Architectural competitions as discursive events

MAGALI SARFATTI LARSON

Temple University

During the 1970s and 1980s, the number of persons who reported
their occupation as architects grew at an impressive rate in the United
States; the number of design competitions paralleled this rapid
growth. At first glance, the volume of construction appears to be a
common underlying link between the two developments. In particular
areas, the number of architectural firms, and therefore of archi-
tects in their employ, is closely related to the volume of construction;
more construction projects also imply a greater possibility that some of
them will be commissioned by competition. 1 However, design competi-
tions will continue attracting architects even in recessionary times, if
their professional ambition and their numbers push them into this
chancy and onerous method of looking for work. The relationship
therefore depends at least partially on something other than the econo-
my.

Indeed, on the one hand, the Design Arts Program of the National
Endowment of the Arts became active in promoting architectural com-
petitions during the 1970s, believing that the open selection of archi-
tects and designs gives the public and the press a better chance to
defend the built and unbuilt environment. The NEA started granting
subsidies (competitively) to non-profit sponsors, and obligating them
to respect NEA rules, especially that of hiring a professional adviser to
organize and oversee the contest; state Arts Councils and other public-
interest groups followed NEA's policy. On the other hand, in the 1970s,
postmodern eclecticism triumphed over the unitary language of cor-
porate modernism (symbolized by the ubiquituous "glass box") in
American architecture. Thus, during the commercial building boom
that started after the recession of 1973-76, competitions became a
favorite way for developers to sample styles and select an architect.
Developers' competitions, as we shall see, thrive on publicity. Publicity

Theory andSociety 23: 4 6 9 - 5 0 4 , 1994.

© 1994 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
470

is the lifeblood of the symbiotic relationship between developers and

glamorous "signature architects," as well as a cause of concern for pro-
fessional architects and their main organization, the American Institute
of Architects (A/A).

For Robert Gutman, the premier sociologist of architectural practice,

"the basic intention of the design competition method ... is to bring
architectural markets closer to the condition that economic theory calls
'perfect competition: ''2 It would be tempting to assume that selection
by open competition simply arose as a response to the competitive
pressure of growing professional numbers, were it not that the method
fails to produce anything resembling "perfect competition": Gutman
himself estimates that no more than one 1 or 2 percent of the 13,000 or
so architectural firms that practice in the United States enter national
competitions in a typical year.

This small percentage mirrors the lopsided bifurcation of architecture

between a minority of firms known for design excellence and the
majority, oriented to more mundane forms of service. But even the par-
ticipation of the minority is sharply divided between limited (or in-
vited) and open competitions. Either type can admit further rules,
depending on the intentions of the sponsors (sub-types include two-
stage, "on site," design-build, or turn-key competitions, in which the
winning team, organized by the developer, carries the building to com-
pletion). 3 Nevertheless, the major bifurcation in architectural competi-
tion, a bifurcation that reproduces structural divisions of the architec-
tural market, is that determined by the basic rules of entry. The clients
who sponsor competitions favor the limited type, to which they invite
few proven firms with a strong track record. These, indeed, are the
firms that get big and expensive projects. Obviously, young or untried
architects support open contests, which often ask only a design concept
and a few boards. However, in a period when real-estate clients started
looking for new ideas to make their projects look different, the design-
build competition allowed avant-garde architects and "idea firms" to
enter invited competitions by pooling their forces with established
developers and construction firms.4

With its ritual aspects and its accompaniment of mythical beliefs, it is

the open architectural competition that best illustrates the idiosyn-
crasies of architecture as a profession. My analysis of the competition
method and its place in the profession of architecture deals with both
open and invited competitions. The first type, however, because it is
 471

open to all architects with time and ambition, is more likely to reflect
the diversity of the field and the jury's reading of emergent architectural
trends. Indeed, the belief that anonymous contests can reveal and
crown superior talent more effectively than the market and more equi-
tably than the profession's hierarchy attaches itself only to widely open
competitions. Because of its particularities, the open design competi-
tion sheds new light on the combination of market imperatives and
non-market aspirations, of economic weakness and ideological
strength, of dependency and autonomy, which characterizes many pro-
fessional practices.

Architectural contests may be a corrective for the market or rather, as I

suggest, a mirror of its polarities, but competitions certainly appear
to contradict the established hierarchies of prestige on which profes-
sionals found their expertise. 5 No institution would go find a physician
or a scientist by a method that risks to subvert (or at least to ignore) a
scientific community's consensual ranking of experience and achieve-
ment. Yet both the clients who sponsor competitions and the architects
who enter them affect to believe that open and anonymous contests can
"discover" talents heretofore ignored by the profession's official judg-
ment. To self-confident designers, the open competition may seem a
launching-pad for their career or an interesting gamble (even though,
as one experienced architect says, "Your odds are better in Atlantic
City than at landing a job by competition!"6). In any case, belief in the
subversive potential of either true merit or sheer luck implies another
belief: If open and anonymous contest can rank talent differently (and
possibly better) than the established profession, competition may well
entice original departures from the accepted canon of architecture, on
which rankings ultimately depend.

One historian argues that these unproven and unspoken beliefs keep
young architects flocking to competitions (and architectural historians
paying them attention). 7 The notion seems to be, in summary, that
opening design opportunities to new people must induce more innova-
tion and originality than what can be expected from established de-
signers. However ideological, the notion is clearly "anti-professional." It
comes as no surprise, therefore, that the American Institute of Archi-
tects should have tried since the last century to reaffirm professional
control on the competition process. Because the composition of the
jury plays a determinant role in the contest's outcome, the AIA's code
of ethics demands that registered architects be a majority on any jury,
and it proscribes participation by- members in competitions that do not
follow its guidelines.8
472

The professional society may well be relatively ineffectual, but we know

that collective decisions, as a rule, involve compromise and tend
toward safety. Competitions whose results represent "a watershed
between old and new" are therefore less common than those with an
architecturally "safe" first prize and avant-garde runners-up. 9 The his-
torical record indicates that the "anti-establishment" potential of com-
petitions is more ideology than fact. Moreover, professional and com-
monsense objections emphasize that all competitions are very costly
processes: the participants are never fully compensated for their expen-
diture of time, effort, and materials, even if they win.

I argue in the first section of this article that the method of architect
selection by contest rests on the bourgeois ideology of art. This specific
ideology also supports the market for architectural services and the cal-
culated use of competitions by business sponsors. Viewed from this
angle, architectural competition clouds the line between "art" and
"commerce," contributing to the "denial of economics" characteristic of
markets where symbolic values are bought and sold. 1° The traditional
identity and the traditional legitimations of the architectural profession
also appeal to the ideology of art. n This ideology makes significant
architectural competitions into events in architectural circles: built or
unbuilt, the projects ranked in an important competition are published,
diffused, examined, discussed, and entered as credits in their authors'
r6sum6s.

Important competitions are important, first of all, by the nature of the

project; but they are also important for the cognoscenti (which includes
the sponsors or their representatives), because their outcomes can
change the position of the players in the specialized field of architec-
ture. 12 Here, I consider as "discourse" all the statements that a par-
ficular category of agents issue in a specific capacity and in a definable
thematic area. The entries in a design competition (and not only what is
written or said about them) are such statements. In architecture as in all
professions, discourse is open only to those who know "how to speak."
Insofar as open competitions allow specialized, yet still unknown
"voices" to enter the field of discourse, they can authorize new players
to speak about and for architecture. Architectural competitions are dis-
cursive events because they have the potential of changing (more in-
directly than directly) authorized notions of what architecture /s, for
those who listen to the specialized discourse of architecture.
 473

In competitions that matter as discursive events, architects gamble to

accumulate what Pierre Bourdieu aptly calls symbolic capital: the right
to speak with authority in a delimited field, wherein that symbolic capi-
tal is created and reinvested according to field-specific rifles. 13 In the
symbolic domain of discourse, the odds of winning are much better
than those of landing a real commission. Overall, the potentially sub-
versive effects of any particular contest, as well as its effects on the win-
ners' careers, are always mediated by the authorized and authoritative
discourse of the architectural profession.

It follows from these premises that when discourse is divided - har-

boring, that is, a multiplicity of paradigms, none of which can evoke
sufficient consensus to serve as a basis of unification - the odds of
accumulating symbolic capital in at least o n e of the paradigmatic fields
are even better. The reasons are clear: First, in a discursive field, the
competitions that appear to reward innovation are logically more likely
to change the position of the winners than are contests that reward
established designers and consecrated design values. Second, competi-
tions that reward innovative departures from the canon are more likely
to fred at least s o m e sponsors in a field divided by paradigmatic
struggles than in a field cemented by orthodoxy. Indeed, in competi-
tions that qualify as discursive events, the jury m u s t include architects
and cognoscenti. The judgment of the specialists cannot harden in a
field that admits many kinds of "good design;' and in which standards
are too fluid to be perfected. Heterodoxy should therefore augment the
chances of new architects, whose design resolutions are less likely to
have been polished by accumulated experience than those of estab-
fished architects with proven "track records,"

The second and third parts of this article explore the "innovation
effect" and the "career effect" of competitions through two detailed
case studies. The protagonists are Robert Ventufi mad Michael Graves,
two architects famous for their role in the post-modern shift of Ameri-
can architecture. Venturi won the competition for the Yale Mathema-
tics Building, which was never built, in 1970. Graves won at Portland in
1979, and his project was built. The decade is significant.

By 1970, many sorts of personal interpretations of site and program

contended for originality on the architectural scene, coexisting with
whatever had become of the modernist functionalist pretense. The dis-
tinguished architect Charles Moore, chairman of the Yale Department
of Architecture and organizer of the 1970 contest, replied to the con-
474

troversy kindled by Venturi's design by describing the three predomi-

nant styles in the country: One often identified with Chicago and still
based on the architecture of Mies van der Rohe; another, which was
"an academicized and sometimes technicized extension of Le Cor-
busier, convincingly advocated by Colin Rowe (and these days the most
frequent competition winner);" and the style identified "with Philadel-
phia and based on the insights of Louis Kahn ... now much in evidence
at the Yale School of Architecture."14 We could say without being too
pompous that in 1970 some of the main protagonists perceived the
situation of their field as one of "paradigmatic breakdown." But let us
first examine how competitions become discursive events.

Architectural contests and the ideology of art

The most prestigious, important, and publicized competitions are

international, following in this the tradition of Western architecture
since the Renaissance. Study competitions are open only to a specific
category of architects: like their French model (the Prix de Rome,
established in the early nineteenth century) they are held for students
or recent graduates; while study competitions are not distinctive of
architecture, the ideology of art surfaces in the prize: Not a building,
but a period of study in a world art city, which reinforces the ideologi-
cal vision of architecture as the expression of a timeless, continuous,
and universal culture.

All contests have in common an obvious trait: They are all competitive.
They are not intended only to explore an idea but to find a winner. 15
Even in closed competitions the contestants know that they will be
judged against one another and who the others are. It is true that when
an architectural firm, its whole body of work and its management are
considered, not much in this pattern differs from the usual assignment
of architectural commissions to noted architects, except that the com-
petitors submit their work to a jury whose composition is known.
However, when designs only are judged, the jurors' evaluation is sup-
posed to rest on the project at hand, in either open or closed competi-
tions. This trait of competitions harks back to the essence of architec-
tural work.

Architects' expertise, as that of all designers of physical objects, is

embodied in a tangible product, which can be prefigured by drawings,
plans, and three-dimensional models. The assumption that drawings
 475

and models are sufficient to predict the final result is the core of the
architects' specific competence and a premise in the comparative judg-
ment of their ability. This traditional understanding of design allows
architects to present prospective results in a form more concrete than
just reputation, yet separate from prior accomplishments.

The architectural competition uses self-standing designs either to dis-

cover unrecognized talent or to rouse known contestants to "give their
best" in one shot. Thus, it is not the competitive principle that makes
these contests a singular mode of expert selection. Rather, their par-
ticularity resides in that they require an effort to express one's ability in
only one product, for the burdens of which production there can be no
adequate reward except victory.

Competitions based on design assert the latter's crucial place in the

profession's identity, reinforcing the concentration on isolated objects
characteristic of architectural culture and discourse. The reliance on
design also connotes a symbolic reference to the glorious past of archi-
tecture. The reinvention of design competitions in the Renaissance was
a sign of this ascension. 16 The deliberations of the building committee
were a subtle signal that "even with their superior power and knowl-
edge the rulers of the polity could not directly and immediately discern
the most excellent individual." 17 The elaborate process by which com-
petition recognized the contributions of artistic talent to collective life
affirmed the special value of art.

For the competitors, today's contests still mix irrational beliefs and ele-
ments of ritual with rational calculation, such as gaining experience
where one may not have it; making one's name or, in any case, one's
ideas known to the jurors, even if one does not win; having a serious
project to include in a curriculum vitae; becoming visible through the
publicity and the display of works. Yet competitions clearly represent
for the hopeful contestants the possibility that the best person may win,
at least for this once; what happens after that is another story.

As Helene Lipstadt observes, the myth and the hopes surrounding the
architectural competition remind one of the carnivalesque rituals, in
which hierarchies were symbolically inversed but not denied, putting
women, the poor, the wretched, for one day on top. 18 An obscure assis-
tant professor, an unknown draftman, a beginning architect can beat
the elite professional and the student can come ahead of her teacher, as
happened to Maya Ying Lin in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial com-
476

petition, which is for that reason an exemplar in our time. The fact that
experienced jurors - even more than the unexperienced or lay persons
are able to recognize an architect's style and manner is known by all,
but it is temporarily overlooked to permit participation in the ritual.

The institutionalization of selection by contest in both architectural

education and practice fosters a marked enjoyment of contests and a
spirit of emulation in the profession. Architects enjoy the stimulus of a
ready-made problem, the discovery of others' ideas and the critique
they receiveJ 9 The reference to carnivalesque rituals suggests some-
thing more. Just like the escolas de samba of the poorest Rio de Janeiro
neighborhoods throw everything they have and do not have into the
magnificent costumes of one day of Carnaval, the architectural compe-
tition is valued for the occasion it provides to expend and demonstrate
creative energy, as much as for the lucky break, or the accumulation of
symbolic capital it seems to promise.

Taking creative work for its own reward emphasizes the status of archi-
tecture as an art. Art and aesthetics, in our society, are constructed as
essentially non-utilitarian: Businessmen and professionals do not give
their work "away for nothing; but artists can be expected to. It is again
not surprising that the AIA (which has acted since its foundation as the
guardian of the jurisdictional interests and economic health of the pro-
fession) should have opposed competitions without ever advocating
their complete eradication. For indeed, if the judgment of expert pro-
fessional juries can be substituted for that of the market, competitions
then reinforce rather than subvert professional control. 2°

Despite the real ways in which professional hierarchies are silently con-
firmed, the founding myth of the open, two-stage competition, signaled
by its very openness, is that artistic talent can be found anywhere,
among the humblest members of a profession as much as among its
elites. There are hints of this romantic and peculiarly Western ideology,
which allocates a transcendent status to art by allocating the gift of
genius to artists, in yet another aspect of design competitions. Work
done for a client entails adjustments, constraints, compromises, and
also improvements generated in interaction with the client's budget,
needs, and desires. The open competition is not similarly rooted in the
concreteness of commissioned design. Although the client seldom is
totally excluded from the jury, he is not assiduously and regularly in-
volved in the design. The client's absence is often compounded by the
reticence to discuss budgetary matters.
 477

Once again, only the notion of architecture as art can explain the mis-
leading belief that artists give their best when they create in 'greedom,"
for one crucial competitive display. This is not, of course, freedom from
mundane economic preoccupations but freedom from the utilitarian
constraints that come, presumably, with the client's active intervention.
The romantic ideology expects the best art to spring free of material
constraints, in the absence of strict programmatic or budgetary con-
siderations, with the artist-architect confronting the telos of architec-
ture alone.

Competitions appear thus, even today, as practices that de W the

rational calculation and economy of effort demanded by the market.
They carry residual traces of the ideology of art and also of the patron-
age relations that have always given an imperfect market existence to
architecture, the products of which must be sponsored and cannot be
directly sold. Thus, even though competitions can reinforce the anti-
market organization of professional work, they tacitly identify this pro-
fession with the (often unaffordable) luxury of art. It is representative of
the architect's situation in modern society that he or she can still be
expected to lavish time and energy without adequate compensation. In
denying the market, competitions denote the market weaknesses of this
profession. The scarcity of commissions, the intrinsic competitiveness
and the non-utilitarian attitudes many architects derive from the pro-
fession's artistic identity create a situation rife with potential for exploi-
tation. According to famous architects, the business-sponsored com-
petitions to which they are invited thrive on this potential.

Michael Graves says: "They know many of us go after the same jobs
and so the competition is high. Although now, unlike the fifties and six-
ties, many of us like each other and although we are competitive, at the
same time we know.., there's going to be the right mixture and you'll
get the one that's really meant for you. But that's only true, I suppose, if
you have enough work. If you don't.., every one becomes crucial ....
We let the world know that we all need and want to work and that
makes us vulnerable to anybody who wants to use us.''21

The vocal criticism of Eugene Kohn, founding partner of the successful

firm Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York, at the same time reveals the tacit
compact between the promoters and the established prestige rankings:
"Even if they are holding a good competition.., they keep wanting
more and more information, you tend to keep doing more and more
and you spend more and more and if you don't win, you don't get any-
478

thing back .... Why do we all do it? Because a lot of good firms do it ....
You might do it for fear of offending a good client, an important
client ... and fear of exclusion, fear that the other big names do it and
you don't .... Somebody says we pick the five top design firms in Amer-
ica or internationally, to be in competition. They ask you, you turn it
down, they get another one. Then your name never appears in the top
five." 22

The structure of design competitions implies that the architect can

express his or her singular vision in abstract conditions of creation. Yet
established professional wisdom that "good architecture evolves from a
tussle between program, client and architect" contradicts it. 23 The
sponsors undoubtedly take advantage of the weak market power of the
architectural profession, but do they expect that the competitive situa-
tion will spur the architects to give their best? My argument is that the
clearest value of competition to the sponsors lies in the myths, based in
the ideology of art, which surround the whole process.

The special mechanism of selection is there to underscore the impor-

tance of the project about to be undertaken. The competition in itself
helps turn the desired building into a monument before the fact: Publi-
city and public-ness, the fact of being public, become an integral part of
the project's extraordinary symbolic essence. Competitions must be
publicized, first of all, to attract enough participants, whose number
shall justify the meritocratic claim as much as the expense. Second,
they must be publicized to affirm the sponsor's intention of giving un-
usual dignity and importance to their project. Publicity is what allows
sponsors to benefit from the tacit "reputafional blackmail" that Eugene
Kohn described; beyond that, summoning talent and creative freedom,
exalted by fair rivalry, to the birth of a building allows the sponsors to
drape themselves in the noble mantle of "patrons of architecture."
Finally, the publicity given to the contest is likely to alert the critics to
the fact that here is a project of more than usual importance. Obviously,
this is also what entices the competitors and helps make the competi-
tion into a discursive event.

The public character of competitions is not the same as the constitutive

public-ness of architecture, but the two draw upon each other, competi-
tions reinforcing the symbolic importance of buildings for collective
fife, and architecture justifying by its public mission the symbolic
mechanism of competition. 24 This complex of intertwined motives
attracts both sponsors and competitors. Even controversy, for the
 479

sponsors, is part of the publicity they are looking for but architects also
welcome it, as long as it does not prevent the building from being built.
As Michael Graves says in a filmed interview in front of his Portland
building, controversy means that "everyone is talking about architec-
ture ... and that's great!"

In summary, the general characteristics of architectural competitions

are rooted in the specific nature of the architectural object as an essen-
tially public good that can be prefigured by drawings. The legitimation
and the operation of competitions draws, however tacitly, on our social
beliefs about art, artists, and creativity. Because architectural monu-
ments are visible, interesting to the public, and classified as "art," de-
sign competitions both need and generate publicity. Publicity is the
source of the most significant benefits that sponsors and participants
expect: symbolic capital (more than eventual commissions) for the
architects and an occasion for asserting the public value of their profes-
sion; for the sponsors, eventual trade-offs between aesthetics and
public regulations, and the less tangible benefits of dignity and social
acceptance. The cases to which I now turn illustrate the importance of
special networks in supporting innovation and the differential effects of
building and discourse on architectural careers.

The Yale Mathematics Building competition (1970)

In 1970, anyone who had followed recent events at Yale's architecture

school would have known that the jury for the Mathematics Building
competition meant what the program said. Charles Moore, respected
educator and iconoclastic architect, had come from Berkeley to take
the chairmanship of architecture in 1965. He believed already in what
he was to announce in the Mathematics competition preface five years
later:

Yale, proud as it is of its modem monuments, now finds itself looking again
toward the integration of new buildings into the strong existing fabric and to
the provision of workable, economically, generally nonmonumental space for
the conduct of its teaching and its research, as

Yale in the 1950s and 1960s had acquired "enough free-standing new
monuments to be called the greatest open-air museum of modern
architecture on the continent;' as Charles Moore wrote. In a much less
complimentary vein, the architectural historian Colin Rowe called Yale
"not so much a museum as a version of Mine. Tussaud's, a waxworks
480

exhibition displaying important simulacra of the good...." In intro-

ducing a research article on Yale by Robert Stern (a noted alunmus),
Peter Eisenman, editor of Oppositions and a student of Rowe, was
struck by "the curious absence at Yale of any polemical bias either for
or against the Modern Movement.''26

Yale's architecture had been shaped first by George Howe, one of the
first American modernist architects, and by Paul Rudolph, from 1958
to 1965. Rudolph's "incredible intensity and commitment to building
bright ideas" (as a former student said), the publications and exhibi-
tions he supported, the distinguished visiting critics and the university's
ambitious building program, all went to make Yale's architecture a
focus of international attention. It was also, for all these reasons, a
school that exalted the conception of architecture as personal expres-
sion. 27 After 1963, the students' disappointment with the built results
of Yale's heroic preferences found a focus in Rudolph's new building
for the Art and Architecture school. Contemporaneously, Edward
Barnes's appointment as campus planner and architectural adviser to
President Brewster marked a departure from the old notion that one
gets appropriate architectural solutions by letting each "big name" firm
place its monumental signature on the campus.

By 1969, when suspected arson devastated the architecture building,

Moore had already made in it changes no less dramatic than those he
had brought to the curriculum. From 1965 on, Moore had broadened
and diversified the architecture curriculum and connected it with actual
building projects. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's studios
and, above all, the students of the sixties had given it an injection of
concern with popular culture. 28 Moore later justified the competition in
these telling terms:
All of us involved with Yale's architecture were desperately trying to make
clear the distinction between unheroic buildings and unimportant ones .... To
dramatize that and get good buildings, Edward L. Barnes had been advo-
cating an architectural competition. Both he and I were especially excited at
the prospect of conducting a competition for a complex program on a
restricted budget on a fight and demanding site.., at a critical junction
between one campus fabric and another. 29

For those who did not know the background, it was easy to misread the
intentions and the compefition's preface: workable, economic, non-
monumental.., for a building of that size? and at Yale? 3° And if that
was what was really desired, couldn't the campus architectural office
have provided such a space, without the expense and the bother of a
 481

competition? In fact, the contestants were stumbling, most of them

unknowingly, into an ideological competition implicitly addressed to a
programmatic conflict.

As the chairman of the architecture school (so is the title presented by

Stern), Moore was to serve as professional adviser of the competition,
write the preamble to the program, and choose the jurors. "I counted
on their reputations," he said, '~-urther to convey to contestants what we
were seeking.''31 The jurors were Edward Dun_n, Director of Building
and Grounds Planning for Yale; Charles Rickart, Chairman of the
Mathematics Department, who wrote the program together with Duma;
Barnes, Yale's planning consultant; John Christiansen, a graduate stu-
dent at Yale, serving as token student and fourth registered architect;
two noted architects: Kevin Roche, successor of Eero Saarinen at the
head of the master's Connecticut office; Aldo Giurgola, of New York
and Philadelphia, one of the finalists for the chairmanship at Yale, a
former colleague of Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi at the University
of Pennsylvania; finally, Vincent Scully, Professor of Art History at
Yale, who had saluted Venturi's book, Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture as "probably the most important writing on the making of
architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923." Scully
noted in that same introduction that Venturi's closest mentor had been
Louis Kahn, "as he has been for almost all the best young American
architects and educators of the past decade, such as Giurgola, Moore,
Vreeland and Millard. ''32 Kahn's influence and the presence of his
buildings survived his retirement as a teacher; Robert Venturi, in turn,
had been professor of architecture at Yale since 1966.

The competition was announced on 14 November 1969. The program

called for a new building as well as the renovation of the old Leet
Oliver Memorial Hall, a neo-gothic "pile" from 1908; a site visit was
required of each contestant. By the deadline less than two months later,
1,600 architects registered and 468 sent completed entries. Out of
these strictly anonymous entries, the jury selected five. Jurors were
then told the name of the finalists, although the projects were not iden-
tified; the finalists were given two and a half months to develop their
preliminary schemes, with S 10,000 compensation; the candidates'
component systems and cost estimates were checked by professional
experts. The firm of Venturi and Rauch won the competition by a
unanimous first round vote, after a long morning review of the five
finalists. 33
482

According to a source very close to the firm, "it was obvious that Scully
was going to pick Venturi the moment he saw the drawings, unless he
was handed something awful. And considering Scully's personality, you
knew he was going to dominate the jury. The people at Venturi and
Rauch sat down to make a design to convince Scully.T M Considering
the influence of Louis Kahn on a majority of the jury, considering that
most of them knew Venturi well and several shared his controversial
ideas, it was easy even for outsiders to know what was not going to win.
It was also easy to suspect favoritism, and the architectural public did
more than just suspect. One first-stage competitor campaigned for a
year

to alert the venerable Trustees so that they.., institute an investigation for

the purpose of ascertaining whether the conduct of the professional adviser
and the jury was beyond reproach and if found otherwise, to order corrective
measures so as to ameliorate the injustice done to the other 468 contestants.

The historian Sybil Moholy-Nagy, a former Bauhausler like her famous

husband Laszlo, scathingly summarized the procedural part of the
complaints: "In every boxtop contest, employees are barred from par-
ticipafing - not at Yale."35 Most of the grumbling was that Venturi
shotfld have been given the commission, without causing 467 architects
to work for a contest they could not win, against a jury and a program
thoroughly biased in Venturi's favor.

The grumblings had a point. But Moore was to insist later that Yale,
already in the throes of financial difficulties, had no reason to squander
large amounts of money and unreimbursed time to select an architect
who was already most eligible for a Yale commission. 36 More tellingly,
he had declared at the time:

[I]t seems to me a tribute to this jury's cormoisseurship that their prize went
to such a simple solution instead of to one of the numerous entries which
bore a much larger number of devices generally associated with Robert Ven-
~ri's style? 7

Moore was saying, in fact, that it took the skill and the knowledge of his
jury to recognize the winning scheme as being not only the best, but
also Venturi's design. The real issue was not procedure, but design - or,
more exactly, the use of competition to legitimate a particular design
ideology and perhaps proselytize for it. However, in a society where
plurality of tastes is highly legitimate (and even incipiently so among
professional designers), it is easier to attack the jury for unfairness than
for the substance of its choice.
 483

Venturi and Rauch's building certainly retained a m o d e m vocabulary.

None of the letters published mentioned the two histoficist allusions (a
Gothic porch in concrete and the paving pattern) placed in the back to
obtain a symbolic relationship with the neo-gothic Leer Oliver. Only
one of the letters (from the architect who wanted the contest voided)
listed "38 deviations from the program or malfunctions of the require-
merits," to which Moore replied one by one. 38 Other letters showed
echoes of the nineteenth century "battle of the styles." One contestant
wrote: "You can't tell much from one photo [and no plan, added the
Forum writer] but it's a pretty bad building." "No matter how long the
article or clever the words," wrote another, "the winner is still a piece of
junk.''39
A non-contestant, however, revealed what the battle was really about:
Here is apparently a brand new building designed to look like an existing
renovated old loft building, with maybe a couple of stories added (in differ-
ent colored brick to give the impression that the "old existing" brick could
not be matched). Here is evidence of men revelling in mediocrity.... If this
design represents a new architectural millenium, then.., why don't we all
become technical consultants to contractors.., by merely abjuring any ten-
dency toward giving a building character 4°

The selection of Venturi and Rauch's unassuming project involved an

unacceptable definition of architecture and its relations to the built
environment. Much more effectively than Ventufi's theoretical writings,
which few practising architects had probably read, this design deliber-
ately ignored "great architecture" and forced architects to question
accepted notions about their role.

Venturi and Rauch's proposal was one of the three that abutted Leer
Oliver Hall, using the latter's grand entrance on Hillhouse Avenue.
Mixing styles with sure footing and making them into foil and comple-
ment to one another, the architects placed their wail flush against the
older building, leaning against it with a curved facade that crossed the
railroad tracks and opened the best views of the avenue to the faculty
offices, library, and lounge. Inside, the basement was perhaps the most
ingenious feature of the plan: auditoriums and large classrooms were
concentrated there, insulating the rest of the building from the heavy
circulation of undergraduates, as the program required. The extension
of basement and sub-basement in the back gained space and lig~htened
the bulk of the new building. Upstairs, unusually large corridors facili-
tated casual gatherings, following the mathematicians' wishes. In a
building with a deliberately "ord~ary image," a lounge with a view and
a two-story ceiling, a library all on one floor with mezzanine and the
484

same view, spacious and quiet offices, created interior amenities that
were all but "ordinary." The chair of the mathematics department had
feared he would have to fight the architects on the jury for this entry, in
which, he said, "the architect seems to have been able to visualize
rather clearly how flesh-and-blood mathematicians might actually use a
building. ''41

Colin Rowe, who was asked to criticize this "hotly and even sensation-
ally controversial" building, said the design was an "urbanistic failure."
The architects deferred too much to the pseudo-gothic Leet Oliver, and
not enough to the characteristic Yale spaces of courtyards, gates, and
quadrangles; their scheme made of Becton Plaza in the back "a stag-
nant cul-de-sac??' But perhaps Rowe's main complaint was that it had
become impossible to keep the reading of this building separate from
the torrent of words - Venturi's own and his admirers' - that ex-
pounded the architect's p h i l o s o p h y . 42

Although Venturi had explained that not only the image but the sub-
stance of his building was ordinary, he had never set out to provide an
ordinary building, on the contrary: 43

We say our buildings are 'ordinary' - other people have said they are ugly
and ordinary. But, of course, our buildings in another sense are.., extra
-ordinary... they are.., we hope, very sophisticated architecture designed
very carefi.dly, from each square inch to the total proportions of the
building .... Harmony with Leet Oliver is sought through contrast, as well as
analogy. The windows are different in type, yet similar in scale; the material is
different in type and texture, yet similar in color to that of Leet Oliver (gray
limestone). A t the back, the paving pattern of the plaza and the tracery of the
entrance are different in scale and material from the ornament of Leet
Oliver, yet similar symbolically. 44

This kind of statement led Rowe to accuse Venturi of the sort of under-
statement of rich women who line their "ordinary" raincoats with mink:

The public face is deadpan; the private world is chic. We rest upon our privi-
leges and dissimulate their existence, which is all a little like Park Avenue ....
Venturi's exterior and interior are, maybe, just a little too disrelated.

After harking back to the modernist principle of inside-outside corre-

spondence, Rowe mostly attacked the program for being "fashionable."
And yet, he added, Venturi's project, still unbuilt in 1976, "has
squashed establishment architecture as we have known it - which is a
very great credit to Venturi. ''4s Rowe was therefore granting to the
latter the status of successor of canonidal modernism. The new "Yale
 485

style" had scored a partial victory: Its exemplar, though unbuilt, had
become a discursive event.

Indeed, Moore and Pyle's slim book on the competition opened with
the statement that the Yale Mathematics Building had reversed the
"special twentieth-century pattern for memorable architectural compe-
titions: the winner is conservative but highly competent; among the
runners-up are designers of buildings of revolutionary importance for
modern architecture." With the implication that the truly revolutionary
thing in 1970 was to please the users as Venturi's project had done,
Moore gave to the Yale competition its full polemical import, revealing
it for that which it had always intended to be: a taking of position in a
debate on principles. 46

At Yale, the jury could escape the normal compromise and crown an
innovative and controversial architect because almost all the architects,
the influential art historian, and the professional adviser wished to pro-
mote that kind of architectural statement, "for the future of architec-
ture." As Moore admitted,

It can then come as no surprise that when this jury found an entry which met
the program requirements with unusual felicity and also carried a stylistic
messageof particular interest to them, they gaveit the prize. 47

This was a '~ixed" contest in the sense that it had been devised, no
matter how honestly, to publicize an ideological program with which
the winner was fully identified. It is obviously more difficult to establish
what the victory did for Ventufi's career, since the Mathematics
Building is, to this date, unbuilt; I argue that it confirmed Ventufi's dis-
cursive position, while doing nothing at all for the "track record" on
which clients judge architects.

When Robert Venturi, associate professor at the University of Pennsyl-

vania, was appointed to the Davenport chair at Yale in 1966, his aca-
demic reputation was more than well established, as Moore announced
the appointment as that of "one of the world's leading architectural
intellectuals." The justification lay mainly in the success of Venturi's
1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction. This was not all, of course.

Venturi, first of all, had the right academic pedigree for an East Coast
architect: private school, Princeton, the Rome prize after finishing lfis
M.A., an Ivy League assistant professorship. He had worked as a
designer for famous achitects: Oscar Stonorov, Eero Saafinen, Louis
486

Kahn. After two short-lived partnerships, he had founded the lasting

one in 1964 with John Rauch. He had also found Denise Scott Brown,
whom he married in 1967, and whose role as an innovator, initiator of
new ideas, and co-author was in every way as important as her exper-
tise in planning and her social commitment.

Thus, in 1970, the firm seemed positioned for success, with excellent
leadership, remarkable collaborators, and some stable income from
teaching and lecturing. The projects built by the principal had been
very few and small in scale but there had been, however, much noted
entries in at least five competitions; of these and others, the book Com-
plexity and Contradiction made exemplary and intelligent u s e . 49 In
1965, a solo exhibit of "The Works of Venturi and Rauch" had toured
the United States, moving five years later to the Whitney Museum in
New York. Venturi's book had received attention in every national pro-
fessional journal and internationally, as did his "shocking" work on Las
Vegas with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. 5°

Yenturi was included in that mysterious but always named elite "cir-
cuit" of mostly Eastern architects who make the rounds of elite archi-
tectural schools, appear on award juries, and are talked about by cri-
tics, students, and other "intellectual" architects in places such as
London, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo, besides New York and New Haven.
However, signs that discursive controversy can breed real trouble had
appeared in 1968: Venturi Rauch Scott Brown, in association with the
large Texas firm Caudill Rowlett Scott, had won the competition for
Transportation Square in Washington, D.C. The scheme was rejected
by the capital's Fine Arts Commission of which the most prominent
member was Gordon Bunshaft of SOM-New York, the archetypal large
modernist corporate practice. Typical of professional elites anywhere,
the animosity evidenced by Bunshaft against Venturi was more than the
feelings of a man close to the mandatory retirement age of 65 at SOM
and threatened by the next "bright young architect full of promise."
Denise Scott Brown points out that a corporate architect might resent
Ventufi's intellectual reputation but, above all, a building like the Guild
House "outraged Bunshaft's philosophy."51

The Yale Mathematics Building Competition added to the symbolic

capital accumulated in Ventufi's intellectual and ideological type of
career. 52 In his section of a divided field, Ventufi was a star. But
Bunshaft's vehement opposition, coming from an eminent represen-
tative of corporate modernism, showed that the professional establish-
 487

ment would try to close ranks against the young Turks. In the short run,
it was difficult for Venturi and Rauch to transfer that symbolic capital
outside the circles of intellectual architects and critics, a transfer indis-
pensable for the transformation of prestige into commissions. Because
important projects like Transportation Square or Yale remained
unbuilt, the clients did not set an example that others could choose to
follow. Controversy discouraged larger (and almost inevitably less
adventurous) clients than those who gravitate around architectural
elites.

In terms of buildings, Venturi's career developed with painful slowness.

The firm produced distinguished institutional and residential work, but
large-scale well-financed projects were practically non-existent in the
1970s. Venturi's intellectual stature and the critical attention paid to his
and Scott Brown's ideas amplified the resonance of this work far
beyond its scope, but reputation was circumscribed to a large discur-
sive field. Complexity and Contradiction had been a difficult promise to
maintain, precisely because it was liberating for so many in the archi-
tectural profession; Learning from Las Vegas infuriated the "architec-
tural establishment?' Considering Venturi's talent and the quality of the
firm's work, it must be concluded, as the protagonists themselves do,
that renown far in excess of the track record (the accumulated ex-
perience that clients see only in realized buildings) was damaging to the
firm's practice.

The commission of Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton University in 1979-

1980 broke the cycle of small or medium-sized distinguished buildings.
The enthusiastic support of Princeton's President William Bowen and
the other commissions that followed, including the Molecular Biology
building, were, in Scott Brown's words, "the seal of approval that re-
moved the risk elements for many clients?' Although Venturi was
world-famous, only then could his partner present herself to the com-
mittee charged with setting up one more competition for the troubled
extension to the London National Gallery and tell them confidently: '~I
think you ought to consider us.''53 "The office made a conscious deci-
sion to go for broke on this one," says Steven Izenour. "We knew that,
unless we blew it, it was our best shot ever. It was between [James]
Stifling, [Henry] Cobb [of I. M. Pei] and us; at worst a chance in three,
more likely a chance in two .... We didn't have Christmas bonuses that
year, but it was a conscious decision to enter that level of project," In a
field of six architects, Venturi Rauch Scott Brown won the contest. 54
After seventeen years, the firm had its '~vorld class" building.
488

The Portland building competition (1979)

When Michael Graves won the Portland competition in November

1979, his career had been much of the same type as Robert Venturi's;
at forty-five, he was one year older than Venturi in 1969 and he was
much at the same place. Graves's undergraduate education - at the
University of Cincinnati - had been less exclusive than Venturi's or the
Eastern architects' with whom he is associated, but for his graduate
degree he had gone to Harvard, where he had

a rather miserable experience, because of the faculty and because of the

times more than just Harvard; the kind of dilemmas that architecture found
itself involved in at that time: the loss of language; the end of Gropius....52

After finishing his M.A. in 1959 and working for a year, Graves too
won a Rome Prize. That, he says, was a crucial factor in obtaining the
appointment at Princeton in 1962. Princeton, where he has been ever
since, gave him a stable income and an open teaching and learning
environment, under the guidance of Jean Labatut, the Beaux-Arts
architect who had been the teacher of Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon,
and Robert Venturi. In 1960, Peter Eisenman joined the Princeton
faculty. Graves says "Peter and I looked at each other and said ~11
right, we are the Young Turks.'" Together they obtained a huge grant
from the university and Prudential Life "to explore possibilities of
urban growth in a linear context." The nucleus of CASE - the Con-
ference of Architects for the Study of the Environment - self-
consciously modeled on Le Corbusier's CIAM and England's post-war
T E A M 10, was formed when the British critics Kenneth Frampton,
Anthony Eardley, and Anthony Vidler were brought to Princeton.
Almost fortuitously, Arthur Drexler, the Director of Architecture and
Design at the Museum of Modern Art, discovered the Graves-
Eisenman team on a visit to Princeton and ended up including their
project in the 1967 Museum exhibit "The New City Architecture and
Urban Renewal." By 1970, the CASE group had attracted so much
attention that Drexler offered them to hold a public meeting at the
museum, out of which Eiseuman drew a book, Five Architects, pub- "
lished in 1972. The press and the cognoseenti had found an architec-
tural avant-garde to talk about.

Unlike Venturi, Graves did not contribute his ideas in writing to the
debate, except for a few pieces. His buildings were few, as they had
been for Venturi in 1969, mostly rehabilitations. 56 "I was known as the
Cubist Kitchen King, the Painter-Architect," he says, "all kinds of things
 489

that would say 'Good here, but he hasn't built. '''57 A solo exhibition of
Graves's projects had been held at Columbia in 1976 and toured the
United States. Graves was part of the rarefield New York art world, in
which his drawings of abstracted architectonic forms were known and
highly priced. He was in a central position from which to accumulate
symbolic capital, his drawings serving him in a way analogous to
writing for Venturi.

The Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge, an invited competition

where Graves placed first in 1977, allowed him to put himself on the
list of architects who had projected larger buildings. The lecture circuit
had gotten Graves included in Jthe initial list of twenty, but he had to
compensate for the fact that he had very little in the way of built pro-
jects to show. He describes in poignant detail the enormous effort and
expenses that he assumed to get to the second-stage interview. Graves
won with a stunning design that spanned the Red River between the
two cities. The respected Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times
thinks it was "probably one of the most beautiful architectural drawings
of recent times ... the sort of work that sends the viewer away with the
sense that some kind of breakthrough is being made," but Graves
remembers it as one more frustration in his career:
I worked so hard to get the commission! I got it, but never built a building.
Now the drawings were published everywhere.., covers, and so on. That's
not what I wanted: I wanted a building! But, from that, I was invited by the
local A I A to give a lecture in Portland so the net continues, you see .... Ed
Wundram [the competition's professional adviser] sat next to me at dinner
and he said 'We've got a competition going here.., what do we have to do to
encourage someone like y o u to enter it?' I said: ~sk!.' I mean, 'somebody like
you!' He thought I was too grand but, again, they believed Fargo would be
built and so did I at the time .... Even when it looked ... very shaky, you con-
tinue to say 'There's every hope that it will be built' and you're not lying
although things are not going well, and you say 'They didn't raise the money,
or they didn't pass the bond issue'.., which is all true. Golf courses got 51%
of the vote and the cultural center 49%. And so it was dead, but by that time
we had Portland? 8

The Public Service Building in Portland rapidly became an architec-

tural cause cdl~bre because of the opposition awakened by Graves's
design. Here is how Douglas Davis, Newsweek's art critic, described
Graves's first presentation in Portland:
Arthur Erickson, the Canadian modernist.., proposed a reflective-glass box
resting on pillars. Graves countered with a simple thirteen-story rectangle,
which he proposed to decorate with colored ceramic tiles expressing a vari-
ety of symbolic meanings. In his meticulously drawn proposal, tall terracotta
490

columns rise from a stepped green base toward an arching keystone at the
top, recalling both the splendors of Imperial Rome and the hard-edged geo-
metry of art deco. Perched at the top is a symbolic 'head, in the shape of a
small pavilion....' In addition to fanciful 'welcome garlands' on the sides, he
placed a blooming female figure, three stories high, on the front. 'I called her
Portlandia; he says. 'She says, in effect, 'the city is lively.'59

The design and especially the more decorative elements identified with
Graves's "signature" (there should have been a whole '~village" of small
pavilions on the roof) were modified several times over the course of
this uncommon and much criticized competition.

The Portland story opens with a mayor who had the ambition of
leaving behind him "a building design that was something special, not
the usual mute box squatting anonymously on the skyline: '6° A non-
profit corporation composed of business people and politicians was
established to sell bonds and act as owner; among the politicians was
Portland's future mayor Frank Ivancie. Edward Wundram, the architect
hired to prepare the program, budget, and schedule, came up with the
idea of an international "design-build" competition. "Design-build"
places the architect, always believed to be indifferent to and respon-
sible for cost overruns, in the employ of the contractor, not the client.
The budget of S 22,420,000 was non-negotiable; the teams would sub-
mit a bid and a schedule for which they would be responsible, at the
tune of a S 9,000 fine for each and every day over the promised com-
pletion date.

The city thus seemed to be of two minds about this project: on the one
hand, it wanted to tie the building team to a very tight budget (S 51 per
square foot!) and make it responsible for cost overruns. On the other
hand, it wanted to get Portland national and international acclaim.
Wundram says:

All Ivancie wanted was 'on time and on schedule.' As soon as that was taken
care of, the Mayor came to me and said: 'Now, c a n we get good design as
well? Is there a way?' I said 'Yes, but we need someone strong to carry that
message and I believe that Philip Johnson was the strongest influence on
design in this country. 61

The competition was risky, and Wundram sought to give it legitimacy

by borrowing prestige. After some negotiations, Philip Johnson and
John Burgee accepted to be special advisers to the laymen's j u r y . 62
Graves says: "You have got to provide yourself with the opportunity,
but once you are there you need a little shove." Philip Johnson, interes-
ted in Graves's work since the first M O M A exhibit, was to give it.
 491

The city sent out "requests for qualifications" to over a hundred firms
and over eighty responded with inquiries; only eleven teams, led by the
contractor, submitted their portfolios. By late November, Johnson and
Burgee, acting as consultants, had picked four teams of contractor/
designer/engineers; as had been announced, only three of these were to
compete with actual design submissions: Mitchell/Giurgola, Michael
Graves, Arthur Erickson, and their respective associates.63 Graves's was
associated with the architectural firm of Emery Roth and Sons, proba-
bly the most experienced designers of high-rise buildings in New York.

The presence of Emery Roth and Sons on the team was crucial, and
prominent in Johnson's timely "shove." In Graves's words (he held the
story from Ed Wundram),

The members of the committee were standing in Philip Johnson's office in

New York and someone said 'Well, first of all, we can take off this Michael
Graves, he has no experience.' Philip thought I should not be thrown out
first, the competition should be interesting and I should stay in the mix a little
longer. He said to them 'Don't get Michael wrong, he is the designer and he
has the Roth organization.' 'Who is Roth?' the man asked. Philip took him to
his window - and this is the strength of somebody like Philip Johnson - and
said 'See that building and that building and that building' and making a
sweep he said 7kll those are by Rot_h! They've got as much or more tall
building experience as anybody in this country. So we are going to keep
Michael on the list.' End of story and we made it to the final three. 64

John Burgee recalls his and Johnson's reasoning:

We felt responsible in this position because we were being the sole judges.
We had to pick somebody and then defend it when it was done.., with
Graves you get the chance to have a real breakthrough building, something
that would be quite different than what you might be expecting. I don't
remember what the others were, but you would not want to put an Eisenman,
a Stern and a Gehry and make the competition out of those three ... what if
n o n e of them really did a civic building that was responsible? Any of them
could end up winning the competition. 65

By their own admission, the lay jurors leaned heavily on Philip Johnson
and John Burgee's analysis. That was what they were wanted for, after
all, but Johnson's presentation before City Councit, jury, competitors,
and public was thrashed by all those, and they were many, who would
probably not have been as incensed if they had liked Graves's design.
Johnson spoke of the future of architecture, and Aldo Giurgola later
said:
492

Philip came up with the phrase that Graves' project was avant-garde, ours
was in-betweenand Erickson's was modernist. I think a jury should discuss
these things only by themselves. Who wants not to be in the avant-garde? It
influenced people who were not professionals.66
Architectural circles knew that this would happen. Steven Izenour
recalls that "everyone knew Graves was Johnson's golden boy.., for
that year! We saw the jury and we knew there was no competition in-
volved, we said 'forget it, we are not entering this'!" Yet a source close
to Erickson's office at the time says that na~vet6 is hardly something
one would tax him with: The decision to enter the Portland competition
was taken advisedly. In 1979, Erickson was also involved in the design-
build invited competition for the redevelopment of Bunker Hill in Los
Angeles (which his team won in July 1980) and Mitchell/Giurgola in
the international competition for the Australian Parliament House in
Canberra, one of the most important commissions of the last twenty
years (they won in 1980 by unanimous vote of the jury). The publicity
received in a prestigious competition for a civic building, especially if
they made it to the final round, would obviously not hurt their chances
elsewhere.

One week after Johnson's public presentation, the jury of five chose the
Graves/Pavarini/Roth team by four votes and one abstention. None of
the finalists had been able to respect the impossible S 51 per square
foot and all three offered less space than requested, but Graves's team
offered the most footage, came in exactly under the budget and got the
best ratings from the construction managers hired by the city for energy
efficiency and other performance aspects. At that point, the battle
started, led by the local Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.

The uproar and the opposition in City Council were such that the
Mayor asked the jury to solicit a modified submission from Graves
(and only from him). Stripped of its decorations and redimensioned,
the design that had been likened to "an aristocratic cousin of R2D2
from Star Wars;' competed once again with Erickson's glass box on
pilotis, its only runner up. 67 The Graves/Pavarini team provided, as
before, more space and energy savings at less cost. In April 1980, the
commission was finally theirs. The ground was broken in July, while
Graves's design team ffast-tracked" the drawings; the Portland Building
opened two years later, in October 1982.

The controversy had not only focused on Graves's unusual design; he

was a "blossoming celebrity" among Eastern architectural elites and
 493

there were echoes of the accusation of architectural "carpetbagging;' at

least as old as the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Graves saw
it clearly and put it graciously:

I think the Portlanders felt like guinea pigs, and asked themselves: 'Why
shouldn't this sort of thing h a p p e n in New York instead, where the media
helped create it?' Just the fact that an international competition was re-
moving an opportunity from the local architectural community was a threat
to local practices, and then the aesthetics was a further blow to the type of
architecture preferred there - a M o d e r n , commercial sort, but very good of
its type. 68

When finished, the building's cheapness looked like a threat even to

"Post-Modernists," for it seemed to prove the criticism that PM is
merely "billboard stuff;' a criticism most cleverly summed up in the
lapidary title of the A R T news' review, "ff Gloria Swanson were a
building. ''69

Hemmed in by the tight budget, Graves was forced to discard his

beloved terracotta tiles and decorations (the garlands came back in
fiber glass, geometricized, as part of the one percent "art budget" of
public buildings) and to sacrifice, as he said, "the richness of solid/void
relationships necessary to create a real sense of density.''7° The Pro-
gressive Architecture team of writers asked Graves whether he should
not have fought to make the city pay the extra cost that a civic building
deserves. He answered with a realistic and political sense of what is
possible:

We had a very short time, three months, in which to design, present and cost
out a building with a very strict budget .... I was not interested ... in arriving
in Portland three months over that time with a building over budget. The
other two competitors, to my surprise, did not assume that this was a strict
rule, but I felt that it had been spelled out quite clearly, that the city had
recently had two cost overruns on a public works project which had b e c o m e
a c a u s e c d l k b r e - and there was a mayoral race in the balance .... We did not

feel that way [that the city should pay extra], though we found the cost prob-
lem frustrating throughout. 71

The price of getting a controversial design built was to offer exceptional

cost and technical efficiencies. Graves's own costs had been punitive: It
was reported at the time that he had invested in the competition ten-
years' earnings from his drawings. 72

It is remarkable that in the documents published the Portland competi-

tion is not challenged for its extremely unorthodox procedure, as had
494

happened at Yale despite Moore's strict observance of AIA norms. The

prestige of Philip Johnson and his power in architectural circles may
have forestalled procedural criticisms, confirming Wundram's choice of
him as a source of legitimacy for the contest. Even ad hominem criti-
cism of his presentation appears to have been mild, except for Pietro
Belluschi, leader of the professional opposition. Being himself a "grand
old man" of architecture, Belluschi could afford to call Johnson "witty
and brilliant, but.., by nature an iconoclast ... the high 'guru' of a cote-
rie of young gifted people who earnestly believe visual chaos is the rea-
lity of today's world." Belluschi's stature also allowed him to attack the
winning design directly, without the subterfuge of impugning the proce-
dure:

"Johnson's young men," he said, "have discovered that frivolous means get
immediate attention, and that fashions need not last. They tell us that content
and expression, function and form have no more fundamental a connection
in architecture than in scene painting, dress-making or hat-design.''73

Susan Doubilet, the Progressive Architecture critic, observed accurately

that the architectural public examined the flaws of this threatening des-
ign "out of all proportion to the possibilities inherent in an inexpensive
building by an architect inexperienced in large-scale work." 74 But para-
doxically, the budget strictures so adamantly placed on the project allow-
ed it to be built, escaping the fate of many competition winners, inclu-
ding Venturi at Yale.

Because the Portland building was built, Graves's symbolic capital

became instantly productive. Many critics, aware of the budget's stric-
tures and imposed modifications, called for one uncompromised work
to judge the properly architectural qualities of Graves's bold designs. 7~
Whether they changed their minds or not is a different story, but in
1982, the New York Times Patti Goldberger could write the following:

It has fallen to Michael Graves to become the figure around which the
public's interest in post-modernism has coalesced .... It is a role that many
critics and historians had expected would be filled by Robert Venturi ....
[His] buildings, however, are an unusual mix of the highly studied and the
self-consciously plain, and they do not always have an easy appeal to the
untrained eye. He may be his generation's most gifted architect.., but he
does not seem destined to be this era's most popular one. 76

Because of Portland, Graves was invited to one after another closed

competition. He won the San Juan Capistrano Library in 1981, the
S 50 million Humana headquarters in Louisville in 1982, and the Clos
 495

Pegase Winery in California's Napa Valley in 1 9 8 3 . 77 Graves after Port-

land continued rapidly with some large-scale commissions and some
very controversial ones, such as, in particular, the proposed addition to
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which he ob-
tained in 1985.

Graves's architectural symbolism, first tried on a large scale in Port-

land, was central in the articulation of neo-classicism, which was
becoming in the early 1980s a predominant strain in the academic dis-
course of post-modem architecture. His use of anthropomorphic meta-
phors, abstracted archetypal forms, and colors that seek a relation to
nature may not be easy to read for the larger public, but the forms and
colors hold the viewer's attention. Even if only because of its "toy-like
quality and the nostalgic and comfy, endearing dumpiness of Deco," as
a British detractor put it, the Portland building was popular. It gradu-
ally disarmed its local critics, won the 1983 Honor Award of the AIA,
brought to Michael Graves the status of a celebrity in the popular press
and of master to be followed in architectural schools, a combination
not likely to be stable. As Paul Goldberger wrote, Graves's "brand of
architecture is new, yet strives to create the effect of the architecture of
the past. It is a way to be at once new and old - to have it all .... In
Graves's work, all of this is good enough to transcend mere reaction -
the color, energy and mix of classical and modern sources create
objects that are truly seductive. But how much more the Gravesian
style will be able to do remains to be seen.''78

D i s c u r s i v e e v e n t s and elite careers

Reading architectural critics makes one believe that the discrepancy

between Venturi's "anti-style" of architecture and Graves's distinctive
language of form and color (often called a cubist collage of abstracted
historical forms) was the principal factor of difference in the unfolding
of the two men's careers. A sociologist cannot neglect the content of
the innovation that is proposed, but the manner in which it comes
about and the "medium" through which it is broadcast modify in fun-
damental ways the impact of aesthetics.

Both Yale and Portland were predictable or, even more, pre-judged
competitions, in the sense that the decision-makers were so biased in
favor of a new kind of architectural vision that one of its representatives
was bound to win, provided he did not submit something terrible. Con-
496

sidering the exceptional talent of the "favorite son" in both cases, this
was practically impossible. The lay members of the jury found that
both solutions excelled in something other than novelty and architec-
tural "delight": Venturi's in "comfort" and satisfaction of users' require-
ments, Graves's in technical performance, both of them in cost efficien-
cy.

Aesthetically, both competitions were played out upon the stage of a

divided profession, but the ten years that had elapsed between Yale and
Portland obviously made a difference. Yet it would be too easy to say
that what seemed intolerable in 1970 could pass in 1980, for Graves's
project also was extremely controversial. More significant, Venturi had
brought to the front of the stage something entirely different from
Graves.

Whereas Venturi challenged the conception of monumental architec-

ture at its roots, Graves was putting forth a vision of neo-classic monu-
mentality. The new paradigm would obviously not be adopted by all.
However, with the advance of pluralism, it was easier even for stalwart
modernists to put up with Graves's original formalism and his search
for a new kind of monumentality than to accept Venturi's notions of
"ordinary" architecture.

The students' eager embrace of Graves, of course, may be seen as the

groping for a new general language or, more cynically, something to
imitate. Venturi's approach also produced "signature motifs" and imita-
ble forms (like his famous half-moon windows) but it was not a style,
whereas Graves, after entering his "neo-classic" phase, consistently
developed a readily recognizable manner from project to project.

Above all, Graves's winning design could disarm its critics because it
was built, while Venturi's could not. The Portland critics were able to
appreciate the architectonic amenities offered by the new building or,
as Belluschi admitted, "get used to it. ~'79 It would also be possible later
on to see how the building was aging in both architectonic and stylistic
terms. Also, critics seem to agree with Paul Goldberger that Graves's
"fundamental instincts are pictorial," which means, among other things,
that visual appeal matters more than texture and materials in his archi-
tecture. Graves's absolute determination to accept this commission
despite the miserly budget may thus have compromised his basic archi-
tectural vision less than it would have for other architects.
 497

Venturi's intellectual influence on American architecture was and is

deeper and broader than Graves's. Precisely for this reason, the dis-
crepancy between his reputation and his "track record" of built
buildings during the 1970s was even more impairing for him than for
Graves, with his one finished major building. But it is remarkable that
Ventufi's career also "picked up" in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
suggesting that the transformations he had advocated a decade earlier
had been accepted by the official profession and could thus be pro-
posed to clients with either safe critical backing or diffuse support from
a changing culture of taste.

Were it not for the impact (both positive and negative) of his and Scott
Brown's written work, Venturi's career would be much closer to the tra-
ditional "good architect" pattern: going from smaller to larger commis-
sions locally, specializing in the "elite" non-commercial domain and
himself becoming slowly able over time to direct work to younger
architects in a local frame. Venturi, too, needed a visible major project
to build. He got it at Princeton in 1980, the same year of Graves's
award in Portland and he got it, according to his wife and partner, on
the strength of what his firm had built:
"I do not know how we got on the fist," says Scott Brown, "but what we
showed them was very interesting. We showed them our campus buildings, of
course, and advisedly we wanted to give them a rest from the heavy responsi-
bility and we showed them a couple of beautiful beach houses. The idea was
to turn them into little barefoot boys and to show them just beauty: After-
wards, I read somewhere a salesman's writing, about how you sell a cor-
porate jet: you sell efficiency to middle management, but you sell the presi-
dent real beauty. That's what we did there."8°

Although we obviously cannot draw any firm conclusions from two

examples, the case studies show that for innovative competition results
to happen in periods of discursive conflict, it takes an unusually single-
minded jury to promote a new vision against a still prevalent ortho-
doxy. The innovative architect's previous position in either like-minded
circles or networks of the central figures who thrive on making "avant-
garde" reputations seems a crucial addition to the mix.

Despite the importance of realizations for the track record, Yale and
Portland do not prove that what matters most for careers is getting that
winning project built. The location of the work and the hullaballoo that
surrounds "big" competitions seem just as necessary,sl The trajectory
that a firm has already outlined for itself determines the kind of compe-
titions that will be entered.
498

Architects and architecture critics say that open competitions, like pro-
fessional award programs, are a means to make a name for oneself - or,
in the terms I have used, to gain right of existence in the profession's
discursive field. A "name" gets one invited to compete in restricted
contests. Success by itself (winning or placing among the finalists or
being otherwise noted) does not appear sufficient to create for an
architect networks he or she did not have before the event. Yet the
gains in self-confidence and the encouragement may spur a change of
course or trajectory for a beginning firm. So it was for Barry Elbasani
of Berkeley, whose award in the Binghamton Sports Arena competition
became the foundation of a successful practice, avoiding, he says, "the
ten years of floundering with houses, churches and schools." As he
rapidly adds, "[s]uecess from a competition requires a project big
enough to have holding power. Also it takes business sense to stay alive
when it's o v e r . ''82

Why do architects continue supporting the practice of competitions by

their participation? The reasons of elite architects who are invited to
closed contests are different from those of the younger ones who enter
open contests, but not entirely. On the professional side, the "star sys-
tem" has its obligations, as Eugene Kohn noted. 83 On the other side, his
firm enters diverse competitions in an effort to widen their "range" - in
the case of Kohn Pedersen Fox, breaking with a track record that types
them as a "high-rise only" firm. They are closer in this to Michael
Graves, who admits
You feel used. You feel y o u m i g h t be there as a s y m b o l to bring s o m e creden-
tials to the competition. B u t I also want very m u c h to do a n a q u a r i u m ... a n d
a winery, which was also a competition. I would n e v e r be invited to do a
winery or m a y b e I would, b u t h o w m a n y wineries are built a n d how m a n y
vintners in California or M a i n e or wherever would call Michael Graves to do
their winery? ... T h e r e are certain kinds of building types that you will get to
do t h r o u g h competition a n d in no other way. s4

Competitions, thus, can add "range" to the noted architect's "track

record. ''s5 But what about the apparently persistent faith of a multitude
of architects, who are neither among the noted nor the invited? True,
the meritocratic myth is confirmed once in a while over the life span of
a generation of architects. Also true, entering one's name into the field
of architectural discourse amplifies careers based on relatively small or
local achievements. Finally, the ideological, non-rational, and non-
economic elements in creative work and its intrinsic gratifications allow
architects to ignore the abusive aspects of competition, while complain-
ing bitterly about them. Even for those who are outspokenly cynical
 499

about competitions, the process simulates real work, As Steven Izenour

puts it,

You can't do architecture in a vacuum. You can do a theoretical house or

play with some theoretical idea but, beyond that scale, you need some kind
of program, a site, the idea of a building that couMbe realized, s6

By establishing parameters of work that approach reality (perhaps

most of all in their exploitative characteristics) competitions have a
paradoxical value: the process reproducesfor its consenting victims the
conditions of existence of architecture as art.

Notes

1. The increase in the number of architects was 87.4 percent from 1960 to 1970 and
60 percent in the following intercensus decade. In absolute numbers, the initial
basis was small: 30,028 in 1960, 56,284 in 1970, and 90,026 in 1980. Growth con-
tinued after that. See Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1988), 9ff and Table 5, 120. For the correlation of firms with
volume of construction, see Magafi Saffatti Larson, George Leon, and Jay Bolick,
"The professional supply of design," in Judith Blau, Mark La Gory, and Samuel
Pipkin, editors, Professionals and Urban Form (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 256ff.
My remarks on competitions follow Robert Gutman's manuscript "Design com-
petitions in the U.S.A.," published as Appendix to Great Britain, Ministry of the
Environment Briefing Competitions (London: Bulstrode Press, 1987). Having
failed to locate the published text, I quote from the typescript made available to me
through Professor Gutman's courtesy. Gutrnan says that the increase in the number
of competitions from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties may have been as much
as one thousand percent (manuscript, p. 1). See also ArchitecturalPractice, 71.
2. Gutman, "Competitions," Ms., 22.
3. The "design-build" competition, recently popular in the United States, can be either
open or closed; it is mainly a mechanism for controlfing costs and making the com-
plete team of architects-engineers-contractors responsible for the schedule and the
budget.
4. See Gutman, "Competitions," ms. 26-30. For the developers' interest in "product
differentiation," see my Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in
Late Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
ch. 3.
5. See Magali Saffatti Larson, "The production of expertise and the constitution of
expert power," in Thomas Haskell, editor, The Authority of Experts: Historical and
Theoretical Essays (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1984).
6. Steven Izenour, of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, personal communication.
7. This is the argument advanced by Htl~ne Lipstadt. See her introduction to the col-
lection by Lipstadt, editor, The Experimental Tradition (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1988).
8. The Institute, however, has little effective authority over the sponsors and not much
over its constituents. Therefore, the AIA cites additional practical reasons for op-
500

posing competitions: they add to the costs, mainly by delaying the building process;
and they exaggerate cosmetics, "the superficialities of design that can be reviewed
in the short period of the jury process," because contests do not give architects the
time to investigate carefully the technical complexity of modem building. Gutman,
"Competitions," ms. 7.
9. The expression "watershed" is from Dennis Sharp, "Introduction," in de Haan,
Hilde, and Ids Haagsma, Architects in Competition: International Architectural
Competitions in the Last200 Years (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988). Two of the
most famous international competitions, which became a stage for the conflict
between modernists and "traditionalists," were the Chicago Tribune competition of
1922 and the competition for the League of Nations palace in Geneva of 1927.
Eliel Saarinen placed second in Chicago and Le Corbusier in Geneva. See the con-
tributions by Dennis Sharp and Kenneth Frampton in De Haan and Hagsma, ibid.
10. I owe the comment that a general pattern in the commercial arts is worked out in
the design competitions to an anonymous reader for Theory and Society. The idea
that markets for symbolic goods are based on the denial of economics is, of course,
Pierre Bourdieu's. See, in particular, "La production de la croyance," Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales 13 (February 1977): 4-43.
11. See Magali Sarfatti Larson, "Emblem and exception: The historical definition of the
architect's professional role," in Judith Blan, Mark La Gory, and John Pipkin,
editors, Professionals and Urban Form (Albany: SUNY press, 1983).
12. My heuristic definition of "discourse" is obviously derived from Michel Foucault.
See L'Ordre du Discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), trans. Rupert Swyer as "The dis-
course on language," in Michel Foncault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New
York: Pantheon, 1972).
13. See Bourdieu, "Production de la croyance."
14. ArchitecturalForum, "Mathematics at Yale: Readers respond," 1970 (Oct.): 65.
15. Close to the study competitions and to classic architectural pedagogy, "idea" com-
petitions are not related to any building project: They ask the contestants to devel-
op ideas for the solution of a problem that has particular technical or social rele-
vance.
16. See John Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980), 365 ff.
17. Lipstadt, Experimental, ix.
18. Lipstadt, Experimental, xii.
19. Robert Gutman estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 firms and individuals
regularly enter architectural competitions of all kinds in the United States. Most of
the participants, he says, are young, architects employed by large offices or by archi-
tecture schools. Gutman, Practice, 70-71.
20. In France, for instance, public competitions among registered architects are obliga-
tory for all important official buildings. In the words of Serge Chemetoff, an award-
winning French architect, architectural competitions have become "a system of
architectural commission regulated by the profession itself.., some fifty or so pro-
fessionals compete regularly among themselves." [Symposium on Competitions,
Architectural League of New York, May 1988]. In the United States, where official
government competitions are much rarer and professional regulation much weaker,
the professionalism of the jury gives respectability to a contest and legitimacy to its
outcome. There is evidence of the professional uses of competition, even in the
United States: architects who teach in universities want competitions and awards to
count for their tenure as equivalent of articles and books; they emphasize that the
 501

contests represent a judgment of their peers, like an article in a refereed journal,

and not a judgment by clients on the "open" market. [I am grateful to Professor
Gwendolyn Wright for this observation.]
21. Michael Graves, personal communication to the author.
22. Eugene Kohn, personal communication to the author.
23. Steven Izenour, communication to the author.
24. We can see the difference clearly when the public character of architecture turns a
real public against the unwanted results of a competition, leading event~aally to the
project's political defeat. Opponents would have wanted that to happen to the win-
ners of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial or the Portland Public Service Building
competitions. See Lipstadt, Experimental Tradition, and Todd Marder, editor, The
Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1985).
25. Charles Moore and Nicholas Pyle, The Yale Mathematics Building Competition
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), 98.
26. Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, 1; Colin Rowe, "Robert Venturi and the Yale
Mathematics Building," Oppositions (Fall 1976): 14-15; Peter Eisenman, Intro-
duction to Robert Stern "Yale 1950-1965," Oppositions (Fall 1974): 35.
27. The student is quoted by Robert Stern in "Yale 1950-1965," Oppositions, 50. For
the favorable factors that maximized the effect of Paul Rudolph's leadership, see
46-47ff.
28. See Stem, "Yale 1950-65," 56ff. Venturi and Scott Brown had held their famous
studio on Las Vegas in the Fall of 1968. They had published the much attacked
article "A significance for A & P parking lots, or learning from Las Vegas," in the
Architectural Forum (March 1968): 37-43ff. The Las Vegas studio was followed
by the equally controversial studio on Levittown: "Remedial Housing for Archi-
tects, or Learning from Levittown" in 1969, when Denise Scott Brown joined her
husband officially as co-occupant of the chair.
29. Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, 1.
30. Moore himself admitted that the building would have to be rather large and that
Hillhouse Avenue was already "a street of monuments" (quoted by Ellen Perry
Berkeley, "Mathematics at Yale" Forum (July-August 1970): 64). To accommo-
date the demand for 31,500 sq. feet of usable space, the maximum square footage
allowed was 60,000 and maximum ground coverage 12,000.
31. Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, 2.
32. Vincent Scully, "Preface" in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 11 and 13-14.
33. Details in Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, 100ft.
34. Confidential communication to the author.
35. Architectural Forum "Mathematics at Yale: Readers respond" (October 1970): 65.
36. Charles Moore, "Conclusion," Oppositions (Fall 1976): 20-21.
37. Moore in Forum, "Mathematics," 66.
38. Forum, "Mathematics," 65, 66.
39. Berkeley, "Mathematics," 65.
40. Forum, "Mathematics," 65, emphasis mine. This echoed Paul Rudolph, quoted as
having said that "Venturi's architecture is already built, it's already there. If Venturi
accepts the existing cityscape, then he doesn't need to build anymore" in John
Cook and Heinrich Klotz, editors, Conversations with Architects (New York:
Praeger, 1973), 248.
41. Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, 5.
42. Rowe, "Robert Venturi," 20, 15, 18 and ff.
502

43. Venturi and Rauch's design was indeed economical. Yale's Director of Building
and Grounds, a member of the jury, gave economics as one of the reasons for his
enthusiasm: the university had estimated a S 5 million budget, but Venturi's could
possibly come in at S 4.5 (Berkeley: "Mathematics," 66).
44. Venturi in Cook and Klotz, Conversations, 248,258.
45. Rowe, "Robert Venturi," 16 and 19, emphasis mine.
46. Moore and Pyle, Yale Mathematics, vifl.
47. Forum, "Mathematics," 66.
48. Venturi was to share the appointment with James Stirling and, in 1969, with Denise
Scott Brown (his wife and associate), as well.
49. Four private residences (including the famous house for his mother in 1963), a few
restorations and additions, a nurses' association headquarters, a fire station, and the
largest one, the Guild House for the elderly in Philadelphia, completed in 1965.
Among the competitions was the Walker and Dunlop office building at Transporta-
tion Square in Washington, with the firm of Caudill Rowlett Scott, which won first
prize but was rejected by the Art Commission (t 968).
50. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las
Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1972).
51. Scott Brown, personal communication to the author.
52. In a twenty-page interview with Venturi and Scott Brown for their 1973 book John
Cook and Heinrich Klotz devoted seven pages to the Yale project, which had been
reviewed in the major American architectural journals and included, thereafter, in
the exhibitions of the firm's work in the United States and abroad, generating more
reviews. By 1973, besides, the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown were more and
more frequently mentioned by architectural art, and "culture" critics in the daily
press of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Houston, Lima, and Madrid, in campus
newspapers, and in periodicals such as Newsweek and Life. This, however, was due
much more to the "shock value" of Learning from Las Vegas than to the Yale com-
petition!
53. Scott Brown, personal communication to the author.
54. Izenour, personal cornmunication to the author. Despite the stir raised by James
Stirling, who was one of the rejected competitors, the winner was maintained.
Venturi's project received the blessings of Prince Charles, who had become a
Trustee of the Gallery, and therefore part of "the client," after having contributed
to kill the contrasted scheme by a British firm, winner by default of a previous con-
test. The complex story is told by the British architectural newsletter Blueprint
(May 1987): 4.
55. Michael Graves, interview in GlobalArchitecture, Special Issue on Graves (1982):
5.
56. Just before the competition, Graves appears to have had the same number of built
projects to his credit as Venturi had had before Yale (20 for Graves, 19 for
Venturi, with or without Rauch, including 3 urban planning projects). However,
since Graves had started his practice in Princeton in 1964, the same year that
Venturi and Rauch had founded their partnership, both firms had been 15 years in
practice. By 1979, the firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown had realized 53
various projects, including 16 urban design studies, as well as 8 installation designs
for important exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia. The work of the firm had
been shown by itself, nationally and internationally, in nine exhibitions, against only
one for Graves; the latter, in turn, had been more active than Venturi in collective
exhibits (he participated 23 times, in the U.S. and abroad, and Venturi 16, 6 times
in the same exhibitions as Graves).
 503

57. Graves, communication to the author.

58. Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Building Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 67-68. Michael Graves, personal
commtmication to the author.
59. Douglas Davis, "Building with symbols," Newsweek (1 September 1980): 82.
60. Lisa Fleming Lee, "Building the building," Leading Edge (October 1982): 65.
61. Personal communication to the author.
62. Burgee says: "They called one day and asked us ... I guess they wanted to give legit-
imacy to the whole thing and I said no, it takes too much time. They insisted that
they wanted to pay us but I told them 'Look, you can't afford us, but if you come
here to New York we'll do it. You can bring us a salmon for our fees.' They
accepted." Wundram's recollection is that after the jury accepted to go with
Johnson's strong advocacy of Graves's design, Johnson was so amazed that a quasi-
governmental body would take such risks that he said "Look, I'll come to Portland
to present the decision and I'll do it for free." The jury members insisted they
wanted to pay him and Johnson said "No, you can't afford me." He had just won the
Pritzker Prize, says Wundram, and he was in a pretty good mood: "We were
leaving, waiting for the elevator, Philip stuck his head out of the door again and said
'I know the fee I want: a Columbia River salmon;' John Burgee came out and said
'Make it two!' That's how they came to Portland, all expenses paid, of course, but
no professional fee involved at all." Johnson and Burgee were roundly criticized for
their lack of professionalism in official quarters.
63. Wundram recalls that the designers on most of the other teams were local and not
well-known, they tended to do the kind of architecture with which the Mayor was
"totally bored." The fourth "semi-finalist" presented by Johnson and Burgee to the
jury when they arrived to New York was the well-known' modernist Gunnar
Birkerts. Personal communication by Edward Wundram.
64. Graves, personal communication.
65. Interview with the author.
66. Quoted by Dean, Andrea O. Dean, "How Competitors View Competitions," AIA
Journal, 1980 (Aug.): 56-60.
67. Quotation from Lee, "Building," 66. The idea of the second round was "that the
two schemes should be equal in cost and floor space so that we could judge them
more fairly," said the city's director of general services (Dean, "Competitors view,"
60). Also, the jury wanted to judge Graves's design, shorn of its decorations, for its
basic structure. Erickson questioned the changes in Graves's entry; Graves con-
siders that he had already won the competition and should have been reconsidered
alone, since only he was asked to make modifications.
68. Doubilet, Susan "Conversation with Graves" Progressive Architecture (February
1983): 114.
69. Failing, Patricia "If Gloria Swanson were a building," ARTnews (September 1982):
111-114.
70. Doubilet, "Conversation," 110.
71. Ibid., 110.
72. Dean "Competitors View," 57.
73. ArchitecturalDesign, 1980, #50: 139.
74. Doubilet, Susan, Editorial, ProgressiveArchitecture (February 1983): 108.
75. Except for the lobby and the public spaces on the ground floor, the interiors were
not reviewed, for the good reason that they were not part of the competition: a
Portland firm, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, won the interior design commission (in a
504

competition that was not even mentioned by the press). In a thoughtful and very
critical review, the historian Kurt Forster acknowledged that the building "pos-
sesses an undeniable presence and radiates a power of its own." But Forster, like
others before and after him, noted that Graves "conceives of architecture strictly in
terms of planar articulation," that he had "progressively drained his architectural
ideas of physical presence in favor of graphic signs. Disembodied and abstract,
these signs quite willingly lend themselves to logo-like reduction, because they are
far more removed from the bodily qualities of architecture than the modernist
buildings tend to be" (in Skyline (January 1983): 16, 18). Writing in 1983, Forster
did not believe that Graves's latest buildings would change from the "flat" approach
that he thought Graves transferred from the collages and murals that were his "true
field of experimentation."
76. Patti Goldberger, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Postmodern Age (New
York: Penguin, 1985), 317.
77. The competition set up by Humana consisted of five invited submissions by
Graves's office, Cesar Pelli and Associates of New Haven, Murphy/Jahn Asso-
ciates of Chicago, Ulrich Franzen/K. Kroeger and Associates of New York, and
Norman Foster and Associates of London. Richard Meier, also invited to par-
ticipate, withdrew before the design stage. The jury of five consisted of Humana
corporate officers "that included architects Jan~es J. Waiters, AIA, vice-president
and Robert B. Harris, AIA, design coordinator" (Record [July 1982]: 59).
78. Goldberger, On the Rise, 319.
79. See David L. Gilbert, "The Portland building," in Marder, CriticalEdge, 168.
80. Communication to the author.
81. Thus, David Calder Richardson, who won the competition for the Gulf South
Research Institute in Baton Rouge, declared to Andrea Dean that neither clients
nor commissions followed: "No one cared, although Gulf South won a regional and
state A I A award." Dean, "Competitors View," 58.
82. Ibid., 58.
83. Kolm adds with regret that the organized profession is not now and has never been
strong enough to decide a boycott of competitions, which might in any case be in
violation of anti-trust laws. Communication to the author.
84. Interview with the author.
85. On these "vernacular" concepts, see my Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architec-
tural Change in Late Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), chapter 4.
86. Communication to the author.