Architect 2014-03.pdf

AIAFEATURE
45
march 2014
1922 Tribune Tower competition (left to right): entries by Bertram Goodhue; Bruno Taut,
Walter Gunther, and Kurz Schutz; and Walter Gropius. Opposite: Eliel Saarinen’s second
prize entry (with Chicago architects Dwight Wallace and Bertell Grenman).
an architectural competition can be an adrenalin rush.
Just imagine hundreds of designers, from the famous to the
wet-behind-the-ears, all thinking about the same program, all
simultaneously striving to improve the commonweal with a brilliant
solution to a major urban problem—or at least designing an icon that
will change their careers forever.
A competition is an opportunity for an untried visionary to sweep
away the Old Guard and offer a transformative paradigm. Maya Lin,
a Yale undergraduate in 1981 when she beat out 1,441 other entrants
to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
epitomizes that dream. Her controversial incision in the landscape
on the National Mall changed how we approach commemorative
public monuments. “Competitions are the province of the young and
the unemployed,” says Andrus Burr, FAIA, a Williamstown, Mass.,
architect and Lin’s critic for the competition project at Yale.
“Superstars are too busy to enter competitions,” says Helsinki
architect Mikko Heikkinen, Hon. FAIA, whose firm, Heikkinen-
Komonen Architects, got its big start by winning a competition.
While that is not always true, there’s a kind of idealism and youthful
ardor that fuels stories like Lin’s and is the basis of hundreds of socalled
“ideas competitions” that happen each year.
In a similar manner, Joseph Paxton, an architect and gardener,
came up with a giant greenhouse to house the world’s first
international exposition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. The Crystal
Palace revolutionized the nature of large structures through
prefabrication, among other achievements. The other contenders,
with their Gothic peaks and massive brick domes, were rendered
mute by the simplicity of Paxton’s ferrovitreous cathedral.
Some students learn about legendary competitions, such as that
for the Tribune Tower in Chicago in 1922, for which a Gothic Revival
design by the New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond
Hood beat out the likes of Walter Gropius and Eliel Saarinen, who
both submitted spare, modern takes on monumental commercial
architecture. (This introduces us to the myth of more accomplished
but slighted designers who deserved to win. If one placed second in
a competition, one could avoid the headaches of construction while
preserving an unassailable position of superiority.) Several years
later, Saarinen was notified that he had won the contest to build
Gateway Arch in St. Louis, only to be subsequently informed that it
was his son, Eero, who had secured that plum commission. A story
like that is closer to Shakespearean tragedy than to the everyday
drudgery of office work.
The competition process is often fraught with difficulty,
especially when a project is both very public and extremely
significant (think of the recent Eisenhower Memorial in Washington,
D.C., or the suite of buildings at Ground Zero in New York). Danish
architect Jørn Utzon gave a continent an instantly recognizable
signature with his winning design for the Sydney Opera House (juror