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On Jack Nasar's Design by Competition: Making Design Competition Work

In Design by Competition, Jack Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University, examines how personal, societal, and cultural forces intersect to form a creative product when decisions about public designs of buildings must be made. Using the postmodern Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University campus as a model, Nasar uses quantitative survey data on aesthetic preferences, interviews, and historical comparisons to make a compelling argument that experts and novices often use different criteria to evaluate a building’s success or failure and that these differing criteria may be the source of numerous headaches for architects, planners, administrators, users, and taxpayers alike. Although Nasar may be a newcomer to the readership of the Creativity Research Journal, he has published extensively on architectural criticism in general and on environmental aesthetics specifically. He is familiar with some core readings in creativity, particularly the historiometric work of Martindale (1990) and of Simonton (1994). He also makes use of aesthetic theories based on work by Berlyne (1971). Nasar writes in a clear, pleasant, easy-to-follow voice that leads the reader by the hand through his compelling data. Whether one’s background is in quantitative statistics or in art history, one will find that the book is a comfortable and useful read. Clearly this volume represents the best of the psychological approaches to architectural criticism, and the many tables, appendixes, and photographs only enhance the utility of the text. Nasar begins his book with a section detailing the background of the Wexner Center competition. The reader learns that the design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott was budgeted for $16 million but cost three times as much to build in the end. In addition, the Center has been plagued with multimillion-dollar repair nightmares to fix leaks and lighting problems. Nonetheless, the Wexner design was the winner of a competition in which five internationally known teams of workers submitted designs; Nasar reports that critics loved the design and that it even won an award from Progressive Architecture magazine. Nasar goes on to detail a common dilemma—a new building, often by a so-called signature architect, debuts to critical acclaim only to be resoundly panned by its daily users. The issue that competition architecture may be elitist and nondemocratic is also discussed by Nasar. At any rate, Nasar uses the Wexner Center as a touchstone for presenting his solution to the dilemma—what he calls prejury evaluation, which “involves the scientific study of popular opinion about design entries prior to the jury deliberations” (p. 3) Designs, notes Nasar, can be evaluated at three stages: at the programming stage, when a document is prepared to specify project requirements; the design review stage, when the plan is reviewed in terms of the plan; and a postoccupancy evaluation stage, when functioning is evaluated after a building is completed. Prejury evaluation seems most useful at the second stage, though feedback at all stages can enhance a building. In his discussion of the Wexner Center, Nasar notes that it was 1983 when five finalists (from nine teams that had made it to this point) were selected for the competition by a 13-member committee. After a detailed procedure requiring the jury to review background material prior to a campus meeting and to view individually entries on display, the jury began private