Design competitions are a key element in Swiss building history and culture: about 200 regular design competitions and a large number of mostly private procedures with a competitive char-acter are realised every year. However, it seems increasingly difficult to convince public and es-pecially private constructors/investors to realise design competitions using the regular proce-dures. read more

Erfahrungen nutzbar machen
Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, wurden Fallbeispiele von Wettbewerben im Schnittstellenbereich Städtebau und Verkehr aus den vergangenen Jahren untersucht. Gesucht wurden Antworten auf die Fragen, die sich für Veranstalter und Teilnehmende bei Vorbereitung, Durchführung und Umsetzung von Wettberbsverfahren stellen.

Designing appropriate architectural structures or planning desirable urban environments as well as inventing methods and processes to bring about new ideas require a collective competence, assurance, consensus and acceptance. It needs a shared consistency, participation, confidence and ability to better reframe the often ‘wicked’ design problems and suitable solutions in/for the continuously changing societies. read more

(forthcoming)

We suggest that in research on competition procedures we must consider specific characteristics of processes. In competitions, various levels of communication and technologies of representation are intertwining: images, text, models, and spoken discourse. Furthermore, following Kohoutek (2005), there are no direct bridges between diverse fields of society such as politics, aesthetics, law, economy, science – so communication between those fields must be established by some kinds of couplings; and design competitions constitute such punctual platforms for communication.
The project comperes the instrument of design competitions with instruments from participative planning / civic engagement. Empirically it will review two recent cases in the city of Zurich.

The project starts from the recognition that the field of research on design competitions is in need of systematic research that focuses on procedural aspects of contemporary competitions, and is based on an adequate theoretical and philosophical foundation. We view design compe-titions as significant decision-making procedures towards the built environment, which shape alternative urban futures, and act as ‘sorting machines’ for those futures. read more