Regaining a competitive edge

Throughout my career I have advocated the use of architectural competitions to select designs or design teams for notable public buildings and spaces. Open competitions in particular can bring forward a breadth of new talent, new ideas and adventurous views of the future and serve to advance the architecture profession, especially when shaping the public realm. There is a sense of bravura and an excitement about the melting pot of ideas that results from the challenge of a competition, particularly when we recall the body of knowledge drawn from significant competitions of the past – most notably that for the selection of the design for the Sydney Opera House.

And yet today, our enthusiasm wanes. Competitions are no longer reserved for high-profile projects and have rather become the default process for selecting architects and designs for virtually any form and scale of project, public or private. Various competition formats are now almost-ubiquitous elements of common procurement processes,