Qualitative Analysis of the Evaluation of Architectural Awards - Availability of Data and Methodologies
Abstract: In recent years, the architecture awards have been growing in number, popularity and media coverage. Long-established awards such as the Mies van der Rohe Award or the Piranesi Award are a fraction of the current scale. The unprecedented growth and impact of these platforms has been highlighted by a few pioneering research projects, but the research field is still under-researched. This article focuses on the evaluation of the submitted works by the juries of architectural awards. We justify the focus of the article on the jury's evaluation of architecture on the grounds that it is a determining process within the award. Within the evaluation process, the jury determines and uses the evaluation criteria - which we consider to be a key element of the process that needs to be explored. However, the question arises as to how to methodologically explore this element. Firstly, it is important to recognize that this is research on juror judgement (or the written record of it), so the object of our interest is the actions of people, one of the areas of research in the social sciences. It is a well-known commonplace that qualitative analysis is the appropriate methodological approach to investigate social phenomena about which we do not know much. Qualitative analyses comprise a group of research designs; when focusing on text, these are, in brief: phenomenological analysis, grounded theory method, narrative analysis, content analysis and discourse analysis methods. However, our objective is not to analyze all the designs, the objective is to focus on those that have already been used in architectural research and to select the one that will allow us to identify the evaluation criteria of the juries of the selected architectural awards. We come to the second objective. For the purpose of the analyses, we need a representative sample of awards meeting certain assumptions and parameters. The basic assumption is the existence of one form of output from the jury deliberations - a transcript of the meeting/verdict/report or an essay by a jury member or expert on the award in question. Another assumption is that the text in question is of sufficient length. These text files become the source data. The required parameters of the award include - the internationality of the jury, the timeliness of the award, and the typological diversity of the selected awards. In summary, the overall objective of the paper is to elaborate the initiation phase of research on evaluation criteria of architectural awards. From the material processed so far, we are able to present the following conclusions for each objective. Among the methods of qualitative text analysis that have been used in architectural research we include the grounded theory method, content analysis and critical discourse analysis. We devote a more detailed discussion to their possible applications in research. Furthermore, in our search for a sample, we included the following awards in the broader selection: the New European Bauhaus Prizes, the Mies van der Rohe Award, the European Prize for Urban Public Space, the Piranesi Award, the ARCH Award, the Dušan Jurkovič Award, the Grand Prix architektů, and the Czech Prize for Architecture. We found that only the Slovak ARCH Prize, awarded by the magazine of the same name, records the jury meetings. For the Mies Award and the Czech Prize for Arch we can use verdicts, essays or reports.
