Niall McLaughlin: Design competitions and awards put 'extraordinary pressure' on architects
– Niall McLaughlin
Acclaimed Irish architect Niall McLaughlin has claimed that award wins and nominations can be a poisoned chalice, as practices become pigeonholed as designers of a certain type of building.
Speaking at the 2017 Ecobuild conference in London, McLaughlin said the influence of award shortlists and the “conservative stance in architectural procurement” means that “everybody wants something like you’ve done before.”
The practice he leads, Niall McLaughlin Architects, have twice been nominated for the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the Stirling Prize.
“For the three years after we were first shortlisted for the first time [for Oxford’s Bishop Edward King Chapel in 2013] we were approached constantly by cultural institutions and Oxford and Cambridge colleges wanting music performance spaces, museum spaces and cultural spaces,” he said.
“After a couple of years the echo started to die away and the approaches become less frequent. But then we were shortlisted again, in 2015, for a piece of low cost housing in London and suddenly we were being approached by lots of developers wanting low-cost housing.
“So I’m interested, for architects, in the way in which the system of awards and competitions is a generator of the kind of work you do.”
He said this cycle creates “a danger that your work gets cornered in one area and that you end up doing too much of the same thing, which goes against the idea of innovation and of being given new new problems to solve.”
Speaking more broadly about the impact of being shortlisted for awards, McLaughlin revealed that “85 per cent of all the work we do comes from design competitions, and we get shortlisted for those competitions by winning awards.”
“We produce work that gets consumed through the awards system and approved of, and that approval gets converted into approaches for more work, closing the loop,” he added.
Despite the benefits of this cycle, he said “the idea that buildings are always being offered up in a competitive system is something I find, to put it bluntly, very tiring,” adding that “it “puts an extraordinary pressure on architectural practices”.
Explaining how he has ensured he has a diverse portfolio of work, McLaughlin said: “You need to find ways of reviving your own practice by pushing yourself out into areas that are different from what you have been doing before.”
The architect was speaking as part of a Q&A session hosted by BBC Arts editor Will Gompertz, in which he also discussed his views on modernism, materials and metropolitan planning.
Last year he was awarded the annual RIBA Charles Jencks Award, which celebrates individuals who have made a major contribution internationally to the theory and practice of architecture. His studio's next high-profile project is an extension to London's National History Museum.
Ecobuild is one of the world’s biggest trade events for sustainable design, construction and the built environment.
This is not the first time in recent months that design competitions have come in for criticism. Wolf Prix, the design principal of Austrian architecture studio Coop Himmelb(l)au, argued last year that they “diminish the value of our thinking”.
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