Eric Naslund, FAIA, AIACC Design Awards Jury Chair
arcCA: What broad themes did you see in this year’s submissions?
Naslund: Somebody described it as the triumph of modernism. I am not sure if that is a larger trend in the field or just who submitted. I was on the AIA Arizona jury recently and noticed the same thing.
arcCA: You gave one honor award and 19 merit awards. Why only one honor?
Naslund: I think that the honor award rose to a higher standard; it is the one project that we were unanimous on.
arcCA: Several of the projects were either civic in nature or had a clear social purpose. Were you looking for that?
Naslund: We were looking for good work regardless of its program. We were interested in what the architect contributed to the final outcome. This is a design awards program for the architectural profession, after all. Any design problem begins with a set of conditions that an architect has little or no control over—site, program, and budget, for instance. What is important is what one does with these “givens.” Our interest as the jury centered on what you did with the cards you were dealt, not with what the client brought you. To judge based on the program is not really fair, nor is it indicative of the design intervention.
arcCA: You gave an Accessory Dwelling Unit Manual an award. Was that a first?
Naslund: That was an urban design award, and those are new to the California Council. It was a situation in which the architect participated in a way that was larger than any individual building. When you evaluate urban design awards, you look at them differently. There is a broader agenda.
arcCA: In some cases did a clear plan or diagram tip the scale?
Naslund: The award winners did all things well. It wasn’t just a good plan but also a good relationship to context, an elegant solution for the program at hand, and a compelling place. It was all those things. Some would do a couple of things well, but miss on others.
arcCA: Can you run through how you reviewed and eliminated projects?
Naslund: In the first round, each juror reviewed each binder. From there, we kept a project for further consideration if any juror wanted it in for any reason. The second round, we looked at the remaining projects again and laid them out on the table. If a juror thought it should go to the third round they would tag it. Projects with two or more tags were held over for further discussion. At this point, there were intense discussions, project by project. The final awards were a consensus view that everyone could support.
arcCA: So, there was no horse trading?
Naslund: I have heard of that in juries but have never witnessed it myself, and it didn’t happen this time. This jury was eclectic in terms of its taste, and nobody really pushed an aesthetic agenda. We were open to a wide range of ways of making architecture. I think that’s healthy.
arcCA: What could be done better?
Naslund: Many people don’t tell their story in an effective way. They need to look at their submissions like a design problem. Throwing a bunch of photos together generally won’t win. Any jury needs to know how the project resolves issues of program, construction, context, and site. The text should be succinct. The submissions that did a good job of communicating issues and solutions and documenting them became the compelling schemes. I am sure that there were projects that might have been in consideration longer and perhaps won an award, but the story was incomplete or missing altogether. We want to know, of all the potential solutions to your design problem, why was the one you landed on the best one?
Hugh Hardy, FAIA, AIACC Design Awards Juror
arcCA: Could you talk about the idea of architecture as a language? This was something you mentioned in the jury discussions.
Hardy: Architecture is like any language that you can read. You can tell when it was built. You can read the motivation of the people who built it. You can understand how well it was built, but more importantly, you can discover by looking at buildings what brought them into being. For generations, there was a consistent language of architecture, which the modernists threw away. And we can see that schism. Modernism was the enemy of cities, the enemy of ornamentation, the enemy of history, really. It is now being embraced again, the clarity and the discipline, which is a form of classicism. The interesting thing about practicing architecture now is that everything is possible—it’s all going on at once. The diversity of approach—I do not use the word style, that’s a trap—is healthy. Rather than one orthodoxy, there are many possibilities, and the profession is richer. This program and the awards do not reflect a single point of view, but recognize this diversity.
arcCA: As a frequent juror, how do you get around the challenge of the “beauty contest” and look beyond the gorgeous photograph?
Hardy: That’s hard, because the means by which you make these evaluations are photographs. I think it’s legitimate to use the photos to go through the first cut in the jury process. They are the introduction and invite you to spend time to look at the parti, the plan, the site, and the context. But you can be seduced by photographs. On another jury, a fellow juror and I were on the way to the plane and we went by one of the award winning buildings and it looked so different that we called the chairman from the airport and told him you can’t give this an award. The creation of the photograph can be suspect if you don’t know anything about the context. This is important these days as we run out of room and everything runs into everything else. The context is as important as the individual character.
arcCA: The jury selected a large number of institutional or community related projects. Why do you think this is?
Hardy : We liked the sense of architecture having a social purpose, not a plaything of the rich. Some people believe it is only valuable if it costs a lot of money. I have a prejudice in favor of the public realms.
arcCA: Were there any surprises?
Hardy: There could have been more projects that recognized the relationship of landscape architecture, especially in the light of the modern premise about unity with the outdoors. The landscape tended to emphasize the building. You associate the west coast with unparalleled beauty and the natural world, so you expect a greater concern about those things. There was not any craziness. I guess there was less of a Southern California sensibility, a funky irreverence, than I had expected. They were mostly very sober and earnest submissions.
arcCA: What advice would you give to components organizing these awards? And then what advice would you give to architects submitting their projects?
Hardy: How do you beat the drums? How do you make these programs valuable? The publicity is one thing, but I wonder if it would be possible to challenge the profession by having some thematic base for submissions. Prime the pump by thinking about the ideas that architecture represents. It could be old and new, environmental, civic, residential. But we should generate some new thinking. Instead of just saying it’s an awards program, you emphasize the need for innovation. Explain to the world what’s changing.
Obviously the photo is very important, but so is the clarity of the submission. Fancy graphics are not. Because of the computer, there is an enormous interest in overlapping images; it is a relief to have a clear, straightforward, simple presentation that you can understand. The context is absolutely crucial for understanding the building. I cannot say that enough.
Eric Naslund, FAIA, of Studio E Architects in San Deigo, served as 2004 AIACC Design Awards Jury Chair, and Hugh Hardy, FAIA, was a member of the jury. Bay Area-based communication consultant and writer Kenneth Caldwell interviewed Naslund and Hardy for arcCA.
Opening photo by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 3rd quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.3, “Photo Finish.”
