The built environment and universal design: are architectural competitions a qualified instrument to a better consideration of the diversity dimension impairment?

Abstract

Procedures of building planning and delivery are of crucial importance in generating better and more inclusive built enviroments (named “architecture” from here on) following the idea of Design for All/Universal Design. In contrast to other “products” of the everyday life, architecture is comparably complex in generation and maintenance, given the multitude of stakeholders involved in generation and operation, the longevity of interventions, the involved cost, and its role in ecological, economical and social dimension of mankind. Needless to say, architecture has a significant impact on society aspects, and thus also on the different diversity dimensions of societies. To ensure high quality in interventions toward the built enviroment, the instrument “architectural competitions” has been established decades, if not centuries ago. Today, usual architectural competitions target the call for high-quality design ideas or suggestions for specific requirements within the built enviroment. Architectural competitions differ in their scope, their procedural and organisational structure, the number of competition entries, and other methodological aspects. Typical timeframes for architectural competitions take 6 to 8 weeks of preperation work and 8 to 15 weeks of time for competition entry developments, and – in most cases – the winning project is intented to be realized/built. This paper presents concept, method, and results of an empirical study pertaining to the relation of architectural competitions and the consideration of Universal Design/Design for All aspects within the competition. Thereby, both the call for entries and the overall provided information, as well as a comparable large number of competition entries was examined in a structured process: In a first step, we generated a checklist template that targeted different aspects related to Universal Design/Design for All in the framework of the competition call for tender. The checklist was also adapted for evaluation of aspects of Design for All within examined competition entries. In a second step, recently conducted architectural competitions were selected. For these competitions we collected both the call for tender documents, as well as selected competition entries. Subsequently, the checklist was applied on the collected data, to generate both quantitative results and to identify good and bad practices regarding the consideration of universal design aspects within the competitions. 15 different architectural competitions and 76 competition entries were analyzed. The consideration of Universal Design aspects in the entries happened mostly rudimentary, but some specific best practice and worst practice cases could be identified. A major finding of the overall evaluation procedure is that – disappointingly – there is a lot of improvement potential for a better consideration of Design for All/Universal Design aspects in this early phase of building delivery processes.