Competition of Competitions

COMPETITION OF COMPETITIONS
Redefining Briefs, Clients and Agents.
by Storefront for Art and Architecture for the AAAI!

Throughout history, competitions have constructed a relationship of servitude between architects and the structures of economic, politic and cultural power.

The competition brief has served as the initial document for the manifestation of desires either through programmatic, economic or formal needs. Often, the role of the architect has been reduced to answer a question that someone else has asked. In exceptional occasions, the architect’s ability to reinvent and produce new desires has occurred in the form of rebellion against the brief. In an act of bravura, architects have broken the rules, driven by the pure belief that the real needs were contained outside of the given principles.

Given competitions operate in a confined space for experimentation, they have perpetuated and sometimes repeated ad nauseam a series of programmatic and social needs – from Museums to Concert Halls - without actually asking what needs of society architecture should aspire to serve.

This competition claims that the true desires of our present society are outside of the current taxonomy of competition briefs and that architects should be participants in the construction of the questions they are asked to answer.

If a competition is the articulation of society’s desires in space, what new desires should we consider? What are the questions of our time that we should be asking to architects, urban planners and policy makers to redefine the way in which we build our cities and territories? What underrepresented spaces, individuals or collectives need to be explored?  And, what are the agents, authorities or organizations from which the competitions should be promoted?

The intention of “The Competition of Competitions” is to provide and deliver new and relevant forms of engagement and content to the economic, politic and social systems that currently act as the voice of authority for the development of our cities. “Competition of Competitions” asks architects, artists, economists, philosophers, writers, and citizens at large to create interdisciplinary teams to formulate the questions of our time and define the agents that should pursue the task to ask and commission the visions for the future in the form of a competition brief.

We encourage participants to rethink the format, content and agent/s that constitute the basis for the way competitions and commissions are organized.

For more information about deliverables, rules and prizes visit the website: http://storefrontnews.org/programming/events?preview=true&e=520

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UPDATE: The registration and submission deadlines have been extended through August 15th and 30th.