Spontaneous Architecture

While browsing the internet for potential opportunities, I came across an innovative series of design competitions. The simple format and democratic transparency of the Spontaneous Architecture project, run as a collaborative experiment between Pre Office, GSAPP’s Studio X,  and Good Magazine, aims to maximize the potential for the form of the architectural design competition to provoke discussion, debate, and new ideas. This freedom is achieved, perversely, through the use of a highly restricted competition format; each contestant has only a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper with which to show the world his or her ideas. That minimal format, combined with the contest’s quick timetable and low $5 entry fee, encourages risk-taking and innovation among the competitors. As a result, each month’s entries can often be highly abstract and experimental …

… or theoretical:

This proposal, for the US/Mexican border, provokes the following question in its descriptive text: "What is a border? Conceptually, it's a line, separating one side from another. But in architecture a line always gets a thickness."

Other entries have even more ambiguous meanings:

Other contestants may take the alternate approach of honing their message through simplicity. The results often resemble the visual equivalent of a one-liner:

Some other entries, meanwhile, are just plain bizarre:

Regardless of each entry’s psychedelic value, however, they are all displayed for public viewing and voting on the competition website. In an interesting blend of the digital and analog worlds, the entries can also be discussed in real life at a monthly Studio X event. These venues for debate and discussion ensure that each contestant has the potential to make a statement, provoke thought, or contribute to a larger dialog, regardless of whether or not they win or even necessarily intend to win:

I was also surprised by the thoroughness and passion with which many of the competition entries addressed the pressing issues of today’s society. Although their awareness was undeniably kick-started by the format of each month’s competition brief, which inevitably highlights a particular social or cultural challenge, the resulting entries suggest inventive new solutions that rise above and beyond the  rehashed political arguments typically associated with those themes. A proposal to place medical offices and waiting rooms on trains, for example, pragmatically reinterprets the unpleasant urban reality of long commute times as a tool for positive health care improvement:

"Combine idle time. Use time during the commute for visual checkups on specialized checkup trains."

Such competition briefs encourage architects to think beyond the design of individual buildings, and instead consider the overall systems of society and how design can impact the future. That approach is also reflected in the elegant diagrams that back up another health care proposal:

Decentralized health care kiosks to serve local communities.

Some other dreams embark on a more idealistic direction, resembling the kind of dramatic utopian visions more often associated with Modernist planning schemes than with the pessimistic postmodern environment of our current recession:

Immigration infrastructure designed to link unemployed workers with countries that have demand for their labor.

Regardless of how spectacular some particular entries appear, however, the discussion-focused nature of the competition seems to lend its entries to be judged by the critical fiber of their ideas rather than the presentation of their surface imagery. Andrew Miller David Ruperti’s winning entry for the March 2010 Olympics-themed competition, for example, is hindered by the foibles of a distracting background and inconsistent illustrations. Its overall idea, however, makes you think:

"Identity Games proposes that Olympic teams be allowed to identify themselves with non-nationalistic groups. This change would invite a flood of new teams representing both geographic and non-geographic communities."

January 2010 winner Daniel Georges’s dystopian prediction of how beachfront areas might be visually transformed by global warming is similarly challenging:

"Even the things that will be saved won't be the same any more."

Regardless of the merits of any individual submission, however, the contest’s overall spirit of headfirst risk-taking creates an atmosphere that I haven’t quite found in any other design competition that I have ever seen before. This is the kind of ambition that the world needs more of right now, and as this generation (my generation) of emerging architects grows and develops, we hopefully will see much more of it to come. If you’re interested in joining the project, there’s still time to propose your solutions to this month’s topic, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, before the competition deadline of June 15.