ORO Editions

LA+ INTERRUPTION is the fourth international design competition we’ve conducted. We believe there is great value in these competitions. They offer designers opportunities to develop their own ideas and methods, and then see their work in the context of their peers. In the feature essay for this issue, Katya Crawford—who, together with Kathleen Kambic, is currently writing a book on the subject—champions ideas competitions as a vital element of contemporary design culture. For her, they are less about “winning” and more about self-development, and despite—or perhaps because of—the physical and mental pain of producing a viable competition entry, she argues they are exalted and ultimately pleasurable experiences. We agree.

Unlike most competitions, LA+ makes a point of publishing the results of its competitions and interviewing the jury to get their feedback. For example, in her response Fiona Raby of the Parsons School of Design In New York says that for her the most important and appealing submissions were those that sought empathy with the nonhuman. Mark Raggatt of ARM Architecture in Australia asks, “What would a city of empathy really look like?” Raggatt then turns the table on the design professions by calling for interruptions to their complacency. Rania Ghosn of Design Earth and MIT, underscores the act of design as a material and political interruption of the status quo. Martin Rein Cano of TOPOTEK 1 in Berlin explains that in his own practice he seeks to enhance the latent energy of places, noting that this often emerges from working with, instead of against, conflict. Finally, Jason Ho of SCUT in Guangzhou, reminds us that bigger is certainly not always better. For Ho, the most incisive interruptions are often the smallest, and as such he urges designers to aim for greater intimacy and precision in their work.

Ho’s point is well taken, and it must be said there isn’t a lot of precision in the majority of entries in this competition. And yes, we can and should be critical of this work for this is another useful function of these competitions. In entering a competition you put your work up for peer review. Even though competitions such as this do allow for and encourage speculation and provocation, an ideas competition is not a license for incomprehensible vagary, or superficiality. Entering an ideas competition means developing and taking responsibility for ideas. Unlike professional practice, the ideas competition calls upon entrants to spend maximum time with design ideation and less on technical resolution. That said, ideas also need to be “resolved” and, unless the brief demands otherwise, juries also expect ideas to be grounded in at least a basic awareness of feasibility.

The three winning designs each balance the tension between idea and reality, but with very different degrees of emphasis across the spectrum between the two. Xiangyu Liu, Chengxi Zha, and Cengyuan Xu’s winning design—a proposal for a massive carbon sequestration curtain bisecting Manhattan— has clearly benefited most from the lack of practicality that an ideas competition affords. In second place, Jake Boswell’s proposal to tap the latent energy of dams using a mix of available technologies strikes a more even balance. The thirdplace entry by Antoine Apruzzese, Thomas Roche, and Anne Klepal is almost banal in its buildability, yet what it lacks in terms of formal and technical experimentation it makes up for with plausible political potential.

In addition to identifying winners, it is important to have a sizeable batch of honorable mentions. These are entries that some, but not all judges, considered, for one reason or another, to be outstanding. A straight-up list of these shows the range and richness of the entries this competition attracted: a cityscale “play carpet,” an algorithm for DIY renovations, rewilding in Milan, a Christo-like covering for oil refineries, a dystopia of “mole people” mining water under Vegas, a postindustrial nursery in China, a memorial to the lost agricultural way of life in China, the relocation of the Lebanese parliament into ruins, a reworking of the geometry of slave plantations, and finally, a happy twist on sea level rise in Lisbon. On the one hand this range is exciting, on the other it made for difficult judging and as we reflect on the results it is possible to conclude that our brief was too open-ended.

Finally, there is the marvelous kaleidoscope of the Salon des Refusés – literally, the exhibition of rejects. In this section we gather submissions that were of real interest to one or more judges but were ultimately rejected by the jury. Be that as it may, in the Salon we find a beautiful array of seeds that one day might grow a wilder, more exotic garden.

LA+ congratulates not only the authors of all the published projects but all entrants. Everyone who took the trouble to enter such a competition deserves to be acknowledged because in being as open-ended as it was, this was not an easy brief. And if there is just one thing that we hope that all entrants got out of this exercise it is a small taste of inventing your own projects, a taste of interrupting the status quo, where we otherwise wait passively for someone else to tell us what to do. LA+ also thanks the jury – a truly interesting line up of practitioners and academics whose work has proven the value of being brave enough to interrupt.