Reflections on the competition for National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield

For many years, architects in the United Kingdom have looked enviously at the competition system in the German speaking countries and Scandinavia. Now, with the introduction of a major public buildings programme partially funded by the new National Lottery, competitions are becoming more common in Britain. This paper opens with some reflections on the advantages and disadvantages of competitions. It then describes the conduct and outcome of a single Lottery-funded competition for the design of a building for which there were no precedents and in which issues of content and image were major preoccupations for both designers and assessors.