ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the claim that competitions represent a form of utopia. It argues that, while at face value they present an image of creative experiment and formal freedom, they do so on the back of an apparatus that can be read as deeply exploitative. One of the most acute analyses of utopias is that of David Harvey, who identifies two prevalent forms of utopias. The privileging of the architectural object in the architectural competition is an inevitability of a system that relies on drawings as the primary mode of representation and evaluation. Architectural competitions are not going to be abandoned completely; but they surely can be adjusted in their processes. The clue to a revised approach may lie in David Harvey’s reformulation as necessarily combining the temporal and the spatial, so bringing the social to the formal, and the dynamic to the static.
