Design competitions allow practitioners to flex their creative muscles, support social issues, and garner recognition—and maybe even win prize money. Yet it can be difficult to spend time and resources on them while working on projects that support a firm’s financial health and profitability. Here, several designers offer advice for deciding which opportunities to pursue and how best to manage your efforts.
Be Selective
Competitions rarely offer fees or awards commiserate with the work hours required. Still, the 15-person New York firm Reddymade dedicates 10 percent of its time to competition submissions annually. “Our policy is to do at least three competitions per year,” says founder Suchi Reddy, AIA. “We… choose carefully the types of competitions we want to participate in and try to integrate them in the workflow in a way that doesn’t disrupt other deadlines.”
Max Orzi, founder of New York–based Studio Orzi, assesses his practice’s goals before deciding which competitions to enter. If winning is the aim, he considers the requirement rigor, interests of the jury, award amount, and size of the applicant pool. A two-time finalist for the Cavin Family Traveling Fellowship, Orzi says the competition was compelling because of its $12,000 travel and research award and strict eligibility requirements—only early practicing professionals 35 and under who matriculated from architecture programs at the University of Oregon and Cal Poly Pomona can enter.
Because the prize could be transformative for his young office, Orzi approaches the competition with a somewhat less radical eye than those competitions he views as creative exercises. “This is a different model,” he says. “I don’t want to be too aggressive in my proposals. Innovation is good but if you’re too aggressive, it may throw off the jury.”
Set Realistic Expectations
With more than a decade of previous experience at New York–based firm RUR Architecture DPC, Orzi knew it would be an uphill battle competing in larger competitions, such as the Tapei Pop Music Center International Competition. These competitions can take the work of entire offices to satisfy requirements for drawings and renderings and often involve submission of financial records. Many are by invitation only. Instead, Orzi has opted to enter open-call idea competitions, including the HOME Competition, the eVolo’s Skyscraper Competition, and the People’s Notre-Dame Cathedral Competition. Such contests require a more reasonable one or two weeks of work and offer awards ranging from $500 to $5,000.
In most cases, Orzi’s intent is not to win, but to pursue a burgeoning professional interest, broaden his portfolio, or engage an idea with more experimental freedom than typical in client-based work. Though Studio Orzi was fortunate to win the 2018 Home Competition, earning a $2,000 award for a provocative collection of robot-built, sand-hewn residential dwellings, Orzi says it was the competition’s connection to his residential work, not the prize, that made it worthwhile. “The house is something I have always been very curious about; it is what the practice is based on right now.”
Weigh the Benefits
Like Orzi, Reddy says competitions are about more than winning. Reddymade drew widespread attention when it won the 2019 Times Square Valentine Heart Competition, organized by Times Square Arts and AIA New York. “You can’t really put something in Times Square and not get exposure,” Reddy says, adding that the installation has also served as the backdrop for public weddings.
Though the resource investment to develop the submission was not onerous, the $40,000 budget the firm was awarded to build the structure—the tallest ever created for the competition—did not cover the costs incurred, as “it almost never does,” Reddy says. Still, it allowed the practice “to think outside the constraints of the typical architecture practice” and has sparked new interest in the firm. Reddymade is currently in talks with several municipalities that wish to host the structure.
Though large-scale built competitions have smaller odds of winning, they can serve as a morale boost for a practice. Several years ago, Reddymade was one of 13 shortlisted finalists for the Women’s Building International Design Competition by the NoVo Foundation and Lela Goren Group to renovate the former Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan into a center for the global women’s rights movement. Though the competition drew little press and required “10 times more work” than a similar commissioned, it was “good for the life of the office,” Reddy says. Winning would have meant a career-shaping commission for a “$50 million building, up forever.” (Deborah Berke Partners ultimately won the commission.)
Turn Experimentation into Leads
For some firms, entering design competitions is not profitable—but the same rigorous expository approach, focused heavily on site and program analysis, can be applied to other work. “The last time we did a design competition was 20 years ago,” says Barry Yoakum, FAIA, co-founding principal of the 27-person Memphis, Tenn.–based Archimania. “We were a small firm then, much smaller than now, and we saw how it affected our profit margins immediately. [The costs were] almost impossible to deal with.”
Since then, Archimania has instead focused on early-stage pro-bono design and program planning work for regional non-profits and government entities. While satisfying its research interests and supporting local organizations, this approach has led to some 60 commissioned projects over the past 25 years, including new offices and a performance space for Ballet Memphis and a chapel pavilion adapted from a cooling tower at Methodist University Hospital, each of which ultimately earned international recognition. “All are in the same bucket,” Yoakum says. “They came to us because we had this idea of treating pro-bono work as a design competition. Often, it’s not just about design, but what the program is and how it can support fundraising for a capital campaign. That’s what they’re looking for in design competitions—who does the most creative work?”
