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Home > Journal > Issue Nine > Competitons - FKL Competitions have been and continue to be an important aspect of our practice, not in winning commissions or prizes, but in establishing a working method and formulating an Architectural Theory for practice. In the last 12 years, between the three of us, we have entered 44 competitions, in 9 countries, producing approximately 103 A1 boards, taking around 7,140 hours, using up countless evenings and weekends and requiring more all-nighters than is sensible. At this point it is hard to tell whether it has become a hobby or an addiction because as a business strategy it cannot be justified. We have entered competitions individually and together since forming d-Compass in 1991 for the Smithfield Ideas Competition and have continued to do so in the interim in a number of permutations and with a number of collaborators. We started soon after leaving college largely in response to the lack of design opportunities afforded to us by the economic climate at that time. We felt a strong affinity with the Paper Architecture phenomenon in Russia which didn't have much hope of building either. The stranglehold of conservatism, conservation and disembowelled Postmodernism made it unattractive to contemplate the realities of building at the time. Competitions were a far more attractive option, especially Japanese competitions with their abstract briefs and a hint of glamour.
The competition format allows a rigorous adherence to principle, free of overt constraints of finances, planning restrictions and the client's aesthetic preference. In any competition there are always key issues where the guidance of the brief is unclear and the judgement of the participants is called upon. Successfully identifying these key issues and determining the required response is the way of competition success. However, having identified them, we have endeavoured to respond honestly and on the basis of architectural judgement, not on the assumed preferences of the assessors. We attempt to treat each competition as a real project, freed of constraint and designed as a building not purely a graphic. Architectural Association of Ireland |
It soon became clear that if winning was to be the sole motivation then we would probably be habitually disappointed. Consequently we established an alternative agenda where benefit can be weighed against the often-harsh reality of competition results and this has proved to be an important testing ground for ideas and a useful means of research - tackling briefs and working at a large scale, investigating materials structural systems and environmental strategies.