At least two months after the deadline, 18 contestants for the Muża national gallery design contest have finally received a communication from Heritage Malta.
Heritage Malta has recently advised our office that our competition entry has been dismissed in spite of the fact the technical jury assessing the anonymous entries awarded the highest score to our submission.
We think it is appropriate to inform the public of the reasons we were given.
Our first sin, the letter reads, was that the competition rules required the submission of a five-page text report. The fact is that, because it was important for our branding concept, we chose to print a picture on the reverse of the text and to add a cover, with the whole compiled as a museum pamphlet.
According to the letter, the jury understood and truly appreciated our proposed branding but the administrative evaluation committee decided our submission was a 12-page report, in spite of the fact there were only five pages of text.
We would argue that nowhere in the rules was it forbidden to put a cover to the report, or to have a printed image on the reverse face of the text pages. So which rules were broken exactly?
Secondly, the submission was required to comprise six A2 panels “in a landscape (horizontal) format”. Apart from the fact that plans can be read with any orientation of panel – frankly, this requirement was pointless – once again, because of our branding message and because we wanted to show the relationship between plans on different panels, we chose to attach the panels together (which is nowhere disallowed in the rules), with the whole still in an overall horizontal format.
No! Wrong move!
We did everything wrong, except submitthe design which the jury awarded the highest marks to
In a contest where designers were repeatedly invited to “think outside the box”, this presentation of a branding vision led to dismissal of our scheme, despite of the fact that the appreciative jury awarded the scheme the highest marks.
Ah, yes, another thing. The same evaluation committee decided that the submitted details of signage and branding graphics could not be considered as details, at par with details of showcases (which are normally bought off the shelf) and soffits, in a project where branding is key.
Of course, we had more serious administrative errors.
Firstly, we failed to submit an (unnecessary) empty form, referred to as a “nil return”.
And, the cherry on the cake, although we brought into our team some truly international-quality museum designers, interactive display experts and sustainability design experts with top world-wide portfolios and with a commitment to work with us and Heritage Malta on the project, we failed to submit “client satisfaction letters”.
You know, those useless testimonials one writes and then gets the client to sign.
We have to confess that this is true; after convincing major players such as Metaphor, Local Projects and Hilson Moran to join our team (no mean feat), we could not bring ourselves to ask them for proof that their clients were satisfied with their work.
So, there it is! We did everything wrong, except submit the design which the jury awarded the highest marks to.
Why do we not appeal, one may ask. Well, it is not very encouraging when people who adjudicate appeals go on record saying that 80 per cent of appeals are frivolous.
It is like appearing in front of a judge who publicly declares that 80 per cent of those who appear in front of him are guilty. Not a very encouraging start to any appellant and our documented experience is that, with these appeals, even when you win, you do not win.
So, there, we wish only to leave it to the public to judge whether a process, whereby a scheme judged to be best is dismissed for banalities, is a process that should not be changed.
It is clearly far more important, according to the bureaucrats (in spite of lip service in favour of creativity and design quality and against bureaucracy), to create a mountain of extraneous requirements and then to check that all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed than to actually judge design content.
This is not to say that who gets to do the project will not produce a competent design. But it will not be that one judged by the technical jury to be the best.
At this stage, our sole intention with this contribution is a plea so that, in future, the powers-that-be organise real design competitions and not bastardised hybrid “design contests/fee tenders/spot-the-form-you-cannot-miss-challenges”, dreamt up by nit-picking bureaucrats solely to trip contestants up.
Alex Torpiano is a partner of TBA Periti, a multi-disciplinary firm of architects, structural and civil engineers.