MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the fields of environmental design and architecture, tensions ensue between competing design qualities such as aesthetics, affordability, functionality, and sustainability. When faced with the task of designing any architectural form, there is no one correct answer but instead the potential for several suitable alternative solutions to a particular design problem. As humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan explains, “the master architect is obligated to conceive in his mind and on paper a range of architectural forms, all of which serve the project’s purpose but only one of which will be selected because it is deemed the best, for reasons that may not be clear to the architect himself.” Architectural competitions have been used in Norway since the late 19th century as a “democratic device” and mechanism of “futuristic archaeology” intended to generate the best solutions for challenging or otherwise underspecified building assignments. The procedural elements of architectural competitions represent a complex matrix of overlapping and, at times, rival concerns. Through oral history interviews with architects in Norway as well as archival research at the Historical Archive of Norwegian Landscape Architecture and the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo, I intend to investigate the many coexisting rhetorical situations present in architectural competitions, ultimately positing the question: what does it mean to “draw a solution?”