Do Architectural Design Competitions Make a Difference?

Everyone likes to win an award, but design competitions in the United States are, for many architects, a scourge. Some exist as speculative exercises, prompting designers to find solutions to difficult social problems; submitting is time and labor-intensive—and often unpaid—and after rounds of jurying and exhibiting, the final product lives on only in a firm’s digital portfolio or in yesterday’s newspaper. But in Chicago, a design competition called Come Home Chicago, launched at the end of 2022 by the city’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), was trying to change that. Amidst a housing crisis, in a city where vacant lots in marginalized communities present myriad opportunities to rebuild much-needed homes, Come Home gathered new takes on existing housing typologies (including multiunit, townhouse, and single-family) with the goal of actually getting them built in bulk.

Unlike speculative competitions, Come Home had an entire strategy built into their contest: As Dwell covered last year, CAC planned to provide the winners with a stipend that could pay for construction documents, and pair them with developers (rather than sending architects to source a developer on their own) to start construction on winning homes at the end of 2023. The city, the site said, was, “committing to the delivery of 30 to 100 affordable units.” It was a real plan to address housing, vacancy, affordability, and good design—all wrapped into one, thoughtful competition. In March 2023, CAC exhibited the 42 shortlisted entries, but afterward, it seemed to vanish from the public. On October 9th of this year, the competition abruptly reemerged with a brand new name—Missing Middle Infill Housing—and four winning entries: Rowhouses by Future Firm, a six-flat by ParkFowler Plus, a single-family by Vladimir Radutny Architects, and a three-flat by Dirk Denison Architects.

In the October 9 announcement, the competition’s new name came with a different strategy. There is no mention of pairing winning architects with developers or providing a stipend; the stated goal—to build these homes en masse across vacant lots—is now a figment of memory. None of these homes have been built; no holes dug or foundations laid. What is lost, sources say, isn’t just good design—it’s the promise of streamlining housing construction that might chip away at the bureaucratic hurdles that make housing so difficult and expensive to construct. Come Home’s current state speaks to the limitations of competition-as-solution: when the design problem transcends the lifespan of an elected position, what’s needed is a committed framework and financial backing to bring solutions to life.

Chana Haouzi, founder of Architecture for Public Benefit, entered the Come Home competition with refreshed excitement. “I love the optimism of competition. But sometimes it’s so much energy that design practices put in and then don’t really get materialized,” she says. “We were drawn to this one because of its call to be built and to make a difference at the city scale; the city that was making the call, rather than a private institution, which I think is a little bit different.” Hers was one of the finalists exhibited at CAC in March 2023.

Updates from the CAC were sparse—Haouzi says she was told via email in April 2023 that the timeline had been adjusted and the project was paused, and didn’t hear anything else until May 2024. “I think we weren’t hearing anything because there was some uncertainty about how the project would be moving forward,” she says. “So it was actually a long period of time with not much information.”

That long stretch was due to a change in elected administration: Come Home was an initiative from Chicago’s previous mayoral administration, led by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and her appointed DPD commissioner Maurice Cox. The competition was created to address the ongoing outmigration that has particularly affected the city’s South and West Sides. Working with the CAC, which assembled and convened the jury and later exhibited the shortlisted designs, the competition would create a private-public partnership by bringing together architects with governance and regulatory experts, alongside developers. It wasn’t a guarantee that these homes would be built, but at its best, Come Home promised to create the preconditions that would make it more probable.

But last fall, Chicagoans decided not to reelect Lightfoot; Cox left his office shortly thereafter. Come Home evolved to Missing Middle Infill Housing under the new mayor, Brandon Johnson. Instead of building the winning designs, the city issued a broad Request for Proposals for 44 vacant lots in one West Side neighborhood as a pilot program; Haouzi says she only recently was informed about this RFP. “DPD was involved in the initial competition and we are still working with them to a lesser extent on the pilot program,” says Eleanor Gorski, CEO of CAC. “Due to the change in administration in Chicago, the timeline on the competition shifted because of a reprioritization by the City.”

The “lesser extent,” explains Michael Wood, Senior Curator at CAC, puts its focus on marketing. “The new administration is looking at the designs as advisory,” Wood says. A developer can respond to the city’s RFP with any home design by an architect, “but the city is still encouraging that they reach out to those architects who are well read into the situation,” he adds. Wood has attended two Missing Middle RFP predevelopment calls with developer attendees to pitch the four entry winners as possible designs to develop.

But like Haouzi, the promise of construction was the differentiating factor that drove some architects to engage in Come Home in the first place. Winning team Future Firm designed a series of row houses using a pre-engineered steel truss system that would allow for rapid deployment of multiple homes. While principal Ann Lui says they rarely submit to competitions, “this [competition] felt valuable to us because housing of this kind is so sorely needed, and public-private partnerships of this kind have the potential to make things happen in a powerful way that individual developers or clients do not.” Lui continues: “All of us were betting on the competition’s public-private partnership: the city, CAC, and future developers as potential clients.”

Both Lui and Jennifer Park, founder and principal of winners ParkFowler Plus, emphasized that bringing the city to the table could have demonstrated that good design isn’t only about aesthetics, but can actually make it cheaper and faster to build housing. Design, at its best, can help untangle why we are in a housing crisis to begin with: Vladimir Radutny’s winning proposal, for example, was designed to minimize labor costs and uses prefabricated walls, floors, sheathing, and paneling. “Instead of bringing in different trades that you would need to build a house, you would remove an amount of labor by combining it all into a system,” Radutny says. It’s expensive, he continues, to just build one or two of these homes. “You need to build multiples. You need to build a block, because the economy of scale kicks in, and that’s what will bring the cost down,” he adds. An economy of scale will add more homes and make them less expensive to build; that cost can be passed onto the consumer without sacrificing high-quality construction or design. But including city building, zoning, and public safety departments in any design competition could address permitting and zoning problems, two other issues that often slow construction.

This is an issue that plagues cities across the country, not just Chicago. In New York, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, alongside AIA New York, launched Big Ideas for Small Lots in February 2019 with the intent of addressing housing scarcity via “odd lots”—the result of “mapping quirks” or “remnants of adjacent land sales,” according to the New York Times—that wouldn’t support typical housing design. There’s been radio silence since the competition ended in May 2019.

Haouzi, whose submission did not win, suggests that if American cities are committed to innovative buildings and land use, they might instead consider workshopping new housing typologies publicly, inviting architects, contractors, developers, homeowners, and regulators into the same space. It would avoid projects “getting stuck,” she says, by identifying zoning or permitting problems in a supportive space wherein individuals at the city, client, or developer side could get advice prior to submitting for permits or zoning changes.

Haouzi prototyped the idea during her time as a Rose Fellow for the city of Boston, where her team selected a group of eight homeowners who wanted to construct ADUs and put them through these workshops. “It felt like a very safe space to ask questions, and it felt collaborative,” she says. While it only resulted in two permitted ADUs, importantly, it revealed to the city the roadblocks to implementing innovative ideas in a rigid, code-enforced environment. Now, she says, the city of Boston is about to implement zoning amendments to make it much easier for anyone to build an ADU.

“There’s so many different forms proposed [in Come Home]—mass timber, modular—but when it comes down to building, there’s always roadblocks,” she says. In order to be successful, she contends, leadership (regardless of administrative turnover) needs an appetite to see it through. Under the new mayor, the Missing Middle RFP doesn’t require developers to choose from the winning designs; without pairing architects with a developer, there’s no incentive for the former to prove that their ideas would improve the speed of construction or regulatory processes. “Sometimes the best proof of good design is the design itself,” adds Haouzi. It’s why the past partnership model was so important, she says, “because if we’re talking about modular, prefabricated housing, inspections or getting a permit would be a different process from the way housing is permitted now.”

Alongside attending predevelopment calls, the CAC is taking other steps to encourage the adoption of these designs: they’ve published a catalog of all entries that highlight the four winning projects, which, says Wood, provides details like floor plans and some technical details. In an email, DPD official Dawveed Scully states that opportunities to build the winners are being explored. It’s not the end of Come Home’s original ambitions, but it serves also as a reminder of what could have been, and likely, a foreteller of what will pass as “innovation” in years to come.

“It’s why you’re getting what you call the ‘fast casual’ housing that’s out there, right? Because it’s already been done over and over, and developers know it’s going to get approved,” says Park. While she expressed her excitement over winning for their spacious six-flat design, she’s channeling her frustration with the competition into finding a developer. “The onus is on us as architects,” she adds. “Without a solid partnership, we’re fending for ourselves if we want to get it done. We believe that this can make an impact if done well. But architects, we’re going to have to find the right lots, the right communities and developers; and I’m committed to doing that.” 

An earlier version of this piece inaccurately mentioned the Standard Plan program in Los Angeles.