Competitions: Potential Glory, but With a Price

When an architect enters a design competition, he enters a realm that mixes risk and opportunity. The competition may be open to anyone who wishes to enter, attracting hundreds of jostling hopefuls. Or it may be by invitation only, limited to a select few. Either way, the designer tests his mettle against his peers in naked contest.

But, when Frank Gehry won the competition for his daring design of Disney Hall last December, he was shocked at having finally broken through the barrier of resistance he had long experienced in his home town against his unorthodox work.

“I doubt if I would ever have been chosen to design Disney Hall directly,” he said. “It was the competition that made it possible for me to win such an establishment commission. It allowed me to show my paces up against stiff opposition from some of the best designers around, and it allowed the selection committee to justify choosing me by such comparison.”

Architectural competitions have become the rage of the 1980s. Hotly competitive contests create an air of excitement and generate publicity. “These competitions,” said New York architect Charles Gwathmey, “give clients a big bang for the buck.” They even may, if the process of choice is truly open and unbiased, result in a far better building than might have happened in the usual, noncompetitive fashion by influence, connection or reputation.

In the last decade, designers for many major Southern California commercial and cultural buildings have been selected through widely publicized contests.

Charles Moore and the Urban Innovations Group swept away the competition to land the Beverly Hills Civic Center in 1983; Arata Isozaki, a Japanese architect who had never worked in the United States, took the Museum of Contemporary Art prize in 1983; New Yorker Richard Meier won The Getty Center for the Fine Arts in 1984, even before he won the Pritzker Prize; the rebel SITE Projects Inc. seized first prize for the renovation of Pershing Square; and new-wave architects Morphosis, Craig Hodgetts, Ming Fung and Adele Santos walked away with several surprisingly staid projects.

But competitions appeal to clients and architects for distinctly different reasons. “Every competition organizer has a chance to see his dream come true--to discover the architect who can create the most beautiful building in the world,” Hilde De Haan and Ids Haagsma write in their book “Architects in Competition.”

Michael Pittas, former design director of the National Endowment for the Arts and organizer for the Vietnam War Memorial, Pershing Square and the West Hollywood Civic Center competitions, added: “Design contests are a way of achieving a political and aesthetic consensus in a possibly contentious project. And they are great PR, with their juries of high-profile designers and influential lay people. For the money spent, usually between $100,000 to $500,000, they offer great value.”

For younger and less-known designers, winning a competition offers a fast track to the big time. Albuquerque’s Antoine Predock, for example, leaped from honorable obscurity to international recognition after winning four major competitions in five years. Yale architecture student Maya Lin won fame with her winning design for the Washington, D.C., Vietnam War Memorial in 1979.

Perhaps the most famous instance of instant reputation is Australia’s Sydney Opera House. In 1956, little-known Dane Jorn Utzon designed the remarkable structure, shaped like a schooner in full sail, that has become a national icon.

But Utzon wouldn’t have won without architect Eero Saarinen, a powerful personality who dominated the Opera House jury. The masterful modernist rescued Utzon’s radical design from the reject pile and proclaimed to his intimidated fellow jurors: “This is your opera house, gentlemen.”

But there is a downside. “The design requirements in a competition are necessarily sketchy,” Pittas said, “considering that it lacks the intimate interaction between a client and a designer. And there is no doubt that architects are exploited by taking part in competitions that only really pay off for the winners.”

Gehry estimates he spent around $150,000 in time and materials preparing his Disney design. Having won the commission, his investment paid off. On the other hand, his entry for the Beverly Hills Civic Center contest cost him the same amount, but he only received one-tenth of his outlay when he didn’t win.

Expense Continues

The expense and possible heartbreak doesn’t always end with winning a competition.

When Barton Myers won the 1985 competition for the new Phoenix Municipal Government Center, beating out several heavyweight rivals, he was buoyed up on a bubble of euphoria. Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard raved about Myers’ design, describing it as “a mirror to the city, showing us what we are and what we can be.”

The brilliant scheme was published in professional journals around the world as a model of urban design. Four years and hundreds of hours of work later, Myers’ design was killed by a provincial city council that refused to fund it. “Nothing in recent memory has shown in such exquisite detail how Phoenix city government operates as has the way Goddard and his befuddled council have stumbled around trying to build a city hall,” declared a columnist in the Phoenix New Times. “Myers has fashioned a true monument to city life, which will now never be built.”

Delayed the Start

Closer to home, vocal neighborhood opposition has delayed the start of the West Hollywood Civic Center. Though a majority of the city council now supports the design, its future is very much in doubt, and with it the careers of the two young Boston architects who carried off first prize.

Despite the problems, competitions are as old as the art of architecture. In the 5th Century B.C., the Athenians began to design the Acropolis with competitions for the Parthenon. In 1792, there was a contest for young America’s new White House, and in 1971, Pompidou Center in Paris rose from an international design match.

Generally, modern competitions in the U.S. are either open to any designer or limited to a few invitees. Competitors may go through several stages of selection: a first stage to gather the widest possible range of entries and ideas, and a second level for a selected group of first-stage finalists.

The Disney Hall competition was limited to four dazzling invitees. The Pershing Square and West Hollywood contests were wide open competitions that drew more than 200 entries apiece.

In a two-stage competition, the entries are blind; that is, the submitted drawings are unsigned. The second stage involves an in-depth interview in which the finalists can personally explain their designs to the jury.

Crucial Interview

“The interview is crucial in the selection process,” Pittas said. “The jury sees the warm bodies behind the cold sketches, can assess the personalities of the competitors, and gain a sense of his or her competence, or lack thereof. Many a brilliant entry has been scuttled by an incoherent personal presentation.”

Reviewing the pros and cons of architectural competitions after a decade of experience, Pittas said: “You can’t underestimate the powerful impact of a multiplicity of solutions to the same design program from many inventive minds. Juries are electrified. There is no alternative way to duplicate this excitement in the choosing of an architect for an important commission.”