COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Architectural design competitions usually don't result in buildings that are admired and honored, new research suggests.
A study of 80 buildings recognized as architectural masterpieces found that only three resulted from design competitions -- and in one of the three a losing design was recognized as the masterpiece.
In a related study, people rated design proposals submitted for real competitions. The results showed architects and non- architects alike preferred losing designs over those that won.
"The best conclusion I can reach is that the winners of design competitions don't often stand the test of time as classic buildings," said Jack Nasar, co-author of the studies and professor of architecture at Ohio State University.
Nasar, who is chairperson of the Environmental Design Research Association, did the work with graduate student Peg Grannis. He presented the results recently in Austria at a
meeting of the European Full-Scale Modeling Association. An earlier version was presented this summer to the American Psychological Association.
In design competitions, architects are invited to submit proposals for design of a new structure. A competition jury, often dominated by architects, chooses a winning design among the entries. That design is then used for the building.
Competitions have become an increasingly popular way to design buildings. In 1979, nine competitions were announced in Progressive Architecture magazine, Nasar said. In 1993, there were 95 such competitions listed in the magazine.
"Design competitions have become very popular without much attention given to whether they're successful for the public," he said.
In the first study, Nasar compiled a list of 80 architectural masterpieces. These were buildings that had the most citations in one of two kinds of sources. Some of the buildings were cited in at least three of five general encyclopedias he reviewed. Others were buildings cited most frequently in more than 30 books on 20th Century architecture.
"When we checked the history of each building, we found that only three of them resulted in whole or part from a competition," Nasar said. "In one case -- the Chicago Tribune building -- the praised design had lost the competition."
While these findings suggest that competitions don't usually produce classic designs, Nasar said the conclusion is tentative. Some important facts were not available for the study, such as the proportion of major public buildings that result from competitions.
But to examine the issue further, he conducted another study that asked people to judge winning and losing designs from actual architectural competitions. Nasar selected 25 competitions from 1882 through 1996 in which he could find images of the winning design and one losing design. Those 25 competitions were chosen from an original list of 90. The final list included only those competitions in which the images of the winner and loser were similar in quality, mode of presentation and viewing angle.
Fifty practicing architects and 50 non-architect professionals in
Columbus were asked to evaluate the 25 pairs of designs. They did not know which was the winner and which was the loser in each pair. (Few of the designs were recognized; in only three of the 25 competitions did more than 5 percent of the participants say they recognized a building. Recognition did not affect the results, the researchers found.)
The participants were asked, in each of the 25 cases, which one of the designs they preferred and which they thought was better.
In 59 percent of the cases, the non-architects said they preferred the losing design over the winning design. Among the architects, the losing designs were preferred 51 percent of the time.
"Architects were more likely than other professionals to choose the winning entries as their preferred choice, but they still chose more losers than winners," Nasar said.
When he calculated how all 100 participants judged all 25 entries, Nasar found that respondents selected 1,378 losers as preferred and 1,118 winners as preferred. Similar results occurred when he calculated which entries were chosen as the best design.
Why do competition winners often seem like losers to the public? Nasar said competition juries "want a unique design that stands out from its context, and this does not always make the best building." Studies have shown that architects, who usually dominate competition juries, often misjudge and reject popular opinion.
Nasar said these results suggest that architectural competitions should be changed to include more public input. He suggests that a random sample of the general public be asked to evaluate competition entries in a scientific survey. The results should be seriously considered by the competition jury.
"Buildings are not like fine art or music, where you have a choice whether to experience them," Nasar said. "Competition buildings are often paid for with public funds, and they're built where we all have to live with them. The public should be able to have more input."
Contact: Jack Nasar, (614) 292-1457; Nasar.1@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
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