In or out? - Following a controversial architectural project through the jury deliberations of an architectural competition

The paper at hand bases on findings from an ethnographic study on the jury sessions of four architectural competitions in Switzerland. In particular, the paper is attentive to the unforeseeable turns and leaps within the evolution of a jury’s judgement - not only with regard to a single “provocative” competition entry but also regarding the design problem as such. Drawing on literature from the field of design science (e.g. Schon 1983; Simon 1996), the field of organization studies (e.g. Weick 1995; Kreiner 2007) as well as the field of actor-network theory (e.g. Latour 2005; Yaneva 2009) the paper aims at applying Callon’s (1986) moments of translation in order to trace the various scattered entities (e.g., existing buildings, past incidents, shared experiences, diverse historic or current discourses), and the ways how they are mobilized by the local actors (e.g., jurors, competition entries and the existing understanding of the problem). Conceptualizing the outcome of jury deliberations of architectural competitions as a result of a chain of translations, the paper provides a detailed description of the jury board’s complex decision-making process.