Of the architectural commissions available today, few are as prestigious, or as high stakes, as those associated with a museum or cultural institution. While competitions are the norm for these commissions, the process has been challenging for reasons including nepotism, unclear briefs, uncompensated labor for participants who don’t win, and entries that can’t actually get built or don’t fully address institutional need.
Within the last 30 years, a new field of consultants ranging from cultural strategists to competition organizers has emerged to make the process more fair and effective for all parties involved. These consultants have become substantial power brokers in the field of architecture and have remade commissions in the process, serving as hands-on shepherds of capital projects and, ultimately, curators of architects. Their ultimate goal is building more thrilling, ambitious buildings and discourse-defining architecture. Is it working?
What consultants bring to the competition sphere depends on their specific services—strategic planning, architect selection, competition administration—but revolve around a core theme: Completing a capital project is an extremely intensive undertaking that benefits from someone with architecture expertise. An institution’s leadership might only commission one building during its tenure, and likely has little experience doing so, so bringing in an outside expert to lay the groundwork before any sort of design happens can help smooth the process. Contrary to a common assumption of people outside the field of architecture, choosing an architect isn’t the key first step to a commission—it starts with developing a robust brief. “Architects are not there to be diagnosticians, like a doctor,” said Susanna Sirefman, who in 2008 founded Dovetail Design Strategists, a consultancy that has worked with Storm King, Jacob’s Pillow, and the New York Public Library. “They’re there to solve the problem.” And that problem needs to be well articulated and clearly defined in ways that architects can understand. “The narrative of the project is absolutely fundamental,” said Malcolm Reading, whose eponymous firm has run more than 200 competitions worldwide since opening in the mid-1990s.
The rise of museum consultants is a result of cultural institution projects becoming more nuanced, argues András Szántó, author of the 2023 book Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects and a cultural strategist who has consulted for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York. While museums were once places to view art and store collections, they are now more audience-focused, with amenities like fine dining, cafes, shops, education centers, performance spaces, and lecture halls. “The whole puzzle of what a museum is has become much more complex,” Szántó said. There are more expectations about how a museum relates to its surroundings, presents itself to the public, addresses sustainability, and integrates accessibility and DEI. Because of this, “not every architect, frankly, is ready for a museum project,” he added. Szántó (whose academic training is in sociology and art, not architecture) describes his work as figuring out the “software” of a building—e.g., the vision, the objectives, the operating principles—before architects come in to design the “hardware.” To him, the sequence is essential. “I feel that too often these projects, especially [those that are] international, start directly with an architectural competition,” he said.
Shaping a Cultural Competition
Before the Kansas City art museum Nelson-Atkins embarked on a recent expansion, Szántó and his team held workshops, retreats, and listening sessions with the museum’s board, spoke with employees, and conducted community outreach with the museum’s audience. Through this rigorous process they were able to explore an array of growth scenarios for the institution to understand if a capital project was needed.
After determining that an expansion was necessary and a competition would be beneficial, the consultants worked with the architecture firm Cooper Robertson—which often consults ahead of competitions—on spatial planning for the project. This work clarified the project’s program and brought it into sync with anticipated capital funding. “We’re seeking to, in spatial terms, define a project that meets an institution’s ambitions and goals,” said Bruce Davis, a partner at Cooper Robertson. “The space-planning process is very helpful at the beginning because the project scope could be much larger than what can be supported. Doing this type of study early on, before a competition, is really a great strategy to ensure that the project scope and budget are in alignment and achievable.”
With the groundwork established, Malcolm Reading then designed the competition parameters, which included an open call through a website portal with materials “aimed at the right architectural responder,” Reading said. In this case, it was architect-led teams. “That’s a really important change to what happened 30 years ago, when everybody picked the architect, then assembled a team around that,” Reading said. “The structural and MEP services are more demanding, so when we go out for a call, it’s for an integrated team led by an architect. It addresses the client’s needs much better.” Additionally, Reading has noticed that adaptive reuse is becoming more common than ground-up new construction for cultural institutions, which also requires the addition of more design specialists to these teams.
Based on the submissions, Reading and the museum then selected a shortlist of six finalists, which were invited to prepare concept proposals in an intensive phase that included site visits, meetings with the board, workshops, the presentations of initial concepts to the museums’ advisers, and feedback, then the development of presentations and deliverables. From their proposals, the museum selected the winning entry, which was from a team Weiss/ Manfredi led.
Playing Matchmaker
If the process sounds time-consuming, that’s because it is designed to be that way. “It’s extremely demanding on the teams that we ask to enter these projects, but also it’s demanding on the client,” Reading said. These high-pressure intensives are also tests of a firm’s culture, which can be just as important to the success of a project as an architect’s design chops. “Every organization is completely different on many different levels, so we want to get to know how specific individuals work,” Sirefman said about the firms she shortlists for her clients. “We think about three main things: experience, vision, and chemistry.… Personalities really play a huge role in the success of an architectural project.” To understand this element, consultants spend ample time getting to know firms.
To Pamela Tatge, the executive and artistic director of Jacob’s Pillow, a school and performance center in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, good chemistry was paramount in the construction of a new theater. She worked with Sirefman to develop an RFP and design team shortlist. Tatge was able to customize the brief to the institution’s needs, requesting that design teams include a specialty theater consultant and Indigenous artist. She was pleased later to have many viable options to choose from—a marked difference from when the organization managed a competition internally for a 2018 renovation of another building on its campus. “We didn’t think to visit an architect’s office as a part of the review process, and we learned so much [this time] about the team of people we’d be working with by seeing them in their own habitat,” Tatge said.
A Question of Equity
The curated shortlist is intended to be fairer to architects. Instead of competing against, say, 1,700 firms—which is how many firms submitted to the Guggenheim Helsinki competition in 2014—they are put up against six or seven. The odds of winning are simply better, and there’s more intentionality across the board. “Design projects take years, and it’s often some sort of a forced marriage. You want to be sure it doesn’t feel forced but actually becomes a really pleasant relationship over the years,” said David van der Leer, a cultural consultant who is currently working with the Brooklyn Museum and the Nieuwe Instituut and convened a conference on the ethics of competitions when he directed the Van Alen Institute. “Only selecting based on the design, I think, is incredibly dangerous. That’s why I don’t love anonymous selections.”
Architects, however, are ambivalent. There’s still the challenge of resources and spending more time and money than the stipend they receive for participation. Firms whisper among themselves about the demanding nature of these shortlisted competitions and will or won’t consider participating depending on who is running it. The client matters, too. Florian Idenburg of SO – IL, who is currently working with Malcolm Reading, said that while the process is “relatively intense,” it’s very fair and equal. “You know what you’re getting yourself into, and I think it’s a very level playing field.” Where it tends to get murkier, in his opinion, is when firms are asked to participate in something that’s more like an RFP and RFQ. “It is very unclear what the process is,” he said.
SO – IL is selective about which competitions it participates in and only goes for opportunities where it feels it has a strong chance of winning. This could mean a very close alignment of the project goals and the client’s point of view, or having a connection to an institution. He thinks that institutions have a sense of the architects they like, and even if they do create a longer shortlist with more names, the darlings have a better shot. “If you’re not in that initial list and you don’t have a few advocates for you within an organization, it tends to not make sense [to enter],” Idenburg said.
Thomas Robinson, a cofounder of LEVER Architecture, which is part of the winning team that will design the Portland Museum of Art’s expansion, is also highly selective about what the firm goes after. He tends to look for competitions organized by people who have a track record of realizing buildings and for projects that can demonstrate what the firm is capable of. And an invitation to participate is also a vote of confidence. Even if the firm loses, the design exercise helps with publicity, and ideas can leapfrog to the next commission. “Every marketing pursuit is a risk,” Robinson said. “But every time you pursue a goal or a particular design, there’s value in that pursuit.”
The Consultant–Curator
While the invited competition was a move to more fairly compensate architects for their work, the stipends rarely match the level of resources a firm invests in them. Uncompensated labor remains a challenge. And for small firms that don’t have extra staff to spare, this is a nonstarter. “Architects can’t help themselves,” said Jhaelen Hernandez-Eli, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former vice president of capital projects, who recently opened his own consultancy. “If you give them a problem to solve, they will throw everything and anything at it.” He would know: For ten years, he worked on competition entries for Diller Scofidio + Renfro and estimates that he submitted over 300 entries during his tenure. As a result, for the Met, he designed a procurement process that dispensed with competition. Instead, he developed a workshop-based system that was directed at getting to know the firms he was interested in collaborating with.
“When you’re at a museum, commissioning an architect is an acquisition. It is a curatorial act,” Hernandez-Eli said. “The overarching agenda when you see this as a curatorial act is to bring new voices to the table because you believe that their perspective is really important for this moment. But how can you do that when your entire value system is based around risk mitigation? Then you end up with voices that have been doing this for 30 to 40 years.” The workshops included sessions where the architects gave lectures about their work and studio-like assignments. Ultimately, these were avenues to see if the firm’s values aligned with the Met’s and resulted in commissions from Frida Escobedo, WHY, Nader Tehrani, and Peterson Rich Office—practices that are younger and smaller in scale than an institution the size of the Met would typically commission. “It was really important to me that we treated our artists and our architects with severe respect and not treating architecture as a commodity or a service alone,” Hernandez-Eli said.
On the other side, firms appreciate how this approach helps them build good rapport with the potential client and better understand its goals. “This kind of access, to the museum, to existing and archival drawings, and to the Met stakeholders who would form our collective client group, is highly unique,” said Miriam Peterson, a partner at Peterson Rich Office, which was commissioned by the Met to design dining and retail spaces as well as a special exhibition gallery for the museum. The process didn’t begin with solving a problem but framed how an architectural project could help the museum better serve the public. “It allowed us to form a careful thesis about the institution and the potential impact of the proposed project at multiple scales.”
More of the Same?
Some architects, however, see the invited competitions and curated shortlists as another form of gatekeeping that comes down to the biases of personal preference. “What’s crucial is that they truly are anonymous and they truly are open for everyone,” said Samuli Miettinen, a founding partner of the Finnish firm JKMM. (Incidentally, the firm caught its big break by winning an open competition to design a library in Turku nearly 30 years ago; it designed its entry after-hours while team members were still employed at other firms.) He notices that international competitions still tend to attract the same names and that there is a wide disparity between how different countries run competitions because of differing regulations. “There should be wilder cards, and more dark horses should be appreciated, because things won’t evolve without that kind of courage,” Miettinen argued.
Within the shifts happening with architecture competitions is a question about the nature of competition itself. What is it for? Procurement is not the only goal. “There needs to be a kind of energetic, dynamic discussion in architecture about the way the world is changing, what’s relevant, and what people are thinking about,” said Claire Weisz, a founding partner of WXY, which was part of the winning team for Storm King Art Center’s new visitor entry sequence and the Africatown International Design Idea Competition. “The issue is that there are few competitions that actually are meant to do that.”
Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.
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