The Architecture Competition as Political Instrument

The Architecture Competition as Political Instrument: Municipal Competitions in Zurich, 1945–1995

The project is based on a new archival estate at the gta Archive, comprising 125 City of Zurich Architecture Competitions organised between 1925 and 1995. For each competition ca. 10–12 of the highest-ranked entries have been kept alongside documentation: competition programs or Wettbewerbsprogramme, architects’ reports or Erläuterungsberichte and jury reports or Juriberichte, which allow their parallel evaluation and comparison. In total the corpus comprises 1250 projects, some 12’000 competition panels, and ca. 100 text-based competition dossiers. The ZHAC collection, donated to the gta Archive in 2022, is by now fully catalogued and archived, and partly digitised. The current research proposal is tailored for the systematic examination of this invaluable pool of information, with the aim of making it available to the profession, completing existing databases with data regarding historical competitions, and opening up a rich historical resource for further research. 

The research project funded by SNSF for the years 2025–2029 aims to examine the political instrumentality of the architecture competition, bringing a historical perspective on current debates and processes at both political and professional levels.