最近紐約時報有篇關於建築師競圖訪談, 滿有意思的, 特摘錄如下:
- Richard Meier質疑: 為何其他的專業, 像律師/醫生不需要競圖? 競圖, 你不知道是真的案子, 或者只是客戶在釣魚(釣設計理念).
“Do lawyers do competitions?” Mr. Meier said. “Do doctors do competitions? No other professional does a competition. The downside is, you never know whether it’s a real project or they’re just kind of fishing around.
-Tom Mayne說: 必需在5/6次競圖中贏一次, 否則就掛了. 又說: 想不出其他替代方案…競圖至少不需跟客戶打高爾夫…
Mr. Mayne said his office keeps an eye on the ratio. “You have to win one out of five or one out of six,” he said. “Otherwise you go out of business.”
Mr. Mayne said, “I’m not sure how you’d replace it.” He added that unlike some direct commissions, competitions tend to focus on design quality, not political, business or personal connections like “who you golf with.”
-特愛競圖者如Eisenman, 他有袐密武器, 就是免費的實習生: (實習生獲得的是: 替自己申請研究所或求職加分.)
The summer interns in Mr. Eisenman’s office, for example, many of whom are European, work only on competitions, not commissions. They are not paid a salary, but Mr. Eisenman said the experience enhances their graduate school and job prospects.
全文如下:
Ready, Set, Design: Work as a Contest
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/arts/ ... ref=design
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: August 19, 2007
CHARLES GWATHMEY refuses to take part in architectural competitions these days. They cost too much money and divert energy from other projects, he says.
Renzo Piano no longer competes because he doesn’t need to; he always has plenty of projects under way and can easily get jobs without entering a horse race.
Peter Eisenman, on the other hand, says that he must compete to stay busy and that he relishes the challenge.
And Richard Meier says no to most competitions but admits that some of his most important projects came about through such contests, like the Jubilee Church in Rome. And some are too compelling to resist, he says, like a current competition for the tallest building in Warsaw.
It seems that nearly every day a new architectural competition is announced featuring an international lineup of established or emerging architects vying to design an eye-catching museum, airport, theater, courthouse or concert hall.
“It seems to have kind of metastasized,” said the Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne, who recently won a competition to design a 68-story tower at La Défense, a business district on the western edge of Paris. (He beat out heavyweights like Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands, Jean Nouvel of France and Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland.) “In the last 30 years just about every major building you think of came through a competition.”
But architects can be deeply ambivalent about entering such contests. Simply emerging as a finalist can bring prestige and business to a firm and unleash creative juices. But losing can also mean steep financial loss and profound disappointment after months of effort.
“You really put yourself into these in a very intense way,” said Michael Maltzan, who recently redesigned the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Staff members work long days and weekends, and the firm racks up bills on everything from models and presentation media to air travel.
“You really clear the decks for them, and very often you do fall in love with that thing that you made,” Mr. Maltzan said. “And then you lose, and it sits there, staring you in the face, and it’s hard to come in to work the next day.” Architects also point out that they are typically paid either a nominal fee for entering a competition or nothing at all, reinforcing the sense of loss.
They estimate that they generally receive $25,000 to $70,000 for their efforts, which tend to cost them two to three times that amount and sometimes far more.
“It probably pays for a third if you’re lucky,” said Andrew Whalley, the director in charge of Grimshaw Architects’ New York office “It can easily cost $100,000, mostly in man hours. The big cost is time.”
For the client the benefits of competitions are obvious. Developers know that high-profile design contests can bring publicity and cachet to a residential or commercial project; arts institutions have found that they can translate into donor enthusiasm.
But for architects the uncertainties can be a trial. Mr. Mayne of the Los Angeles firm Morphosis cites the 1999 competition organized by the General Services Administration for a new 270,000-square-foot federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore. He beat out four other contenders but only later learned that the location they had been given had been merely hypothetical. “They change the site, you’re more or less starting over,” he said.
Seven years and many challenges later — Mr. Mayne locked horns with a wary federal judge on the selection panel, for example, and spent months winning him over — his curvilinear brushed stainless-steel courthouse opened in December.
In some competitions being American can be a drawback, as Mr. Eisenman found in the 1999 design race for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. He emerged as a finalist along with Mr. Nouvel, but the jury couldn’t decide and passed that task to President Jacques Chirac.
Mr. Eisenman realized he was doomed. “In a time of anti-American feeling we knew the minute it went to Chirac, our scheme wouldn’t win,” he said.
Still, he said, such experiences are just par for the course. “You don’t go to gamble at Las Vegas expecting to come home a winner,” he said.
While competitions have long been a staple of planning in Western Europe — in some countries they are legally required for public buildings — they have a spotty history in the United States. In America’s early years they were seen as part of the democratic process; contests were organized for the design of the White House and the Capitol.
“A competition was something like a public referendum,” said the architectural historian Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. That spirit was paramount in design contests like those for the Chicago Tribune Tower in the 1920s, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis in 1947 and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981.
Yet in contrast to traditional competitions in Europe, which tend to be more open and allow emerging talent to be discovered, design contests in the United States today are generally limited to a few select entrants, be they celebrities or up-and-comers.
They can still give the public a sense of involvement, as San Francisco residents found this month when they filed into City Hall to view three competing models for the city’s Transbay Terminal (by Richard Rogers‘s London firm, Pelli Clarke Pelli of New Haven, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of New York).
But for architects untrammeled public participation can be a mixed bag, as reflected in the fraught design process at ground zero. Political infighting and budget limits have forced all of the winning architects there to compromise repeatedly on their designs: an embittering experience for some, like Michael Arad, who has seen his design for a memorial radically adjusted.
And sometimes the designs generated in a competition prove beyond the client’s means, and the project is jettisoned altogether.
“It’s a killer,” said Mr. Gwathmey, who once won a competition for a school in Shanghai only to find out the client did not have the money to build it and had only been fishing for ideas.
“It’s been disruptive to the office and very expensive and very time-consuming,” he said. “And in the end if you don’t win, you feel depressed and set back in terms of other projects.” He essentially swore off competitions about a decade ago.
Yet architectural historians point out that unbuilt designs can achieve a heroic status eclipsing the building that was actually realized. Walter Gropius’s Modernist design for the Chicago Tribune project in 1922, for example, was far more influential than what ultimately was built, a neo-Gothic design by Raymond Hood. It became “famous by its martyrdom,” Mr. Bergdoll said of Gropius’s project.
Some architects have spoken out about the compensation issue.
During the 2003 competition to design a master plan for ground zero, the architect Frank Gehry publicly criticized the fees paid to the entrants.
People who run competitions “know they can get it done cheap,” he said. “I don’t know that it always produces the best buildings. Better for a client to know who they want and what they want.”
Nonetheless Mr. Gehry acknowledges that he got some of his biggest commissions through competitions, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Some architects have come to view competitions as exploitative and even demeaning, a way for clients to troll for ideas without committing to a specific architect and compensating him or her appropriately.
“Do lawyers do competitions?” Mr. Meier said. “Do doctors do competitions? No other professional does a competition. The downside is, you never know whether it’s a real project or they’re just kind of fishing around.”
And sometimes the hurdles multiply, at considerable expense. In a competition for a new airport in St. Petersburg, Russia, the jurors chose two finalists, Grimshaw Architects and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rather than just one winner, sending both firms back to the drawing board. “So now we have to do more work,” Mr. Whalley said.
Still, relatively few architects can afford to opt out. “There are blue-chip architects who get work without competing, on their name alone,” Mr. Eisenman said. “We don’t get jobs just given to us.”
“Ninety percent of our work comes from winning competitions — and losing competitions,” he added.
Mr. Mayne said his office keeps an eye on the ratio. “You have to win one out of five or one out of six,” he said. “Otherwise you go out of business.”
Some architects say that they enjoy going up against their peers, and that the contests tend to be more collegial than cutthroat. “There is a certain playful competitiveness,” Mr. Mayne said. “It’s like playing on a basketball court. You play really hard, and after you go out and have a beer.”
And while the competition system can be a serious drag on daily operations, Mr. Mayne said, “I’m not sure how you’d replace it.” He added that unlike some direct commissions, competitions tend to focus on design quality, not political, business or personal connections like “who you golf with.”
“It’s kind of an interesting leveling of the playing field,” he said.
In the competition for the Museum of Modern Art’s recent expansion, won by Yoshio Taniguchi over nine other architects, for example, “a lot of people very much disagreed with the direction,” Mr. Mayne said, “but you could have the dialogue.” One camp believed that MoMA should risk a radical redesign, while others favored a more understated intervention.
Still, some architects feel the jousting puts pressure on them to come up with flamboyant models and gaudy presentations. “We personally feel at a disadvantage,” said Billie Tsien, who works with her husband, Tod Williams. “Our work is not about a quick take. It’s a little slower. We’re interested in the emotional experience of an interior. We work inside out. I think you win a competition from the outside in.”
Some architects also have greater means to produce splashy brochures and design boards. Mr. Eisenman said that prompted him to pull out of a competition for a government building in Soria, Spain, once Norman Foster joined the fray.
“The kind of resources he can throw at a competition — models, DVDs, renderings — is 10 times what we can afford to spend,” he said. “I thought the odds were stacked against us.”
To limit the financial burden, some architects enlist the help of interns. The summer interns in Mr. Eisenman’s office, for example, many of whom are European, work only on competitions, not commissions. They are not paid a salary, but Mr. Eisenman said the experience enhances their graduate school and job prospects.
However great a drain a competition can be on a firm’s finances and personnel, Mr. Eisenman said that he enjoys the fight, that it kept him in good form and in the game. “I’m a competitive human being,” he said. “To me, when I stop getting invited to competitions is when I quit. That’s what makes me alive.”
後記: 老鐵人在另篇訪談中, 慨言:
“If you were a son of mine, I wouldn’t want you to be an architect,” the septuagenarian told this reporter, “because it’s a tough way to be in the world. Look, my son who graduated from law school three years ago makes more than I do after 40 years of working.”
好家在, 他最近以320萬美元, 賣了NY的21層2000方呎公寓自宅(接手的是夜店老闆-記者虧道: works in a world that owes more to busty celebrities and lousy cocaine than to architectural anti-humanism or post-functionalism, but that’s how it goes in Manhattan. ), 看來房地產比建築師好賺太多了. 詳: http://www.observer.com/2007/architect- ... wler-3-2-m