Competition is the supreme discipline of the architect. If you look at the sheer number of competitions won by MVRDV, you inevitably arrive at a complete misjudgement of the number of employees at the company.
While last time I told you about my pleasant routine at MVRDV, I can now tell you about the complete opposite: The competition.
The competition is the supreme discipline of the architect and nothing flatters his above-average ego more than to emerge as the shining winner in the everlasting battle for fame and honor. The architect is prepared to do almost anything for this award. If you look at the sheer number of competitions won by MVRDV, you inevitably arrive at a complete misjudgement of the number of employees at the company. Once you’ve been to a competition, you quickly understand why. In the case of a competition, each individual employee can work for three. That quickly turns around 90 architects into 270!
The fascination of competitions is difficult for outsiders to grasp. If I tell the family that I’ve worked through the last 30 hours, my credibility is easily called into question. But if I then claim that I had fun doing it, I am declared crazy without any ifs or buts. If I tell the same story to my fellow students, nobody is surprised, quite the opposite: the longing looks from my friends tell me that I am apparently not crazy at all, at least not among my peers.
My last competition was for the design of a large school complex, where the task was to completely reinvent the concept of school. We worked in a team of two architects, three interns and the project manager. Everyone had their own area of responsibility; for example, I built the 3D model for the model maker and the render team. As the school complex was so large and was also to take on public functions, we mainly planned on an urban scale. Like most MVRDV projects, and of course especially because it was an educational building, our design was brightly colored and a little crazy. So colorful that I can’t think of any of my former professors who would have let me get away with it in an exam. But which professor would have shouted “hooray” at a student like Frank O’Gehry or Zaha Hadid?
During the competition, there is a complete shift in priorities. Where sleeping, eating and having children used to determine the rhythm of people’s lives, life in the competition consists of floor plans, diagrams and renderings. For such a short period as the two weeks in which we worked together on the project, we grew surprisingly close as a team. The design process is so intensive that you can only survive it without damage if you have the right support. In contrast to the group work I know from university life, everyone really has to pull together in everyday office life because the pressure is so much higher. In addition, the basic requirements for everyone at MVRDV are the same, namely that you have to be fully committed to architecture. The same demands would be difficult to enforce in university life and would probably do more harm than good here. After all, it is only by attending concerts that you learn what concert halls should look like and by shopping extensively that you learn how shopping centers work best.
The Baumeister Academy is supported by Graphisoft and BAU 2017
