Memory and Justice: www.memoryandjustice.org

Design Competitions

Design Competitions

Before any memorial to mass atrocity becomes a physical reality, the process that precedes it is often long, difficult, highly political, and mostly invisible to the public. In many cases, the process takes the form of a formal design competition. When done poorly, such competitions can be a kind of backroom deal, and result in memorials designed by committee, pleasing no one. But when done well, design competitions encourage transparency, emphasize consensus decision-making, and produce some of the most innovative and powerful work in the field.

The juries that make the decisions in design competitions can have members that come from a wide range of backgrounds, including politicians, architects, curators, and victims. Regardless of their professions, what’s most important is the spirit they bring to the process. The scholar James Young has served on juries for two of the most prominent memorial projects in the world today: the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (as jury chairman). A good design competition, he said, requires a jury that is willing to “stand by its decisions and convictions and be able to provide a rationale for whatever choice they made – including the choice not to choose something, if they can’t find anything that they feel would be appropriate.”

Design competitions are often much more fraught and contentious than either jurors or the public expect they will be. Put bluntly, competitions are battlegrounds – but with the right approach, they can be highly productive battlegrounds. “The processes themselves are and always have been conditioned by political, economic, cultural realities,” Young said. “There’s going to be contentiousness. This is the place where you work through what is to be remembered and why, and everybody’s got very different reasons.” During the World Trade Center Memorial process, Young said, “the family members had a huge sway, because they had a lock on meaning, and on grieving, and on direct loss. But what about the residents of the city? What about the national constituency? What about all the other nationals – there were people from ninety countries killed there. They all need to have voice in it. So it does get very noisy, and there’s a lot of jockeying around. The toughest part is to be able to manage it all without walking away.”

In some cases, a memorial is a means of creating a unified narrative for a community and applying a singular memory to a traumatic event. For this reason, the jury process, with all of its arguments, factions, and strong feelings, can feel unseemly to some stakeholders. “It turns the stomach of those who want to see decorum as part of the whole memorial,” Young says. “The process seems tarnished to people who like only that very clean finished product. But there’s never really a clean finished product. It’s like washing dirty laundry. All this stuff comes out, and it’s not pretty. But it’s always interesting. Open it up, let it be messy, let it live in real time, let it die in real time, let it evolve over real time. Let its meanings change over time, as they’re going to. If you fix it, you kill it. Just open the doors, and it will be OK.”

Often, as a design competition is in progress, the local press will treat the debates surrounding the competition as evidence that something is wrong – that the process is “troubled.” “In fact, all processes are troubled,” Young said. “The press’s job is to write about controversies, and sometimes to pour oil on them to get them going. The jury has to be thick-skinned enough to both withstand that kind of scrutiny – because it’s a necessary part of the process – and not feel that it has to be unduly influenced by very specific criticism. A jury is a space where we work it through, and we should be informed by the criticism we hear, and even by the lobbying. There’s a difference between being informed and being pressured to do a particular thing.”

In the end, the public usually only sees a single design – the design that the jury chose as the winner, which is presented as if it could never have been anything else. But losing designs can also be important to the process of memory. The World Trade Center Memorial jury, for example, received 5,201 submissions from around the world. “I asked everyone to keep in mind the hundreds of hours that would have gone into each submission,” Young says. “Multiply 5,201 by another hundred or 200 hours, and we can count the number of human hours already devoted to memorial work, commemorating these events in architecture, concepts, music, water, in all kinds of ways, by professionals and lay people alike.”

“I would love be able to show all of the losing designs, and suggest that the winning design is just the tip of the iceberg, resting in some way on all the unbuilt designs,” Young said. “All of these, too, should be regarded as part of the memorial. If all the debates, the decisions, and the proposals along the way come out, then the memorial itself becomes much more nuanced, textured, and interesting.”

Some design competitions are conducted blind, meaning that the jurors don’t know who submitted the designs until a winner is selected. This can be an excellent way to eliminate the personal and unconscious biases of the jurors, and allow them the focus on the actual merits of each proposal. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, for example, was a blind competition, and it is often said that Maya Lin’s revolutionary design would never have been chosen had the process not been blind. Unfortunately, blind competitions are also more expensive to run, and many juries find they can’t afford them. Blind competitions also reduce the advantage of celebrity, and quiet the influence of the art market. For this reason, though, it can be hard to get certain designers to participate. “Many of the great well established artists refuse to enter blind competitions,” Young says. They say, ‘I can’t spend hundreds of hours competing against amateurs and have a one in one thousand chance of succeeding.’ The really great ones almost won’t do it by definition.”

Whether entries are sought blindly or by invitation, it’s best for any competition to be transparent. A transparent competition, it must be said, is not an efficient way of making a memorial. But in the end, transparency is most likely to produce a memorial that most stakeholders feel invested in. “Make the process educational,” Young recommends. “Have a conference with speakers, or a series of speakers talking about why we want to remember. What is it exactly that we’re commemorating, and why are we doing it, toward what end? It is for us, or for the next generation? Why does our community have an interest in remembering? Those are tough questions sometimes. People can’t always answer them. But if they do, then they’ve tilled the ground, and they’ve created a very fertile space for memory, and then for a memorial, a monument, a museum, an education center, or whatever it is they end up with.”

“Don’t worry about the end result,” Young says. “Just preserve the process, and keep it as transparent as possible. Ask difficult questions, even if there aren’t answers, and let that process be the memorial for the time being. It could result in a thing in the ground; it might not.” The best memorial, Young has said, is the debate surrounding the memorial.

Comment on this article

---

---