RIBA Competitions accused of exploiting architects
Jeremy Till
Source: Gary WallisCentral St Martins’ Jeremy Till speaks out at Architecture Foundation debate
The RIBA and its competitions office have been accused of perpetuating a competition system that exploits architects.
Jeremy Till, the new head of Central St Martins, also blamed architects for willingly sacrificing unviable amounts of time and money in pursuit of success.
Speaking at an Architecture Foundation debate on competition culture, Till said: “The professional body is allowing architects to prostrate themselves on the altar of potential fame.
“Architects do this willingly, particularly now when they are in a state of economic desperation… I do wonder why the profession allows itself to be degraded in this manner.”
He said some of the great buildings of the 20th century would never have been built if they had been procured today and called for the entire competition system to undergo “massive reorientation”.
“How can one possibly design a building without a discussion?” he asked.
“The competition process prioritises the building as static object… It privileges a whole set of architectural values that are counter to what might make really great architecture.”
Till said the UK’s unregulated competition system was one of the worst in Europe for allowing exploitation.
He used a live RIBA-run competition – for the £2 million Great Fen visitor centre in Cambridgeshire – as an example of the desperate lengths to which architects go.
Five finalists were picked from more than 200 entries last month and paid £3,000: Foster Lomas, Feilden & Mawson, Birds Portchmouth Russum Architects, Boyarsky Murphy Architects and Shiro Studio.
Till said some of the entries were so detailed they could be used as blueprints and must have taken 20 days’ work.
“So that’s £800,000 at cost, or £1.28 million at commercial rates, spent on a £2 million project for which the client does not have funds,” he said.
Richard Brindley, the RIBA’s executive director of professional services, speaking at the same event, defended the RIBA competitions office for its “rigour, credibility and prestige”.
Clients must adhere to principles such as transparency, paying honoraria and protecting competitors’ copyright, he added.
Postscript:
Order BD’s white paper How to Win Work
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Readers' comments (19)
Why kick the competitions system? How many of us do our initial client meeting for free? We are our own worst enemies. As soon as you step in a solicitor's office, the clock starts ticking.
At last- someone prepared to stand up and state the unsustainable facts behind so much of today's commissioning process. Let's hope not only the profession take heed but also our potential clients.
I agree with Jeremy Till. Why do the most creative part of our work for free - mostly to be ignored by the commissioners.
But it is a fine line between getting known, showing what we can do, and making a living. Especially with so-called design-build meaning that we only do the 'creative' bit anyway.
Well done Jeremy
Well said, but it is equally true that a considerable amount of exploitation takes place as a result of non-competitive work undertaken speculatively. We, as a profession, are not successful at managing our value and give it away too easily.
However, the RIBA has not distinguished itself in the management of competitions. I agree with Till's sentiments regarding the Great Fen visitor centre and would extend the example to the Iraqi Parliament, where the RIBA-run competiton produced a winner, only to be usurped, it would appear, by one of the losers circumventing the RIBA and approaching the client organisation directly.
@David - D&B system is the worst thing that happenend to the building fabric of this country. Also, "creative bit" should have a solid background in understanding and intimately knowing how the "creative bit" is to be constructed, used, maintained and serviced. Otherwise it's just doodling...
That is why I never take part in competitions which assume all the work is to be done for free and only reimbursed when you are lucky and win in the first place and then your project gets build by you and bastardised by D&B consortium...
I pose the questions as to whether, in the current economic climate, small practices should be encouraged to spend vast amounts of time and resources in producing competition schemes that statistically are extremely unlikely to get built or produce any fees. This can only lead to small practices finding themselves in further financial difficulties.
In America, where the process in the design industry is commonly know as "crowdsourcing", there is starting to be a back lash with organisation like "No Spec!" and "Spec watch" actively encouraging both clients and designers to boycott the practice.
With the number of entrance that competitions are currently attracting in the UK "merit becomes less of a factor and taste becomes the determining influence. It’s hard to cater to taste on competition, and most designers end up missing out on payment altogether".
In a recent RIBA competition to design a UK sailing club Architects were invited to submit ideas for a project that had no funding, an unrealistically low build cost, and a projected construction start date of 2017. There was a prize for the winner of £1500. As a practice keen for work and very experienced sailors we entered and spent in the region of £6000 putting a typical submission together. There were in the region of 140 entrants making an approximate grand total of practice spend of £840,000. The national competition was won by a practice 31 miles away from the site. A cynic would say that this is a very nice way of getting the A-D package that was openly needed to approach the planners for a fraction of the going rate. This would appear to have been a waste of all of time and money and begs the question should we all have spent our £6000 on advertising instead? The wasted time and energy makes this a massively inefficient way of producing buildings.
I have encountered a culture where developers are aware that struggling small practices are all too happy to produce speculative work and as a result are cashing in. Our practice is all too aware of this having naively worked on a number of projects that never happened where the client hadn't even bought the land let alone secured funding. Recently I see this filtering into competitions with some of the low end housing competitions.
I think there are key problems with competitions:
• The bills have to be paid and in order to fund this kind of work you will need raise fees from other potential clients, meaning you will be uncompetitive and not win proper projects. For practices that are focused on long-term goals, a short-term strategy like this simply isn't the way to go.
• Competition design is about impressing the Judges and creating the ‘wow factor’. However good design should focus on the end user and not necessarily the person that you are presenting to.
• Good design comes from being well informed, you need to know your client and understand their needs. In competitions you generally do not get to even meet the client. Ultimately competitions ignore the collaborative nature of design. A successful project is as much about successful client architect relationships as the right design.
• Rather than stimulate design we have always found the opposite. With no fees there is always the pressure to get a scheme crunched out and drawn up in super quick time with out the normal research, reading and architectural visits that would normally constitute part of our thinking.
I believe that the original concept of the design competition was to raise the quality of the end result and provide the client with a better building but surely the client needs to be paying a premium for this level of service.
Andy Ramus
AR Design Studio
Jeremy is correct. Whilst in the past 10 years 57% of built RIBA competitions go on to win awards, and the system evidently produces better buildings than other procurement approaches it is no panacea, and the waste of the professions energy on submissions is completely absurd.
But UK is not alone. The Extension to Stockholms Library attracted over 1,100 submissions at a cost to the architectural profession estimated to be more than 3 times the buildings construction cost.
Switzerland with a population not much more than South London has over 500 competitions per annum, yet have been producing many of the most respected current generation of eurpean architects. Innsbruck procures most of its buildings in the public and private sector this way with well run & remunerated staged competitions. relative to UK production these are well built highly sustainable and ambitious projects.
So the solution is not fewer competitions but more, with better standards, better briefing, less exploitation and better RIBA Competitions practice. One way to do this is to build competitions into public procurement policy and not be solely reliant on one off individual competition patronage.
In the end no system will be perfect - but what is clearly needed is a competitions system in the UK which is far better than the existing confused and wasteful processes. For example incorporating interogative debate into the process whether by public participation or jurors can be done in well administered and intelligent design competitions and this should be encoraged.
RIBA Procurement Reform Group has drafted new competitions guidance for issue later this year which embodies many of these criticisms allowing for example wild card bidders, a sortition system for small comps., public participation and/or interview, digital submission etc.
However good any guidance maybe, the quality of the briefing and competition administration needs to be done with integrity and intelligent judgement. That has been and always will remain a challenge.
Just to reinforce Walter's point, I did go on to say that there are models of competitions that do work, but it needs to have a critical mass to make it viable for architects to enter them. Also just to clarify, I would never blame architects for entering competitions. I am all too aware that the present economic crisis means that firms are having to explore every avenue - my point was that the present system tends to exploit exactly this vulnerability.
There should be costly sanctions against promoters who fail to build the winning scheme in a timely manner.
Brian Waters, former RIBA v p marketing