Competing for a Shape in History : ARCHITECTS IN COMPETITION<i> by Hilde de Haan and Ids Haagsma (Thames & Hudson/W.W. Norton: $65; 219 pp., illustrated) </i>

What makes this academic survey and commentary on select international architectural competitions of the last 200 years quite timely is that such events as a popular method to select architects for high-profile projects are at present a subject of heated debate within the design profession.

While competitions are being praised by their sponsors for generating ideas, publicity, public support and, in some cases, financing for a particular project, there are sharp complaints from architects of convoluted selection processes, predisposed juries and rising costs to produce appropriate submissions.

Various architecture associations of late have protested the competition process, and some architects are refusing to compete, even if invited and liberally paid. By declining, they join such illustrious architects in the past as Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, who rarely, if ever, participated in a design competition.

Still, following a long European tradition, competitions in the United States are very much on the increase, playing on the hope for recognition of relatively unknown and hungry architects, the envy and peer pressure of the more established superstars, and the need for work in an increasingly crowded and competitive profession.

For all their problems, competitions generally are an excellent way to raise design issues and place before the public a wide range of alternatives. And as authors Hilde de Haan and Ids Haagsma declare in their introduction, competitions also are a valuable yardstick for architectural historians, offering a view of the works of varied architects responding to a particular problem at a given moment. What we have in competitions is an architectural time capsule.

According to the authors, who are Dutch architecture writers, architectural competitions are not new. Among the first recorded was in 445 BC in Athens for the Parthenon. Other early competitions of note were for the dome of the Florence Cathedral, won in 1420 by Filippo Brunelleschi, and Rome’s Spanish Steps, by Specchi and De Santis, in 1723.

Concentrating on the last 200 years, the authors selected 15 particularly well-known projects that evolved out of competitions, documenting the purpose and juries of the varied contests, describing the wide range of entries, putting them in a proper social and political context and relating some of the inevitable gossip that surrounded the choices.

Included are the competitions, in 1792, to design “a residence for the President of the United States,” and, in 1886, to design “a world exhibition in Paris, including a feasibility study for an iron tower . . . with a height of 300 meters.” The results were, of course, the White House and the Eiffel Tower, two national landmarks.

Other competitions reviewed include those for London’s Parliament House, the Reichstag in Berlin, the opera houses in Paris and Sydney, the town halls of Stockholm and Amsterdam, train stations in Rome and Helsinki, a cultural center in Paris, now called the Pompidou, the Peace Palace in the Hague, the World Congress building in Kyoto, a bank in Vienna, and a newspaper office tower in Chicago. Each in its way was a landmark architectural statement.

Particularly fascinating in the clearly written and profusely illustrated summaries of the competitions are the designs that didn’t make it. These include a design for the White House by Thomas Jefferson, who, because he was one of the organizers of the competition, had to hide his identity. And then there is the submission in the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Though it came in second place and was not built, the design was widely praised and publicized, influencing a future generation of skyscrapers.

Some of the problems the Tribune Tower, other competitions and their architects suffered are reviewed in concluding essays by architectural historians Dennis Sharp and Kenneth Frampton. Included is a particularly damning history of the League of Nations Building competition; no one won, and the building eventually was designed by five architects who had received honorable mentions, with the design very much like the one submitted by an architect who was not included. The essays are an appropriate spicy savory to the book by Haan and Haagsma.