she wants to test the possibility that the boardrooms can fit on one floor, rather than several, as convention centre clients often prefer to hire whole floors at once. In addition, certain volumes have to touch. Eleni selects a line, or several lines, within the plan, then drags or rotates what she has selected. She evaluates the result, a new arrangement of elements within a floor, then selects, drags and rotates again. When Wei and Eleni check their plans against different parameters, one test is simply to look at the arrangement of lines.

Unlike the foam models, the plans in AutoCAD introduce precise counts of square metres. Wei and Eleni print an A3-sized sheet that includes their plan diagrams on one half and, on the other, a two-column table of room categories and square metres. This is the schedule of accommodation. The client’s brief includes such a table, a common requirement within a design competition (eg Kreiner, 2009: 10). The printout acts as a sort of end-state to which Wei and Eleni compare their work: regardless of how the plan is configured, the square metreage of the plan has to resemble that within the brief. In order to do this, they produce their own sets of measurements. The architects do not know yet which option they will develop next week: the round, the angular or something else entirely. This is not a question of how to ‘implement’ a set of pre-determined artistic principles, but a process of generating them by producing options and subjecting each to tests.

Conducting the tests becomes a process of incorporating the brief itself. The client’s categories for kinds of spaces appear within the schedules of accommodation that Wei and Eleni print. Colleagues around the table incorporate the brief in other ways. Lars has a plan diagram open in AutoCAD. He is working not on a ‘building’ but a series of disconnected elements, rooms, each corresponding to categories within the client’s schedule of accommodation: a ‘foyer’, a ‘gallery’, ‘auditoriums’, and so on. Lars is exploring the question of whether he can combine some of the spaces, such as the gallery and the foyer, and reduce the threshold for meeting the client’s accommodation requirements. In doing this, he produces clusters of lines for the other architects to import into their own AutoCAD drawings. Positioning Lars’ groupings into their plans, Eleni and Wei can engage with the client’s brief, determining whether their plans meet the accommodation requirements, by responding to and intervening through AutoCAD lines alone.

Meanwhile, Jens’ own AutoCAD window shows a plan of the site. He zooms in on a cluster of lines, zooms out to show nearby lines, then zooms out again to display the entire diagram. He has added layers of geographic information, from topography to road and rail networks. Like Lars, Jens is bringing the competition brief into AutoCAD, making the client’s site information subject to dragging and rotating, to positioning beneath Wei and Eleni’s own plans.

In the place of explicit artistic statements, then, we see among the architects what we might call judgements or evaluations. To reach these, the architects improvise in AutoCAD. What allows for this improvisation is a process of making certain elements equivalent to the client’s brief. Clusters of lines in AutoCAD come to stand in for rooms in the schedule of accommodation. Other lines stand in for the site. Rather than refer to the brief, the architects can consult the floor area measurements within their printouts. The question of whether a given massing option satisfies the brief, then, becomes a matter of consulting the printouts after adjusting, pixel by pixel, the walls and rooms into place.

Sketching an order and dragging it in

While each architect works on something different, conversation is constant. Desk-side neighbours swivel in their chairs to talk. Any architect who speaks is heard by the others. Often architects walk around the table to visit colleagues. Among these regular encounters during the week of my visit, one meeting stops the work of the entire team at once. Louis, the project architect, calls a meeting. The architects make their way to the model table, printouts in tow. First they talk about the arrangement of elements in the two massing options.

Wei’s scheme, says the project architect, does not have a clear organization. The architects discuss alternatives. One, Louis says as he sketches, is a Baroque poche. Louis draws in the margin of a printout what looks like four quadrants divided by a thick cross, the intersection carved into a circle. Meanwhile, Richard has been drawing. His own sketch shows two images, each a set of shaded forms, an overhead view, along with arrows of circulation. In one, the shapes sit in a rough 2 x 2 grid, the arrows intersecting at the centre. In the other, there is a single mass at the centre of the sketch and an arrow curving around it. Richard has sketched two possibilities for circulation, he says, one where visitors move through a cluster of rooms, one where they move around the perimeter. Louis is not sure how the sketches relate to the plan. As the architects talk, Richard draws another sketch. This sketch looks like a cell without a nucleus, little rooms like organelles spread out within a circle.

Drawing their sketches during the meeting, the architects have responded to the question of whether Wei’s scheme has a clear pattern of organization and, since it does not, how to produce one. Unlike Wei and Eleni’s many adjustments in AutoCAD, the sketches emerge quickly and all at once. They accompany statements about organizational principles, telling colleagues what one architect means when he says ‘poche’, or what another means when he contrasts circulation around a perimeter with circulation through a central cluster.

The next day, Wei is viewing his option as a 3D model on his screen, rotating and zooming. He tells me that he is focusing on giving order to the circulation of his plan: a cluster of rooms in the centre and, surrounding it, a concourse like a fortress wall. A sketch that had emerged in the meeting has become a proposal that Wei is now interpreting within AutoCAD, and here it sits beside him on the table. While the conversation at the meeting had referred to the organization of the plan and its clarity, Wei has returned to dragging, rotating, printing and checking. While Wei has returned to the work of comparing his arrangements of walls and rooms within the plan to the client’s schedule of accommodation, the meeting has added another consideration to incorporate: an organizational principle. Thus while the architects in the meeting have prepared sketches on the basis of explicit claims about the design, these sketches become effective only in so far as they act within a set of gradual adjustments, iterations toward the unexpected.

Discursive events and temporary office space

At their screens and desks, the architects improvise around models and lines. From one moment to the next, it is difficult to find differences from descriptions within Yaneva (2009b: 51–63): a dance around the tables, a dance that continues, recalling Ingold’s (2013: 127) comparison of dance to sketching, in the dragging of line segments across an AutoCAD window. Work on the massing options takes place according to a rhythm of moving and evaluating clusters of lines. Rather than ‘realizing’ statements that they have made previously, the architects are feeling their way through traces, forms and surfaces. What is more, the statements they do work with (those within the client’s brief; the principles of order they discuss at the meeting …) the architects transform into objects with which they can improvise: polylines in AutoCAD.

Yet it could also be the case that more explicit statements about artistic intentions appear at other moments of architectural work. That is, claims about what the architects intend to do become reasons for architects (particularly in managerial roles) to organize furnishings, objects and colleagues. This is especially clear in one moment of the office’s history, the existence of the ‘competitions floor’. With one floor of the office not given over to other uses, and the firm entering an unusually high number of design contests, the partners at OMA devoted the floor to competitions. The floor featured bare concrete, exposed lights and moveable panels, which for one project architect ‘felt like it gave a freedom to ideas and thinking and making’ (interview, 30 January 2014). With a decline in design competitions came the end of the competitions floor. What could be the case, then, is that a design competition is an occasion to produce statements, a ‘discursive event’, in so far as such statements organize the material possibility of improvisation.

Adjusting discursive artefacts

During the term I attend studio sessions at the atelier, the fifth-year students work on a competition for a pavilion in a park adjoining the Museum of Childhood in London. The competition is the latest in a yearly event that culminates each summer in the construction of the winning entry. Each year has its own theme, and the theme of this year is sky. Students submit a single A3 board as a digital document. Within the board can be any combination of 3D renders, floor-plans, cross sections, drawings of components, site drawings and so on (see Figure 2 for finalist submission boards from the 2014–2015 competition). Thus students face two challenges: first, producing a design, and second, determining how to display their design within the board. As I will show, the process of producing the submission boards proceeds through conversations about concepts, echoing the notion of the discursive event. At the same time, these conversations respond to the elicitations of objects, such that statement-making becomes an iterative process of adjustments.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The layouts of submission boards from the 2014–2015 finalists for the ArchTriumph pavilion competition. © Paul Gottschling.

Throughout the term, teams of students present their work to instructors in an exercise known in architectural pedagogy as the ‘crit’ (see Cuff, 1992: 118–129; Mewburn, 2012; Till, 2009: 7–11). In a given studio session, crits take place in the morning, team members convening afterward to develop their designs. The atelier’s studio occupies one floor of a high-rise academic building, a rectangular room furnished with long tables assembled variably from desks. Students assemble in a corner of the room where a television screen is mounted to a pole, the pole propped on casters. Lower on the pole is a shelf. A student from one team places a laptop on the shelf and plugs it into the screen. Students from the other teams pull chairs from the tables and arrange them to face the corner.

One day, the crit concerns the fifth-years’ work on the Museum of Childhood competition. This is the last crit before the submission, and the sixth-years have joined the fifth-years in the audience. What displays on the screen is a submission board. The teams have prepared a single A3 sheet, and the image of the sheet remains on the screen for the entire crit. The board becomes the object of the discussion. During the crit, the team stand by the screen and field questions and suggestions. There are no formal presentations: the students respond to prompts from the audience.

What organizes the attention of the students are the objects within the submission boards. The students discuss images and their expressiveness. One scheme is a shell-like polyhedron with a dark interior and mirrors mounted to the floor. During the crit, the following exchange takes place just as exchanges in the crits often do: as a digression. One student talks about the roles of the elevation diagrams (showing the outer walls of the pavilion). He says, ‘I don’t think you need all of the elevations or all the perspectives either. Because there’s a lot of repetition.’ The instructor, Beatrice, says, ‘Okay’. There is a pause, and she continues:

The crit takes place with a certain rhythm. In the audience, someone notices something about an image. Others join in with suggestions. There is a pause, then someone else notices something. Before Beatrice brings up the mirrors on the floor, the discussion has turned to the roles of the drawings within the composition. As the attention of the students moves across the board, from element to element, so does the conversation.

If we take the competition entry as an artefact of discourse, then what we see in this case is a process of readying discourse for submission. It is noteworthy that the students do not appeal to explicit artistic claims or positions when criticizing the submission boards, but to the communicative qualities of images (‘all of the elevations’) and objects within images (‘slight reflections’): whether the images are redundant, for instance, or whether they have a ‘dangerous look’. What the students and the instructor attend to are communicative effects: excessive darkness, sharpness, disorder and so on. Like architects at OMA making diagrams in AutoCAD, the students are attending to possibilities for making small adjustments. However, what is subject to adjustment is not the arrangement of elements, the layout of a building, but the persuasiveness of the design submission, the entry’s capacity to communicate.

Design competitions and architectural arguments

For the atelier, entries for design competitions not only supply materials for a portfolio, but they also become part of a pedagogy organized around the importance of architectural argumentation. In this way, the atelier recalls Larson’s (1994) notion of the discursive event and Kreiner’s (2013) claim that the challenge for architects in design competitions is to find a concept that unifies elements of the design. At the same time, students’ statements become similar to other objects of architectural work, as the students develop them collectively and adjust them in response to interventions from instructors.

Every week for the first half of the autumn term, the atelier holds a seminar. Students receive reading assignments and prepare presentations that they deliver from their desks. The lead instructor often cuts in, challenging the students and linking their comments to the theme of the atelier: the role of the architect in a global situation of environmental and technological change. One discussion is about choosing models for describing global processes. A student argues that the only thing that is ‘black and white’ is mathematics. The unit leader replies, ‘You can’t generate anything from a purely rational position because numbers themselves don’t mean anything. You also need a phenomenological element.’ What is important, he says, is to develop a view that can lead to design, which, he says later in the seminar, ‘comes from how we understand our place in the environment.’ There are exchanges such as this throughout the seminars. The instructors encourage the students to develop positions, while also exclaiming the value of doing so in terms of the architect’s global role.

That is, design competitions in the atelier are not ends in themselves, but are instrumental for developing skills in argumentation. This is also evident within the students’ end-of-term presentations. For some competitions the students enter, they produce an individual project, linked to the site, that they add to their individual portfolios. Presenting projects for evaluation at the end of the term, teams from different ateliers meet in the same room, taking part in crits over the course of a day before a panel of instructors. The result is that students producing entries for competitions present within the same sessions as students producing projects for the instructors alone. Students receive advice about presenting: not about competitions and how to enter them, but about conveying a proposal to an audience. At one such crit, for instance, one instructor says, ‘It’s not apparent from the plan where these [nodal] hubs are going to be’, and another says, ‘It seems to me that you need to be much clearer, use much better visual language.’ In presentations, discussion moves away from the competitions for which some of the teams are entering and focuses on the task of communicating.

The emphasis on building an argument, and on architecture as a position of argument-making, is also clear within the design practices of the students. This is to say that, among these students, to work on an entry for a design competition is to refine the communicative ability of images and their composition, and, alongside this, it is a process of developing a set of claims. In the first few weeks of the term, what the students produce are not drawings of buildings but mind maps, lists and illustrations of objects. One day in the studio, a student working on the Museum of Childhood competition explains to me the approach he wants to try, thinking about how parents would engage with the pavilion as well as their children. The result would be a tunnel of wooden panels clad with mirrors. The mirrors would be adjustable, allowing visitors of all heights, child and adult, to interact with them. The student has also been thinking about a way to reuse the materials. He mentions that last year, none of the winners had included sustainability features, even though the brief had mentioned ecology. This is something the student wants to consider.

Sustainability is one concept of interest; another is collapsibility. The students are interested in making the wooden tunnel adjustable, letting it open and close. One of the instructors sits with this student’s team around a laptop. The instructor is talking about ‘degrees of closure’. On the laptop are small sketches of objects, a spring, for instance, along with scattered 3D models of collapsible shapes. The instructor leaves and returns with a book of photographs, again of collapsible structures, and the team discuss possibilities. During studio sessions, the competition becomes an opportunity to develop not only drawings and buildings, but also claims about concepts: in this case, through the question of whether, and how, to feature sustainability, collapsibility or both.