What's the Protocol for Abandoning an Architectural Competitioin Once It's Underway?

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

---

---

SCUP Link

What if you (the University of South Carolina) have an architectural competition for a $60M campus building, several firms go all out in preparing bids, and then you decide to let your major donor pick the architect—and they pick one of the firms that allegedly would not have ended up winning the bid?

Here's an Insider Higher Ed summary and here's a link to an article in The Los Angeles Times.

In a move called "unprecedented" in its state, the University of South Carolina held a competition to design a major new business school building -- and let the donor select the winner, without telling the other firms spending considerable time and money on their proposals that they wouldn't have a shot at winning, The State reported.

The article focused on the ways that the process violated procedures in South Carolina, but the incident may also raise issues about the nature of philanthropy and the decisions that should or should not be made by donors. South Carolina's actions appear to violate standards for gifts by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

---

---

SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

Ambitious Design FAIL

We know that SCUPers will like this, although there may be nothing new for those who are experienced in the history of architecture. When something like it is presented at the annual conference, it's always a huge success. Of course, this is just one person's view but, through Slate, Witold Rybczynski shares what he calls some "ambitious architectural failures," including the East Building of the National Gallery (DC), Hancock Place (Boston), Falling Water, the Stata Center (MIT), and more.

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

300% Over Budget?

Ouch. It's not hard to imagine the angst of being involved with the planning of this project:

For starters, what was supposed to be a $40-million project — with a $26-million contribution from the philanthropist Eli Broad, an alumnus — was at one point estimated at a whopping $160-million, according to the university’s president, Lou Anna K. Simon. The university’s associate provost for academic services, Linda Stanford, told the News that the design was being changed and that it would indeed end up “close to $40-million.”

The Campus as Petting Zoo for Starchitects' Designs

Lawrence Speck, writing as a Guest Blogger in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Building & Grounds Blog, shares his take on starchitects' effects on campus ambience:

What is the impact of a building that is a clear expression of its architect’s personal signature on a campus? . . . in most good campus settings, these prima-donna buildings can strike a crushing blow. A campus with a whole series of strutting divas could become just a petting zoo for famous architects’ personal statements. Is that really what institutions of higher education should be communicating about themselves?

New Book: Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art

Former Boston University president John Silber, as noted in this review in The Daily Free Press, "recently took his career in a new direction and wrote a book about some of the world's most renowned flaws, feats and failures in architecture." Purchase the book here.

"I used to say that there would never be an architecture of the absurd," he said. "With architecture, no one was going to pay for something absurd. . . . Over time I came to realize how wrong I was.

"The absurd occurs because there is a confusion between architecture and fine art, and architecture and sculpture," he continued. "You don't live in a sculpture."