The new purpose of design contests

"What if we made it about care?"

This question inspired the design team at San Francisco's SITELAB Urban Studio as they ideated on a submission for Market Street Reimagined, a competition held this summer to create public designs to reinvigorate one of downtown San Francisco's main streets. That question led to ideas about the green benches encircling parks in New York City, and then the team's winning submission: a four-mile bench that would run across Market Street and invite passersby, residents, and visitors to stop, sit, talk, and soak up urban life. 

Winning the open competition wasn't necessarily about the money, says Laura Crescimano, a co-founder and leader of SITELAB. The $5,000 honorarium wasn't nearly enough to cover staff time. Winning also wasn't just about the idea of the bench actually being built, though mayor Daniel Lurie has proposed money for the project in his latest budget. For Crescimano and the firm, winning this design competition was about creating a dialogue around public space. 

It’s also one of the latest examples of how design competition culture is being leveraged to address urban issues. But in changing the focus from a defined site to a more nebulous challenge, can these competitions do more to benefit the architects participating and proposing? 

A play for public engagement

The contest format for commissions and designs has been ingrained in American architecture since the outset. Design competitions helped devise the design of the White House and U.S. Capitol and became a common way to award federal building commissions and grandiose institutional projects. And for nearly as long, the same complaints have bedeviled organizers and frustrated many in the profession: a preference for established firms over new talent, a format dependent on unpaid labor and overworked designers, and grand contests with unsure outcomes that don’t always end up producing what’s promised (especially for the winning architect). 

In recent decades, the contest format has also shifted a bit, and not just because many have been hosted on digital platforms like Buildner. Instead of just being the provenance of big public buildings or institutions, cities have turned to these competitions to try and help solve some of their pressing problems, from a dearth of affordable housing to creating means of reactivating and reanimating post-pandemic downtowns. In 2006, a New York competition to design more sustainable affordable housing led to Via Verde, a design from Grimshaw Architects and Dattner Architects, that helped set off a wave of affordable, passive house multifamily projects in the city. 

The way many of these lower-stakes idea competitions have been structured— seeking implementable ideas as opposed to a grand blueprint for a single site—can activate and engage the public, said Diana Lind, an author, urban policy specialist, and writer at The New Urban Order. She has written about competitions, and helped submit one for the Market Street contest. 

“This is a great way for the public to get engaged,” said Lind. “You're providing a solution. You're not just coming to a meeting and raising your hand and complaining. That's a really productive kind of public engagement.” 

Architecture competitions became a bigger part of the profession in the mid-to-late 19th century, as the growing private architecture industry sought access to valuable public commissions. But as George Johnston, a Georgia Tech professor emeritus and architecture historian, said, even as U.S. architects were being educated in a kind of competition methodology at schools that used the European Beaux Arts model, they became “open to the idea without a full awareness or understanding of the implication for their own financial stability.” The temptation of a job tended to overcome trepidation about the cost and staff time involved in winning. 

But the traditional complaints remained. Critics at the time castigated the idea, with one writing, “It is folly, and something worse, to ask the members of a respectable profession to show us their ideas for nothing.” At the 1908 AIA convention, AIA President Cass Gilbert, in criticizing the competition process as "wasteful," questioned, "How long can the profession stand this drain?" 

There have been many modern examples of U.S. contests creating architectural icons: the St. Louis Arch and the Tribune Tower in Chicago. But there are also questions about whether the system works for everyone.

A tricky balance for practitioners 

Amir Kripper, AIA, founder and principal of Boston-based Kripper Studio, has participated in competitions throughout his career, from student days to his first job to starting his own firm about a dozen years ago. It’s always been a tricky balance of exposure, reward, and time investment, especially in a marketplace where it can be harder and harder to break in as a young firm: often, even the contests that provide a modest stipend—say $10,000—still require a month of work from at least a few staff members, at least double or triple the amount of the stipend. 

Now, his firm tends to focus solely on invited RFPs, where his firm is one of a few pre-selected entrants asked to submit their ideas, and stipends make the gamble more of a calculated risk. It’s important to stretch creatively, and even losing can provide marketing and make the kind of impressions and connections that lead to future work. But the budget math can be tough.

“Only architects are willing to do this, to put all this effort with the hope of getting a commission, knowing that the chances are slim,” Kripper says. 

These issues explain, in part, the appeal of solution-based contests, which often remain more open, can sometimes require less up-front work, and can still make a dent in larger urban issues. The Urban Land Institute's Hines Design Competition, an annual multidisciplinary contest that, since 2003, has challenged designers to figure out how to utilize a development site, offers the winning team $35,000. Nearly 2,500 teams have participated.

The city of Denver has utilized competitions for a handful of pressing housing challenges, including a competition to solicit designs for so-called single-stair buildings—smaller multifamily structures with a single stairway, a departure from North American zoning rules the advocates argue results in more design freedom and more livable rental units. Currently, the city is accepting entrants for an affordable housing design competition, a collaboration between city departments and AIA Denver. 

The goal here isn’t necessarily to turn a winning design—first place purse is $10,000—into a real project, but rather, in the words of Jill Jennings, director of the Denver Permitting Office, to “elevate great design without adding time and process.” The city’s single-stair competition raised attention to the issue, and new legislation is currently being debated to legalize single-stair construction in the city. Jennings hopes a competition that highlights creative ways to develop on smaller, more difficult sites can lead to similar policy and industry shifts. 

Organizers in Denver have been clear the contest is more about celebrating design and bringing attention to the issue; there’s no development assistance, real estate donations, or city budget to build winning submissions. 

In Los Angeles, the city-sponsored Small Lots, Big Impacts contest, an effort to channel design thought into the challenge and potential of infill housing, announced 21 winners in May, picking schemes set to bring housing to some of the roughly 4,000 underutilized parcels under a quarter acre in size. But as Dana Cuff, an organizer and a founder of UCLA’s cityLAB, explains, the contest doesn’t end with an awards announcement. Organizers, who spent a year planning the project with the office of Mayor Karen Bass, are currently working with city hall to pass an ordinance to allow 13 plots of city land to be developed—winnowed down from a list of 2,400—and then tap into city subsidies to build affordable units.

“If what you want is an architecture competition that's going to end in buildings, you have to, from the very beginning, involve landowners, and the people who do the permitting and entitlements,” she says. “You have to get the full housing system involved from the very start.”

But, as Cuff admits, due to city bidding rules—buying municipal land needs to be an open process—they can’t pick developers or push these developers to use a winning design. The hope is that the developers see these ready-made design solutions and enlist the winning architects. They don’t want to be “shotgun wed” to an architect, Cuff says, and organizers feared that starting with architect/developer teams would create risk-averse submissions. Further complicating the process, the designers, if chosen, could be working on a different lot, or need to change or alter their design to fit this plot. 

Cuff sees the payoff coming down the line: there are 24,000 privately-owned small infill sites across the city, and if this competition creates a model for building housing using this land, it could help the city get closer to closing its gaping housing supply gap. For her, this is valuable and exemplifies the cityLAB vision; cut down the weeds, and do the work that generates new work. 

The issues of the Small Lots contest exemplify the challenges of running these kinds of ideas competitions in ways that live up to their ideals, says Harvard research fellow Susanne Schindler, who has compiled research on the topic. Schindler argues that competitions should be real procurement processes for guaranteed work, not just “free ideas we don’t know what to do with.” She argues that industry groups should be involved in drafting rules for competitions to make sure there’s more support and guarantees for architects, as well as money and expertise devoted to making sure the concept can be developed. 

“I think when you spark a conversation and you get the public excited about it, I think you owe a little bit in terms of follow through,” adds Lind.

Patrick Sisson is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Los Angeles.