Critique of the Architectural Competition Stimulated by Graphic Expression: Semiotic Convergences in the Rhetoric of Judgment Process

Abstract

The verb gráphein in the Greek language means to draw and to write simultaneously; its action mixes the synthetic nature of the line with the analytical nature of the word. This paper deals with a study on the instrumentalisation of graphic expression within the comparative analysis applied to the critical discourse of the architectural ideas competition. The study is founded on an exceptional and heterogeneous material: the graphic documentation included in critical editorials across various competitions whose results were published in specialised architectural media journals. These publications present a singular semiotic convergence between drawing and writing, which, once dissected, allows us to establish a categorisation of their rhetoric in relation to the modern systematic criticism—descriptive, analytical, interpretative and poetic—and the graphic vehicles employed for their explanation—sketch, croquis or design development drawing, scheme and diagram. This classification reveals the ways in which drawing can lead to thought, reflection and criticism around a set of projects, and unveils the intellectual value of analogical process documents that have been fossilised in the media terrain of the digital present.

1 Introduction: Competitions and Investigation

From the Age of Enlightenment to the current digital revolution, architectural practices and places have mutated their epistemological support. All of them initially described in terms borrowed from the academic world—creation, study, work—are increasingly referred to in scientific terms—experimentation, laboratory, research. The eternal dilemma of whether architecture is an art, or a science seems to give greater weight to the latter proposition.

In relation to the architectural competition, it is possible to establish a parallelism between the development of any call for proposals and the phases of scientific activity. This comparison makes it possible to detect the existence of coinciding stages: observation (approach), hypothesis (brief), experimentation (entries), conclusions (judgment process) and dissemination (publication). Following this argument, if the consultations are assimilated as scientific acts, the dissemination of their results can be presented in two ways: as applied research under the basis of the built object, or from the conception of the competition as pure research in which the protagonism lies in the comparative analysis of the projects presented.

In the latter case, the jury’s decision and the results of the competition are received by critics and readers through the media in the form of articles. Although these participants—critics and readers—intervene once the competition is adjudicated, they represent the public’s judgment, which is very important insofar as it can influence the course of future competition and commissions. Therefore, the publication of the results of an ideas competition is conducive to social debate and presents a great reflective potential for the discipline.

During the twentieth century architectural competitions were popularised, and converted into major global architectural events with great repercussion. Each competition established under its brief conditions of entry, certain specific requirements for the presentation and representation of the ideas, which makes each one of these competitions unique, as their requirements are not taken directly from a standardised set of rules [1]. The designs, judgments process and criticism of competitions published in specialised journals have had a clear influence on the evolution of architecture and the evolution of its graphic expression.

This diffusion has also been fundamental to the architect’s autonomy in the professional sphere; as Hélène Lipstadt argues in sociological terms, architectural ideas competitions constitute a specialised area of cultural production [2]. Indeed, in contrast to the field of large-scale architectural production resulting from mere competitive bidding and the inherent laws of economic competition, the field of architectural production in the architectural ideas competition tends to develop its particular criteria for the evaluation, criticism and cultural recognition of its very own output repertoire.

This dialectical condition, implicit in the whole process of a competition, has also been evidenced by Elisabeth Tostrup, whose thesis argues that all the rhetoric associated with a competition expresses the hegemonic architectural values in a precise moment in time. Thus, each proposal submitted tries to communicate its arguments within a cultural field according to a logic of persuasion: in architectural competitions, as in classical rhetoric, the speaker must inform (logos), delight (ethos) and appeal to the emotions (pathos), in order to obtain the adhesion of the audience, i.e., jurors, critics and the general public [3].

2 Objective: Criticism Through Graphic Expression

This paper focuses on a specific part of the rhetoric of the competition in order to relate it to the systematic architectural criticism developed by project Professor Antonio Miranda Regojo-Borges [4], whose is related to that established by the linguist Tzvetan Todorov for literary works. Indeed, the different modi operandi that structure this method—descriptive, analytical, interpretative and poetic—can be traced both in the urgent critiques of the judgment issued by adjudicators, and in the meta-critiques of the editorials published in relation to a competition.

The jury´s judgment is a creative process that evolves as the members gradually increase their understanding of the entries through their continued internal discussions [5]. The members of the jury make a collective decision and choose a winning project, but there are many factors involved in this evaluation process. Some of these criteria are formal, and are imposed by external determinants included in the briefs; others are informal and depend on the subjectivity of each jury member. The backgrounds of the jurors and their interests lead to different points of views in the assessment process.

The winner is selected in a very intricate procedure that must include choice, evaluation, ranking, negotiation and consensus [6]. Consequently, any competition decision involves a great complexity that is difficult to explain and analyse [7]. For this reason, in most cases the final conclusions of an adjudication are usually justified quantitatively on the basis of scores that merely translate more complex discussion processes numerically. However, paradigmatic critiques can also be found in which such reasoning has been attempted to be transmitted not only through writing, but also through drawing. In these particular cases, the analytical nature of the word is mixed with the synthetic nature of the line, and their convergence constitutes a black box to be interrogated.

This complicity between both semiotic sensibilities broadens the concept of the graphic as a transcription tool to the point that the drawing can be regulated as an open system script in which its graphics speak, even if there is no common language to establish the intersubjective of its signs [8]. In Greek, the verb gráphein means to write and draw at the same time; perhaps the irreducible difficulty of language to translate ideas is the reason why writing enters into drawing or, on the contrary, it is the attempt to break its silence that makes so many drawings embrace writing [9].

Although architectural criticism of the ideas of a competition has been hegemonically associated with the written word, it can also be found in the drawn line. Until the mid-twentieth century, architectural drawing was mainly related to constructive representation; however, from the 1960s onwards it began to adopt a more communicative character, capable of turning it into an instrument of criticism at the service of the discipline [10]. This use of architectural drawing as a means of analysis, is perhaps one of its most specific features: it turns architecture’s own instrument of production, documentation and expression, into a research tool [11].

This brief thesis explores the instrumental role that graphic expression can play in the criticism applied to a contest. The corpus of study is made up of the documentation provided in judgment and editorials in relation to different competitions published in specialised media during the second half of the twentieth century. It is a heteroclite material whose selection is conditioned by the exceptionality of its own existence. They are records of a critical process—often handwritten—that do not usually transcend to the media and that, nevertheless, constitute a valuable document for the study of the projects presented for each of the published competitions referenced here.

3 Discussion: The Graphic Rhetoric of the Judgment Process

The selection of a proposal by a jury is always based on critical comparison with others, so the role of the non-awarded proposals is equally relevant insofar as they set the selection criteria. In turn, the dissemination of the results in architectural editorials presents a re-reading of the entire previous process and can offer a meta-criticism of the same. The specialised media preserve the architectural competition as official events in the records of the profession, and the priorities of each editor determine the final reception of the contest material.

In both cases—criticism and meta-criticism—, comparison is used as a logical operation, and implies a minimal mental equation based on analytical relationships between the different objects of knowledge: the projects. This comparative perspective is used in other disciplines besides architecture, and requires a certain systematisation through which to define the variables susceptible to critical contrast.

Within the instruments of the comparative method, systematic drawing can be traced back centuries, and has its origins within the anatomical research initiated in conjunction with illustrated collecting. In these studies, graphic expression became a key operational tool in the transcription of both the investigators and the differences to be compared between the multiple samples selected.

In an environment as complex as that of an call for proposals in which hundreds of designs may be submitted, the discussion process implies the choice of a series of objectifiable partial concepts that allow for the elaboration of more abstract graphic materials, in which certain features can be distinguished, according to the notional priority.

This dichotomy between permanence and change, implicit in all comparative registers, implies an exercise of critical synthesis that evolves from description, through analysis, and interpretation, to poetics.

This comparative criticism acts on the different design plans of each architectural project presented in the competition process. Depending on the stage in which the systematic criticism is found—descriptive, analytical, interpretative and poetic—, it is possible to detect a correspondence with the use of a certain graphic technique in its rhetoric: sketch, croquis or design development drawing, scheme and diagram.

3.1 Description and Descriptive Criticism: The Sketch

Descriptive criticism does not look for meaning, sense nor internal disciplines of the concept, it only studies the parts of a design, but not the relationships between them. Description itself does not explain, but tries to describe as objectively as possible. It only focuses on one drawing of the project in isolation and without any relationship between the rest: elevation by elevation; floor by floor; section by section.

This type of elementary approach can be expressed graphically through the sketch: a freehand drawing that is merely descriptive and without codification in its outline. In addition, when the descriptive critique is comparative, the similarities and differences between the different projects presented are established. With the use of the sketch, the same aspect of each design is described and all are presented simultaneously for evaluation.

An illustrative case is the 1958 competition for the Memorial of Qaide-Azam Mohameed Ali Jinnah in Karachi published in the journal L´Architecture d´aujourd´hui [12]. During the deliberations, one of the members of the jury made a descriptive critique using sketches illustrating the main elevation of each proposal. (Fig. 1). This confrontation exposed the iconic possibilities of the designs. The graphic design of the sketch operated by reducing the concepts to be presented with the intention of improving the descriptive control of one of the parts of each proposal.

Fig. 1.

Matthew, R., comparative descriptive sketches of the proposals for the competition of the Memorial of Qaide-Azam Mohameed Ali Jinnah, Karachi, Pakistan, 1958 [12].

3.2 Relational Analysis and Critique: The Croquis

When to the elementary graphic description of each project is added a study of the relationship between its parts, the comparison between proposals goes beyond the search for similarities or differences, and implies a relational analysis. This discussion can be carried out by means of analytical croquis (or design development drawing) based on design plans of the same type in pairs or groups: floor plans with respect to each other; elevations with respect to each other; sections with respect to each other.

The croquis is a freehand drawing, although much more detailed than a concept sketch because it contains more precise dimensional information, and its outline presents a codification that evidences the elements to be related. The croquis lack an exact definition, but their expression concentrates a great conceptual load. They study not only the elements of the proposal, but also the structures that organise them. By applying a shared analytical critique, the proposals are presented together, and their croquis use the same graphic coding to contrast the same parameters in the different solutions.

The 1995 competition for the rehabilitation of the center of culture and arts of Madrid in the former brewery El Águila, published in the journal Arquitectos: revista del Consejo Superior de Colegios de Arquitectos de España, demonstrates this point [13]. On this occasion, the jury carried out a preliminary analysis using a croquis showing the floor plans of each project in which the new and existing buildings were superimposed (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Vallhonrat, C., Aguilera, J., comparative analytical croquis of the proposals for the brewery renovation competition El Águila, Madrid, 1995 [13].

These croquis did not go into considerations of iconicity or architectural quality, but allowed the jury to discuss and make their decisions with as much data as possible regarding the evaluation criteria set out in the competition brief. Since the brief called for the rehabilitation of an industrial heritage, these questions were mainly concerned with the elements of the factory that were to remain after the intervention and their relationship with the new ones.

3.3 Interpretation and Interpretive Critique: The Scheme

The analytical croquis seen in the previous section can be expanded to include an interpretation of the meaning of the project in order to understand its systematics. Each competition invitation has its own suitable interpretation, whether in a professional, disciplinary or intentional capacity. The interpretative critique looks for inconsistencies and/or agreements between different drawings submitted: elevation and floor plan; floor plan and section; elevation and section.

This approach can be done through a schematic drawing that represents more than one part of the proposal. In turn, the comparison of these schematic drawings allows an interpretative critique of all the designs together.

As an example, the study of the successive competitions for La Grande Arche de La Défense published in L´Architecture d´aujourd´hui provides a critique of the unsuccessful 1978 consultation [14]. Given the iconic and urban character of this project, the jury chose to use interpretative schemes that primarily related the elevation to the floor plan of each design. These schemes were used to approach a disciplinary interpretation of the visual effect of the different buildings in the city, as well as the public space they configured.

The interpretative critique was also applied in a comparative manner, establishing relationships between the schemes of each proposal (Fig. 3). This matrix of schemes was the only material that transcended the specialised media of this particular consultation, which demonstrates its capacity for synthesis.

Fig. 3.

Chaslin, F., comparative interpretative outlines of proposals for the competition-consultation Tête Défense, Paris, 1978 [14].

3.4 Poetics and Poetic Criticism: The Diagram

Finally, beyond the objective description of the architectural project and its analysis, when the search for meaning with interpretative schemes transcends to a discovery of the level of truth, poetic criticism is reached. This type of critical thinking looks for inconsistencies and/or agreements in the totality of the plans of the project: between all the elevations, floor plans and sections simultaneously. This poetic criticism can be expressed graphically through the conceptual mechanism of the diagram, since it allows the discovery of the general laws through the comparison of its abstract structures, that is to say, it manages to reveal its architecture.

A paradigmatic case is the international competition for the Elviria residential area in Marbella in 1961, published in the journal Arquitectura: revista del Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid (COAM) [15]. In this case it was the authors of the editorial who addressed a meta-critique of the results of the competition. This was expressed graphically through a series of holistic diagrams with a complex graphic coding: vectors, lines, zones, groupings, nodes, flows, ecological and topographical layers of the landscape, etc. (Fig. 4).

The drawings constituted an integral or poetic synthesis of each project. Undoubtedly, the polysemic character of these diagrams allowed their authors to capture the intuitions and intentions of each proposal, and to enhance the comparative study of very diverse aspects between them.

Fig. 4.

Arias, P., Reyero, J. A., selection of comparative holistic diagrams of the proposals for residential area Elviria, Marbella, 1961 [15].

4 Conclusions

The study of the examples provided in this text allows us to establish a possible relationship between the graphic rhetoric of the competition’s judgment and the stages of systematic criticism. The stages of this critical order—descriptive, analytical, interpretative and poetic—are contained in a progressive manner, as are the techniques used for their graphic communication—sketch, croquis or design development drawing, scheme and diagram.

As we have seen, the study of the drawings of each proposal is an essential part of systematic criticism. In this sense, it is pertinent to remember that the design plans are the technical disassembly destined to achieve the communication of the project as a representation of the potential architectural work. Their study is a rigorously necessary step in the pressing critiques of competition juries and architectural editorials that do not wish to fall into the error of superficial frivolity.

This approach to the ways in which drawing leads the reflection around a set of projects shows the potential of graphic expression as a critical tool. Its main contribution is the vindication of the intellectual value of this analogical material of process that has been fossilised in the media terrain of the digital present, where the immediacy of communication and the volume of information, hinder the existence of more reflective links between critical discourse and the practice of design.