There’s an elephant in the room.
It’s a big one…really big….with tusks.
I could feel it’s heavy, oppressive breath down the back of my neck as I stood on stage at our awards ceremony. Maybe you saw it?

I could feel it right there as Cameron Bruhn read out….

“There is no award given for this category”

I hadn’t actually read the full running sheet, so this was as much a surprise to me as it was to you, and my mind was flooded with many thoughts. Initially, I thought we had done something wrong. What is the message we are sending with no award?

I was still thinking about it a lot the following week as conversations ensued and people regularly used the words ‘won’ or ‘winning’. ‘Won’, ‘winning’, ‘prize’, ‘award’….this is when it started to settle for me.

The truth is that no one ‘won’ that night.

Well maybe the on stage threesome group hug was close to a win… but at its core, the programme is not a competition with a winner and a series of place getters: it is an awards process – and that is very different.

In the spirit of a media friendly promotional tool it would be easier to have a competition. Every category gets a prize and there’s a simple publicity bite of who’s the best in town, but in line with the professionalism of which I spoke on the night, it is underpinned by a requirement to excel in assessment against the awards criteria.

An award is ‘awarded’ to an outcome and an architectural process of excellence. Every entry could receive an award…or none. There is not a first, second and third. It is measured by the jury of peers and must be moderated across juries for the whole programme. As a profession, not an industry body, I think it is appropriate that we run an awards programme and not a competition.

I find that a difficult message in the snap chat, re-tweet world of publicity and promotion, but I think it’s a necessary message in the spirit of professionalism. 

Whether certain projects should or should not have received awards and who volunteers and is accepted for a role as juror is a specific debate, but I think the programme needs to support the fact that no award may be given.

Next year I will bring a message of greater inclusion to our awards process. It troubles me that certain sectors of work are never entered. That either means that all projects in those sectors are not of sufficient calibre, or that there is a perception they do not fit the awards process. I believe great architecture and great architectural process should be awarded wherever it exists and in many different guises. I do not believe that all examples of great architecture make for glossy images.

I also believe that commendations exist to commend good work and encourage the role and contribution of architecture. I believe we should commend a great many good projects. I believe that if a project is tangibly better for the willingness of a client to engage with architecture and the ability of the architect to deliver an outcome which reflects that faith… then it is commendable.

I believe that as a profession of architecture we challenge, collaborate on, encourage and hold accountable our contributions.  I want us to commend our hard work and positive outcomes and to award our exceptional results.

I accept that sometimes, in some years, our member’s projects may be constrained for many reasons and in those years we may have the commendable, but no award.
I hope those years are very few.

Mario Dreosti
SA Chapter President