To the cry of compete

Two recent architecture competitions have caused some grumblings on Twitter, as much for the sheer number of entrants as anything else. Living Architecture’s A Room For London attracted a staggering 500 entries while the comparatively low-key Ullswater Yacht Club competition had over 180. 

Ullswater’s entry is the more remarkable because of the comparative complexity of the brief, the need to make a site visit to a fairly inaccessible part of the world (and I don’t just mean that it’s not in London) and the fact that it had technical issues such as flooding to deal with. A lot of work in other words for 180 practices to expend with such poor odds of winning.

How exactly do you assess 180 entries? If as I suspect, the answer is that a good 100 of them get short shrift and are chucked out for choosing the wrong font size or having funny colours, then you have to question the viability of an “open” competition. To whose advantage is it to have so many entrants, so many redundant schemes, so much professional skill expended for no reward? Clearly not the architects involved. Economically it made absolutely no sense for 179 of them. 

I recently reviewed Eric J Cesal’s excellent book Down Detour Road and it has some very useful things to say about this issue. Cesal has an MBA as well as an architecture qualification and so is able to apply some basic business models to the methods architects use to win work. And the competition system is revealed by these as an unequivocal act of commercial suicide.

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, architects still defend them though. My recent-ish Dear Other Architects post imploring architects to stop entering open design competitions gained some enthusiastic comments but an awful lot of criticism as well. Two  particular strands stood out. The first was that competition itself is a good thing, a necessary stimulus to excellence and innovation. Implicit in this is some notion of artistic natural selection, a belief that the talented will out. Losers should stop whingeing and up their game, essentially.  

The second strand was that my observations about pointlessly long hours spent on projects that earned no fee painted me as a venal philistine, interested in money and not art (if only). Both these criticisms reveal some interesting if depressing attitudes prevalent in architecture, not least the fact that the profession can hold two seemingly irreconcilable prejudices in its collective head at the same time. Funny really, how devotion to the artistic cause can sit happily alongside neo-liberalism. 

In truth, architectural competition culture fits a model of ruthless market fundamentalism perfectly. In its combination of long hours, use of unpaid interns and endemic short-termism, architecture is a flag bearer for the kind of ‘precarious employment' favoured by extreme capitalism. Working long hours for little or no fee in order to win work drives down wages and increases the ‘hire and fire’ tendencies of architecture practices. Firms ‘employ’ unpaid interns to do work on competitions because that’s the only way they can afford to undertake them. This in turn undervalues the work of all architects. If large amounts of design work are worth nothing, then what part of the job can architects legitimately charge for? Simply put, doing work for free is inevitably a bad idea - as this excellent diagram points out. 

This all has a very contemporary relevance. The coalition government's plans to repeal laws protecting employees of small business will be music to the ears of  some avant-garde practices. It's interesting too how the self-harming tendencies of architectural practice resonate with Mark Fisher’s analysis of market driven neo-liberalism in his recent book Capitalist Realism. Fisher is interested in how the mobile, transient and unprotected workforce that capitalism increasingly demands leads to serious mental health issues. The coalition government's sole 'growth strategy' is based on eroding employment rights and increasing job insecurity even further.

I'm aware that an architect whingeing about low fees might seem pretty small beer, or even in bad taste when compared to say, 50,000 people being sacked from the NHS. But I believe that all work should be remunerated and that to think otherwise is the preserve of the financially privileged. Architecture increasingly relies on artistic myths to justify various forms of exploitation. This is doubly ironic because architects tend to disavow getting rich as a motivation for what they do whilst happily assisting other people in their efforts to make money. 


Because their motivation is primarily artistic* and because they have little or no business training, many architects are simply very bad at asking for fees. This leads them to devalue what they do in particular and all forms of cultural and artistic work in general, as if they are a luxury bolt on to society. No one suggests this is true of accountancy or legal advice, both of which are assumed to have some primal necessity for human existence. 

The unsuccessful entries to the Ullswater competition that I've seen involve a level of technical competency that no other profession would consider giving away for free. They go way beyond 'pitching' - something that almost businesses are involved in at some level - to constitute a form of unspoken voluntary work on the client's behalf. And this is the point. In their eagerness to work, in their desperation in fact, architects are prone to being endlessly exploited. In turn, they exploit others further down the food chain, abandoning the principle that work should be remunerated or labour protected from exploitation.


* I'm using these terms pretty much at face value however naive they sound, in order to make a point. So, don't shoot me.