120 HOURS is an architecture competition that was initially created by three students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2010 and is running successfully ever since. It is a competition for students that challenges them to design, present and submit their work in only 120 hours - counting from right after the announcement of the assignment. At first, 120 HOURS was only a competition for Norwegian students, but today, only over the course of five years [the article was written in 2014], it has turned into a prestigious international competition/event, acting as a great platform for some wild creativity.
The exciting nature of the competition and its student base were the main reasons for this interview with the members of the directing team behind 120 HOURS. Before each part/question, the name of the answering member is written.
 |
| The 120 HOURS team. From left: Hans Martin Frostad Halleraker - Scott Olav Allan - Fredrik
Mortensen - Magnus Asker Pettersen. ©120 HOURS |
Fredrik Mortensen, Sponsorship Manager
To begin with, please tell us a bit about the idea of 120 HOURS, your approach and the beginning of the story and the role of creativity in it.
The idea of 120 HOURS is all about presenting your idea in a way that makes people want to be apart of it. I`m sure there are a million ways of developing your idea, from beginning to the actual product. But I believe that when you have a million ways of doing it, you also have a million great opportunities. It´s all about believing in your idea.
Today the idea of 120HOURS has become a competition for students where they have the opportunity to create something that can be seen by thousands of people on the Internet. Their work will be curated and displayed, it will be viewed by a highly qualified and international jury, and they will have the opportunity to compete with students all over the world. We have seen so much promising work over the years that we are certain that this model also can be used for architectural competition in professional use.
But in order to understand how 120 HOURS has become what it is today, we must go back to the beginning. From the very start, our idea was to get people to be part of our concept, we knew that we couldn’t do everything by ourselves. To make this happen we had to transfer the confidence that we had in the idea, to the people who we wanted to involve. This meant students, jury, professors and teachers, and the professional industry. We had to create a concept that made it clear how poorly we think competitions work today, and that shows how we could make it better.
After getting these groups involved it was time to spread the idea even further. This is a job that we are still working on, but it is going well. By developing the 120 Talks concept, by creating assignments that can be universally understood, by expanding to other creative arts, we always try to challenge ourselves to go beyond our existing followers.
As of 2014, 120 HOURS has become the world’s biggest architecture competition, created for- and by students, with 2959 participants from 83 nations.
Architectural competitions affect people outside the architectural industry. It`s time to let them know.
So with all these ideas behind 120HOURS, it seems that 120HOURS means to be a - let me call it - "creatively curated" competition. So, how important is the role of creativity in organizing and curating a competition in order to get more creative results?
We have always strived to be as creative as possible in our approach. However this year it is a tough balancing act, since we are letting a new group of students organize the competition by themselves. We want to encourage the organizers to come up with new ideas for the competition, but it is also very important that they remember to also give the participants freedom to express themselves without too many restrictions or unnecessary guidelines.
Being creative in organization and curating is not synonymous with doing more, but perhaps more about knowing when to stop. For instance, when we write the assignment text in cooperation with the jury and the rest of the 120HOURS-team, we use a lot of time debating what to include, or not to include. What we have learned over the course of the last four years is that creativity is born in the white space, between the lines.
 |
| The judgement process. 2014. ©120 HOURS |
Peder Brand and Hans Martin Halleraker, Founding Directors
What is your opinion on creativity and competitions and their co-relation? What is the 120 HOURS way to see it?
Competitions hold a nearly mythical position in architecture, they represent a possibility to re imagine and challenge established paradigms. A chance for the underdogs and outsiders to prove themselves amongst the big shots, competitions promise fortune and fame for those who dare to move into unexplored territory. At least that’s what we in 120Hours think competitions should be, an arena for undisclosed newness.
In 1922, the Chicago Tribune issued an international design competition for their new headquarters, challenging architects across the globe to design "The most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world”. The response was enormous, with over 263 entries from twenty-three countries. With radical modernists such as Adolf Loos, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Ellie Saarinen participating, the entries ended up shaping what we now know as the stripped down modernist office tower. The competition became a channel for promoting radical modern ideas, likely far beyond the client’s expectations. Most notably, Adolf Loos’s entry, despite not winning, stood as a remarkable reimagining of the tower as quite literally a giant column. A common denominator in all the memorable proposals is that they all challenge the ideas of the office tower at the time, proving the immense creative potential of a well-directed competition.
A more recent example of this is the Çanakkale Antenna Tower Competition to design a 100-meter Observation and Broadcast Tower for the historic city of Çanakkale in western Turkey. The shortlist included renowned firms such as Sou Fujimoto and Snøhetta, but was won by the small Dutch firm: Powerhouse Company in collaboration with IND. Instead of relying on a conventional tower with a base, mid and top section, the winning entry proposes a continuous ribbon where the antenna rises up from the landscape rather than being placed on top of it.
The notion that competitions should fuel and encourage new thought, even beyond what the brief calls for, is the backbone of 120Hours. As with everything else, architecture tends to fall into static and comfortable states, reproducing the same stuff in different places. Competitions must exist as a constant provocation to the known, always pushing the creativity of architects to its limits.
Frankly, what is the distinction between "creativity" and "just doing something which has never been done before"? Or more fundamentally, is there such distinction?
There is a clear distinction between the truly creative and what could be called novel newness. We certainly see an immense amount of novelty every day in online magazines, one project after another claiming its 15 minutes of fame with novel moves such as a new facade pattern or a shiny new material. While the projects most basic diagram, the projects core, remains the same as the previous projects in that genre.
Creativity is not necessarily just making up the absurdly new but consciously and critically thinking about how to approach an abstract problem. By reimagining the conventional diagram, and breaking out of the preconceived solution. Sometimes the most creative solution could be to use what is already available, rather than crazy originality, it’s all about resetting oneself from the established norms. An Architect's job is to materialize abstract ideas; creativity is the skill that enables that.
At 120HOURS, when you come up with the assignment, do you have any idea of what would the entries be like? And how close or far they end up to be?
Every year, we have a perception of how the “perfect project” of our assignment will look like, and we are equally surprised by the scope and the quality of projects every year. Our perception of the “perfect project” is never correct, and we love it. The contestants impress us more and more every year and it is always great fun to look through the delivered material.
 |
| Projects ready to be judged. 2014. ©120 HOURS |
Magnus Asker Pettersen, Founding Director
Developing an idea is also very important, and then comes the matter of how to present that idea. What is your view?
What is competition, and how does it affect creativity? Competing is not only something you do in a competition. You do it every day. Who has the best idea for an assignment in school and who comes up with the best concept for a project at work? These questions we face every day as architects and students of architecture. That is a good thing!
Competing with yourself and your fellow students and co-workers keeps you from repeating yourself. You can develop your ideas and evolve as an architect.
One important thing to remember when you compete is to evaluate yourself and your work. Put some distance between yourself and your work. If possible get a second opinion, because you should never underestimate the value of a second opinion. If someone else understands your idea, always ask; “how would you present it?”
The ideas and the concepts are indisputable the most important part of your work when doing competitions, but a lot of people forget to think about how to present their work. The best students and architects know how to put their energy into the presentation as well. Being able to communicate your proposal to the jury is key to winning a competition.
The winners of 120 HOURS 2013 and 2014 are both great examples of how a clean presentation can communicate a project in a very persuasive manner. You don’t need a lot of text or a lot of diagrams and illustrations as long as what you have is precise and to the point. If you look at architectural practices like BIG, JDS, REX they are extremely precise when it comes to how they present their work and ideas. They make it almost impossible to misinterpret the core of the concept. Turning a complex idea into an easily understandable concept is difficult, and simple presentation is a highly creative presentation.
I understand that you believe in creativity in every stage (concept, development, presentation, etc) so what kind of a project is the most “well-received” in a competition: A "better" idea? A "better developed" idea? Or a "better presented" idea?
First of all, I don’t think that it is either one of them; it is all of the combined. If you have a good idea, you also (hopefully) know how to present it in the best way possible, so that there is absolutely no chance that the jury will misinterpret your concept.
My experience, and we see this every year in 120 HOURS, is that if a good idea is presented poorly, either the contestant did not know how good their proposal actually was, or even worse, they knew, but did not care about giving it a clear presentation.
If it is the latter, a good jury will catch up on this at once, and you are out of the game (or the idea has to be mind-blowingly great!). I think that the proposals that show great dedication to the task given and the concept developed from the brief are the most interesting, and they are always appreciated by the jury.
120 HOURS love dedication, because dedicated people are inspiring people.
 |
| Architecture. 1st place winner. 2014. By Antariksh Tandon and Jennifer Tu Anh Phan |
Scott Allan, Head of Communications
So what else remains?
So what do you do after the competition is over? You may have been lucky enough to win, and so you receive a lot of “fame” and attention. But let’s face it, the most likely scenario is that you didn’t. Does this mean that your idea is finished and done? – We hope not, that would be a shame.
At 120 HOURS we encourage all our participants to share their ideas and final projects with each other, after the competition. Even though your project may not have won, it doesn’t mean that your idea is bad, or that it isn’t worth sharing.
One of the great things about the world that we live in today is that it allows us all to share ideas with each other, primarily through social media. Taking the time to letting other people know what you are creating will not only help to showcase yourself, it could also help to inspire others to further develop their own ideas. Maybe your idea is the final piece that was missing in their own project, and so they are able to grow as architects because of it. Or maybe someone approaches you with an interesting project or job offer because you took the time to tell him or her what you are creating.
Our main point is that you must not let your ideas be forgotten after the work is “done”. It only takes a few extra minutes to tell someone about it.
«Sharing is caring»
 |
| Øyens Sky. Honorable Mention winner. 2014. By Matyas Svejdik, Marek Nedelka, Pavel Springl. |
It seems that for providing the chance of sharing the ideas after the competition, we need to keep the excitement - the atmosphere - going on, so how could a competition keep the heat going on after the results are announced? And does 120HOURS try to do so? And how?
Yes it is very important to inspire the participants to share their projects after the competition is over.
First and foremost it is all about making the projects sharable. This means doing the hard work of collecting, adapting and publishing every project on your website. For instance in a gallery like on http://120hours.no/entries/2014/ Our goal for next year is to make every project sharable on Facebook through the click of a button.
Secondly we wanted to showcase the winners in a forum where people really would appreciate all the hard work that has gone into making the projects. We teamed up with an Oslo art and design gallery called DogA and created an exhibition of the winning projects. This gallery exhibition lasted a whole month after the competition was over.
Lastly it is important to use traditional media to spread news about the competition and the projects. After the competition ended we used a lot of time on writing stories for local and international media. We collected images from the top projects and wrote articles where we showcased the winners and what we had achieved as a competition. You can see some of the results on: http://120hours.no/news/
But there are many other ways of keeping the fire going as well:
- You could try to get jury members to write or talk about the quality of the entries, and how they experienced the competition, - either online or at a live event.
- Engage your Facebook community in discussions about the winners or about how your competition can improve. What would they like to see next year? What would be their dream assignment? Who should be next year’s jury leader? Etc.
- Hold mini competitions on social media like Facebook or Instagram. Who has the best tip for next year’s assignment? Which entry is the “audiences” favorite? Logo competition etc.
I can’t say that we at 120 HOURS have found the final answer to this challenge yet. But it is something that is always at the top of our minds and something that we are continuously working on.
This piece was originally published in NAAM #1 "Creativity and Design".
No comments:
Post a Comment