By Zachary Edelson

The design competition can be a sensitive nerve in the architectural brain.

While it’s hard to decry the notion of an merit-based way to award projects and showcase new ideas, design competitions, much like buildings, must be well-made. A poorly-built competition can fail just as surely as a poorly-built structure. That’s why the Van Alen Institute (VAI), in partnership with Architectural Record and support from the Graham Foundation, has launched a design competition survey for architects.

With more than a century of experience holding design competitions, and a broad mandate to advance the design discipline, the VAI aims to use this survey as advocacy for architects and researchers everywhere. Acknowledging the growing number of design competition, as well as their increasingly complex and cross-disciplinary nature, VAI’s Director of Competitions Jerome Chou says “We feel it is important to highlight the interests of designers in these processes, as these are sadly not always fully considered… We want to hear how they would improve on the status quo — and we’ll focus on other stakeholders in competitions (such as government officials and nonprofit advocates) in future surveys.”