Judgement by design: Towards a model for studying and improving the competition process in architecture and urban design

SummaryIn the fields of architectural and urban design, judging is a disciplinary tradition. There is hardly any design that is not complemented by a judging process be it in schools, in professional offices, and in this peculiar democratic phenomenon called: architectural competition. Although commonly spread in the everyday practice, judgement has been little theorised. If asked to give a theoretical model of judgement one might quickly fall short of diagrams. Some might argue that the same could be said of “design thinking” but that would be erroneous considering the last 50 years of research and attempts at theoretical modelling. This paper seeks to contribute to the theoretical modelling of architectural judgement by exploring the hypothesis of a fundamental analogy between designing and judging. We call this model: judgement by design.

Research highlights▶ We underlined the historical relevance of judgement in architectural competitions. ▶ We showed how crucial and complex the qualitative judgement process can be. ▶ However the issue of judgement has been poorly theorised in architecture. ▶ We proposed the hypothesis of judgement by design as a new theory. ▶ We developed this hypothesis with models drawn from design thinking studies.