Hi Furkan,

Thank you for your question. We do find that a lot of participants struggle with the same things you so clearly touched on here. It’s great that guys ask these questions and get to learn about the differences between designing for a real project vs. an ideas competition at this stage. Like we always say, we want arkitekturo’s competitions to be a learning experience!

So moving on to your question. There is nothing wrong with your design process. A good site analysis is always a good place to start any project, and the rest of your process is also valid. Regardless of what your specific design process is, every project usually starts from the bigger ideas/decisions and slowly moves on to the more specific. For example, this could be the workflow of a regular (completely made up) project:

1. You do your site analysis and other previous research.
2. You start sketching and envision a single-story building with a huge retractable roof that will open up at specific times of the day/year turning the inside of your building into an outdoors space.
3. You also decide that your one-story high façade will be cover with a local stone that’s the same overall color as the landscape there, so you picture your building fully merging with the landscape.
4. Then you start laying out the interior spaces and realize its probably best to always keep the roof on top of the offices and bathrooms, so you make your retractable roof smaller.
5. You also realize when the roof is down you need some windows to let the light in, so you bring in some glass to your previously all-stone façade.
6. You then start applying all the local safety regulations, fire escapes, etc. and you realize you need to have an emergency exit every 20 meters, so you add some extra doors to your façade.
7. You then learn that the biggest retractable roof that can be built is half of what you had envision, so you adapt your design accordingly.
8. You then start doing some budget calculations and realize you are way over budget, so you make your retractable roof even smaller and replace your fancy stone-façade for ceramic pieces that kind of resemble the color you envisioned earlier.
9. By then you realize you probably need to compromise on a lot o other things in order for your project to be buildable, within budget and following all urbanistic, construction, safety and sustainability regulations.
10. You are finally done, you have been able to check all the boxes required by the brief, satisfy all regulations and stay within budget. At this point your project probably only slightly resembles your sketches and initial vision.

When designing for an ideas competition you can follow that same process, but you can stop on step 5, when your idea is still “pure” and the only changes you’ve made to your initial concept have been in order to improve your building from an architectural perspective, to make it more usable and comfortable for the people who will be using it, and not to satisfy some overly-generic regulation or to maximize the developer’s profits.

In other words, here is a list of things that make designing for a real project vs. an ideas competition different.

• In an ideas project there is not construction budget limit, unless otherwise specified in the brief. In this case there is no limit.
• In an ideas competition you don’t need to follow city planning rules and regulations.
• In an ideas competition you don’t need to follow local construction regulations.
• In an ideas competition you don’t need to figure out every single detail of the project. Such details belong to a more advanced stage of the project.

Hope this gives you a better idea of what’s expected within the context of an ideas competition 🙂

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by arkitekturo.