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Pools, Carparks and Ball-Pits: Or why the Notre Dame restoration competition is a meme

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Hamish Lonergan

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Hamish Lonergan, “Pools, Carparks and Ball-pits: Or why the Notre Dame restoration competition is a meme,” in: Footprint 26, 125-136

Abstract

The first restoration proposals to emerge after fire destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral’s roof and spire were jokes. The more serious schemes that followed Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s announcement of a competition – many markedly similar, recreating what was lost in glass– were collected on mainstream design media websites like Dezeen where they attracted an unusually high volume of angry comments, accusing the architects of insensitivity. Soon after, Ulf Mejergren Architects’ proposal to replace Notre Dame’s roof with a meditative pool was edited into a carpark. It sparked a series of increasingly outlandish edits – first a multi-story carpark, then a ball pit – before the French Senate declared that there would be no competition after all. This at times absurd online interest might be new for architectural competitions, but it is easily explained through meme theory, as conceived of by scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner: systems of interconnected units of cultural exchange operating on both wider cultural and specific sub-cultural levels. In this essay I contend that meme theory can be used, in reverse, to analyse reactions to, and similarities between, even the most serious Notre Dame proposals. In applying this framework, we can begin to understand how competitions operate more broadly as part of a complex network online and how they relate to traditional competition conditions.

By GodefroyParis – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78090147

The Notre Dame (non) competition

It did not take long for images of the reconstruction of Notre Dame to become a meme online. Even between 15 April 2019, when fire consumed the roof and spire, and 17 April, when French prime minister Edouard Philippe announced a future competition for its reconstruction, images circulated on social media incorporating the restored cathedral into a slick mixed-use development by the august-sounding firm Pick Rogarth + Baumsnatch. [fig. 1] Many responded with shock and disbelief at the arrogance of architects imposing their banal, commercial vision on a national monument, before realising the joke. Those taken in were quick to claim it was not so ridiculous after all, pointing to I. M. Pei’s pyramids at the Louvre, and the commercialisation of many European cathedral squares.

Fewer fell for Oliver Wainwright’s Twitter proposal on 17 April to replace Viollet-Le-Duc’s spire with Heatherwick’s Vessel. [fig. 2] It followed Phillipe’s widely-discussed call for solutions ‘adapted to the technique and the challenges of our era’, 1 Jon Henley, ‘France announces contest to redesign Notre Dame spire’, The Guardian, 18 April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/17/france-announces-architecture-competition-rebuild-notre-dames-spire. Other journalists were quick to point out the political utility of Emmanuel Macron’s calls for ‘a more beautiful cathedral’ to be built in just five years, in time for the Paris 2024 Olympics, projecting an image of a progressive, modern government, distracting public attention in the midst of the populist ‘yellow vest’ protests. Dorothy Wickenden, ‘The Notre-Dame Fire Could Be a Turning Point for the Macron Presidency’, The New Yorker, 18 April 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/the-notre-dame-fire-could-be-a-turning-point-for-the-macron-presidency. and the frenzied pledges of support from billionaires like Bernard Arnault, who commissioned the Louis Vuitton Foundation by Gehry Partners. 2 Since then, none of the promised funds have been released, prompting some commentators to accuse France’s billionaires of cynically exploiting tax loopholes and of pledging support only to wield disproportionate influence on the reconstruction when it begins. Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires’, The Guardian, 18 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-notre-dame-billionaires-french-philanthropy. In this context, after Wainwright’s damning review of Hudson Yards in The Guardian – and  an earlier twitter post comparing the Vessel to a giant shawarma – it read as a pointed warning against deliberately iconic architecture. These three days set the tone for discourse surrounding the promised competition over the next month: the focus on shareable images; the public anger at architects capitalising on tragedy; confusion of the serious and satirical; connections across pop-culture; and the ever-present proximity of architectural competitions and power.

Many of the more serious proposals were strikingly similar: transparent recreations of what was lost in the fire. As early as 16 April, Studio Fuksas described their vision of ‘a crystal pinnacle of Baccarat for the new Notre Dame’ on Huffpost, before releasing glowing, blue renderings. 3 Linda Varlese, ‘Massimiliano Fuksas: “Immagino un pinnacolo di cristallo di Baccarat per la nuova Notre Dame”’, Huffpost, 16 April 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.it/2019/04/16/massimiliano-fuksas-immagino-un-pinnacolo-di-cristallo-di-baccarat-per-la-nuova-notre-dame_a_23712564/. Soon after, emerging and established designers began posting proposals on Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms, where they were picked up by mainstream design news websites like Dezeen, Archdaily and Designboom. By 25 April, when Dezeen editorialised the ‘best’ of these proposals, Fuksas’s images were joined by variations in stained-glass and green crystal; some, like architects Studio NAB and rendering firm Miyosis Studio, filled this glass roof cavity with plants, turning it into a greenhouse. 4 Tom Ravenscroft, ‘Seven alternative spires for Notre-Dame Cathedral’, Dezeen, 25 April 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/25/notre-dame-spire-alternative-cathedral-designs/. Kiss the Architect’s scheme – replacing the spire with an assemblage of columns, arches and spheres – photoshopped an existing folly proposal into place, conspicuous in a field dominated by professional and expensively-produced renderings. Where a popular Dezeen article might typically attract between ten and twenty responses in the comments section, the Notre Dame piece attracted over 140 comments with an unusual degree of consensus, panning the proposals as shamefully insensitive to the building and its history, calling for an accurate reconstruction instead.

Soon after, Swedish firm Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA) shared renderings replacing the roof and spire with a meditative pool. [fig. 3] By the time Dezeen posted a follow-up article, ‘Seven of the most outrageous proposals for Notre-Dame’, the pool had been edited into a carpark – ‘if North Americans are put in charge of the Notre Dame reconstruction’ – and retweeted by a Belgian politician taking a swipe at his opponents’ transport policy. 5 Tom Ravenscroft, “Seven of the most outrageous proposals for Notre-Dame,” Dezeen, 15 May, 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/15/notre-dame-rebuild-outrageous-proposals/. BoredPanda, a non-architecture website aggregating memes and general internet culture, attributed the carpark design to Pascal Smet, minister of mobility and public infrastructure for Brussels, who had retweeted the image. Giedrė Vaičiulaitytė, ‘9 Ridiculous Proposals for the Notre Dame Restoration’, BoredPanda, https://www.boredpanda.com/notre-dame-cathedral-outrageous-redesign-proposals/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic. [fig. 4] It set off a series of increasingly outlandish edits: another Twitter user turned it into a multi-story carpark, [fig. 5] before it morphed into a children’s ball-pit on architecture meme account Oh-Em-Ayy. [fig. 6] Another contributor to the Dezeen comments photoshopped a mob of gilets jaunes protestors in place of the pool, while others questioned why Dezeen would engage with the scheme at all, accusing the designers of manufacturing outrage to stand out in an already crowded field. Designer Sebastian Errazuriz replaced the spire with a rocket, claiming it was an ‘act of creative one-upmanship designed… to exhaust the audience’s patience… for a new glass eco-roof.’ 6 Sebastian Errazuriz (@sebastianstudio), ‘This little piece’, Instagram, 17 May 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxidsq_BHFT/ . ­ He congratulated himself when, on 29 May, the French senate determined that there would be no competition and the cathedral would be restored to its ‘last known visual state.’ 7 Tom Ravenscroft, “Notre-Dame must be restored to ‘last known visual state’ says French Senate,” Dezeen, 29 May 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/29/restore-notre-dame-cathedral-french-senate/. Even then, GoArchitects, an independent publisher turned competition convenor, announced a ‘people’s choice’ design competition, open to any scheme ‘no matter how outlandish’. The online edition of British newspaper The Independent featured an entry by Bay Huynh Architects, with another rooftop pool, this time connected to the Seine by elevated canals. 8 Liam James, ‘Notre Dame design competition seeks new roof for world famous Paris cathedral’, The Independent, 21 June 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/notre-dame-cathedral-roof-fire-design-competition-paris-france-a8968791.html. [fig. 7]

Competitions on the internet

In the month between Phillipe’s announcement of a competition and the French Senate’s bill to prevent it, Notre Dame generated a remarkably high level of online interest, even compared to recent competitions like the Guggenheim Helsinki (2014). Without a competition brief, hundreds of proposals have been produced, posted across social media, architecture news platforms and the GoArchitects webpage. While the Guggenheim competition produced over 1 700 entries, the way they were aggregated on a single website meant that writers like Peggy Deamer and Pier Vittorio Aureli could confidently comment on the overall quality of the proposals without fear of excluding any key schemes. 9 Peggy Deamer, ‘The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition: What Is the Value Proposition?’, The Avery Review 8 (2015), 1-5, https://averyreview.com/content/3-issues/8-8/1-the-guggenheim-helsinki-competition/deamer.pdf; Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Can Architecture Be Political?’, lecture at the Architectural Association, London, 6 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dd73Sd0xpU. In that case, only the six shortlisted entries were widely shared online, while those not submitted for official consideration – the schemes produced by Mark Foster Gage and Andrew Kovacs, for example, both combining ready-made physical and digital figures into new architectural forms – were widely published in established architecture journals like Log and Architectural Design. 10 Andrew Kovacs, ‘Archive of Affinities Making Architecture from Architecture’, Architectural Design 89, no. 4 (2019): 54–61; Mark Foster Gage, ‘Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture’, Log no. 33 (2015): 95–106.

Notre Dame is the rare case of a discrete internet phenomenon – bookended by the fire and the Senate’s announcement – but even in this limited timeframe the same type of cohesive analysis is almost impossible. Proposals have spread far more widely across the internet, creating the kind of infinite regression of referential connections which leads from a meditative pool to a ball pit. Throughout the process of writing this essay there seemed to be a steady stream of photoshopped variations, impossible to keep up with. All the while, the terrible odds associated with the never-realised Guggenheim competition ­– better to meet a client at a bar, wrote Derrick Leavitt – were compounded in a competition that no-one could win because it was never officially opened. 11 Deamer, ‘Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’; Derreck Leavitt, ‘Why Open Competitions Are Bad for Architects’, Modative Blog, 18 May 2010, http://www.modative.com/modern-architects-blog/bid/31683/Why-Open-Architecture-Competitions-Are-Bad-for-Architects; Taller de Casquería, ‘Guggenheim Helsinki: Architectural Competition Data’, 15 October 2014. Infographic video, 4:31. https://vimeo.com/109085572. In the GoArchitects’ competition, over two hundred entries competed for a grand prize of only €900.

A memetic competition framework

This overwhelming and unrewarded online interest might be unusual for architectural competitions, but it is not strange for memes. Over the last ten years, a mature body of scholarship has emerged to explain the increasingly important role that memes play in online discourse. Although discrete images of Notre Dame like Wainwright’s Vessel mashup may have been extensively shared online, this does not make them memes. As meme scholar Ryan Milner writes, ‘it’s an easy shortcut to call a solitary image we scroll past on Twitter or Tumblr a meme, as if the term is synonymous with “a quirky little JPG from the internet.”’ 12 Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media, ed. ProQuest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 3. Instead, it is useful to turn to Limor Shifman’s broader definition, going beyond individual images:

(a) group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users. 13 The original definition comes from Richard Dawkins: ‘a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 41.

For outsiders, this complex web of self-aware connections can appear illegible, but remains easily comprehensible by overlapping groups of internet users who recognise the joke and its context: from the broadest group who understand the logic of memes generally to subgroups like architects who have the specialised knowledge to grasp disciplinary content.

In this way, UMA’s pool may be the source, but the meme is the network of modified and reposted images across social media. Through this process, the pool and its variants illustrate many of the qualities which Milner sees at the heart of memes. Users took advantage of the inherently editable qualities of this high-quality rendering of the cathedral, already stripped of its spire and roof: it was easier to turn this image into a carpark because the hard work of editing out the background was already done. 14 As Milner notes, the ability to easily appropriate an image is a key indicator of the popularity of a meme, allowing users to easily use it for their own purposes, making it their own. Milner, The World Made Meme, 29. In calling the original ‘outrageous’, Dezeen captured something that resonated with viewers in a way other images did not. UMA’s proposal was refreshing, boldly rejecting the verticality of spire and roof, absurdly juxtaposing pool and roofscape. 15 Milner characterises this more broadly as an image’s resonance. Milner, The World Made Meme, 32. Shifman writes that ‘a fundamental feature of many memetic photos is a striking incongruity between two or more elements in the frame’. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 90. That this audience existed at all is arguably due to the coincidence of the Notre Dame competition with the rise of specialised architectural meme accounts like Sssscavvvv (6 850 followers) and Arc.humor (4 250 followers). When they encountered the ball pit, Oh.Em.Ayy’s 8 950 followers could recognise both Ulf Mejergren’s pool and the poorly photoshopped aesthetic of other memes online. As other social media users modified the image, they invested in a content-creation process that rewarded them in likes, reposts and new followers, ultimately spilling over into mainstream notoriety on platforms like Dezeen. 16 Milner sees this sort of ‘shared resonance’ and collectivism at the heart of meme culture. Milner, The World Made Meme, 33.

Meme theory helps make sense of the string of modifications to UMA’s pool, but my contention here is that this serious scholarship of a seemingly-unserious topic can be used, in reverse, to begin to understand competitions on social media more broadly. As recently as 2017, Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger’s exhaustive overview of the historiography and theory of competitions noted that entries are routinely archived on official websites, without recognising the increasingly important role of social media and online architecture media. 17 Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger, ‘Introduction: Unpacking Architectural Competitions – Project Design and the Building Process’, in Architecture Competition : Project Design and the Building Process, ed. Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 1–27. Indeed, Notre Dame seems less like an anomaly than a premonition of how competitions will occur online in the future: simultaneously under the auspices of competition bodies and the media. The reach of social and mainstream architecture media means that an architect can gain as much popular, professional recognition from a well-publicised image as with a short-listed competition entry. Here, I sketch out three initial ideas for how meme theory might inform an understanding of competitions online.

Architectural subcultures

One typical rationale for entering competitions is the free publicity they offer architects. Indeed, the Dezeen comments section accused firms of exploiting this perverse incentive, creating insensitive schemes to generate media attention. On closer examination, it seems a dubious strategy, given how unlikely anyone is to commission, or even follow, a firm whose work they find so unappealing. Conversely, Deamer wrote that even the most impressive Guggenheim Helsinki schemes were lost in the competition archive and the glut of images online. 18 Deamer, ‘The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’, 4. It is certainly easy for something to anger the public or ‘disappear’ in the depths of the internet, but meme theory shows how subcultures latch onto resonant images even as they are forgotten and ridiculed by online culture at large. Schemes by more well-known firms like Fuksas slid into obscurity whereas UMA’s pool resurfaced on social media via its edited proxies.

Understanding competition entries as a type of specifically targeted ‘advertisement’ helps explain why entrants risk public wrath and oblivion online. Rendering firm Miyosis’s rooftop greenhouse may have closely resembled other schemes, but they were not selling a building proposal. Instead, their images and fly-throughs broadcast high-quality rendering services to their peers and potential clients. Similarly, Kiss the Architect’s arched confection relates to a recent social media interest in postmodernism, on pages like AdamNathanialFurman (30 100 followers) and Newagecocaine (51 200 followers). Indeed, there was a notable increase in the firm’s Instagram following after appearing on Dezeen. Read in this way, these were not proposals designed for construction, rather they responded to specific concerns and interests of identifiable subgroups within the discipline.

Perhaps the most interesting case is UMA’s pool itself. Followers of UMA’s Instagram could place the pool in a lineage of projects rejecting European monumentality and embracing user participation, from a pavilion to be ‘grown’ from trees over the course of sixty years to a bridge formed of two slides. While fun, they are serious proposals, not jokes. Of the pool, UMA wrote:

Most proposals that we have seen puts way too much focus and effort on the spire… Instead we let the bell towers, the flying buttresses and the rose windows do the talking… Maybe the pool will be replaced in a hundred years or so, becoming another layer of great stories. 19 UMA, ‘Notre Dame’, accessed on 18 January 2020, https://www.u-m-a.se/filter/Featured/NOTRE-DAME.

They sought to create a novel, delightful public experience in the heart of the city, preserving what people already love about the building, eschewing the earnest form-making of other proposals. Why, then, was this light-hearted, thoughtful scheme lost on its audience?

Hélène Lipstadt writes that architects perceive competitions, at least in the early phases, as a rare opportunity to exert disciplinary autonomy. Competitions are said to replicate the freedom of artists and authors: creativity is rewarded, with cost pressures and the clients’ whims offset by independent, knowledgeable jurors. 20 ‘The competition temporarily endows architecture with the autonomy of those fields [literature, the fine arts]. When architects compete, the dependency on the sponsor is suspended and the act of entering formal competitions gains them the kind of autonomy historically accorded to artists. A competition is thus the space in which architects can act as if, and believe themselves to be, full-fledged, relatively autonomous creators.’  Hélène Lipstadt, ‘Experimenting with the Experimental Tradition, 1989–2009: On Competitions and Architecture Research’, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 21, no. 2/3 (2009): 15. See also Paul Gottschling, ‘Where Design Competitions Matter: Architectural Artefacts and Discursive Events’, Journal of Material Culture 23, no. 2 (2018),: 151–68. All participants in this sheltered system are accustomed to interpreting competitions as an exercise in autonomy, from entrants and jurors, to peers viewing entries in specialist architecture publications and exhibitions. This frees entrants to push against some of the external economic, aesthetic and technical considerations that constrain other projects. If this is true, then online competitions unleash these disciplinary forces on an unsuspecting public who encounter the full range of unfiltered entries, not just those shortlisted and approved for public consumption. 21 As Elisabeth Tostrup writes, even while architects believe themselves to be working in an autonomous system, juries increasingly consider the public reaction to a work in their deliberation. Elisabeth Tostrup, ‘On Competition Rhetoric and Contemporary Trends’, in Competition Grid : Experimenting with and Within Architecture Competitions, ed. Maria Theodorou and Antigoni Katsakou (London: RIBA Publications, 2018), 24. See also Hélène Lipstadt’s preface in the same publication. It was easy to misunderstand a meme like the ball pit when it leaked from its specific subculture to the mainstream, where viewers were unfamiliar with UMA’s pool and architecture memes. In the same way, there is an inevitable confusion when competition entries are accessible on generalist design media websites and social media accounts; catering simultaneously to an architectural audience that knows what to expect from such competitions and a public that does not.

Copies and consensus

It is common for broad themes to emerge in competition entries. Susan Holden writes that the Centre Pompidou brief emphasised solutions combining ‘monumentality’ and ‘change’ in the context of Archigram and Cedric Price’s English avant-garde, producing a host of similar mega-structural proposals with moving parts. 22 Susan Holden, ‘Megastructures and Monuments: The Dilemma of Finding a “Permanent Image of Change” in the Plateau Beaubourg Competition, 1970–71’, Fabrications 21, no. 2 (2012): 83–112. See also ‘The Pompidolium’, The Architectural Review (Archive : 1896–2005) 161, no. 693 (1977): 270–72. Naomi Stead argues that the brief for Brisbane’s contemporary art gallery, QAGOMA, was explicitly written to solicit entries sensitive to the subtropical climate that were stylistically informed by the local timber-and-tin vernacular architecture. 23 Naomi Stead, ‘The Brisbane Effect: GOMA and the Architectural Competition for a New Institutional Building’, in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015): 627–39. Aureli claimed that the Helsinki competition entries were a group of projects without distinction, united only by the way the Guggenheim used their bland consistency to ‘construct consensus around a controversial building.’ 24 Aureli, ‘Can Architecture Be Political?’ Deamer thought the only unifying quality was a ‘confusion over what a supposed parametric zeitgeist may or may not imply’. 25 Deamer, ‘ The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’, 4. In these three cases, design consensus was constructed explicitly through competition briefs, and fostered implicitly by contemporaneous architecture culture. Yet in each case, it took scholars with detailed knowledge of the competition context and archive to draw out similarities that would not be immediately obvious to the public: similarities less to do with visual resemblances than common conceptual and theoretical strategies.

In contrast, both architectural and lay commentators immediately noticed the transparent roof and spire common to many of the Notre Dame Proposals. In part, this could be attributed to Phillipe’s calls for contemporary techniques, or President Macron’s boast that the replacement would be ‘more beautiful’ than before. 26 Adam Nossiter, ‘In Aftermath of Notre-Dame Fire, Macron Urges Unity in Fragmented Nation’, The New York Times, 16 April 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/world/europe/notre-dame-fire-investigation.html. Yet this homogeneity was too complete, and glass hardly the only material for contemporary, beautiful architecture. The difference here was that, without the anonymity that has been a hallmark of serious competitions since the Italian Renaissance – supposed to ensure that entries are judged on their merits alone, rather than the fame of the designer – proposals were conceived in a context saturated with images of other schemes. 27 Hélène Lipstadt and Barry Bergdoll, The Experimental Tradition : Essays on Competitions in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), 15. The speed with which Notre Dame renderings were produced and disseminated online demonstrates how easy it now is to share early ideas before conditions of competition entry and anonymity are announced. Whether or not this secrecy always functions in picking an anonymous winner, it does ensure that entrants only see other proposals once the shortlist is revealed 28 See, for example, Crossman’s account of the Opera Bastille competition (1986) where jurors chose a scheme they thought produced by Richard Meier, ‘but was in fact penned by an unknown Uruguayan practicing in Canada named Carlos Ott’. Camille Crossman, “‘Jury boards as “risk managers”: Analysing jury deliberations within architectural competitions against the background of risk management’, in Strebel and Silberberger (eds.), Architecture Competition, 117. In contrast, the connection between some Notre Dame projects was explicit: Miyosis first posted their glass-roofed proposal in the Dezeen comments section, below several other near-identical proposals.

Accusations of copying remain controversial in architecture discourse, despite its presence throughout the discipline’s history. Copying continues to imply a lack of originality and authenticity, and potentially infringes copyright law. 29 Neil Leach, ‘The Culture of the Copy’, Architectural Design 86, no. 5 (2016): 126–33. Urtzi Grau and Cristina Goberna, ’What Kinds of Copies?’ Log no. 31 (2014): 139–42. Understanding this free flow of influence from scheme to scheme as a meme offers a way to remove some of this disciplinary baggage. All faced with the same problem at the same moment, transparent reconstructions might be considered a kind of collective solution; developed in tandem by different firms at the same time, each with different strengths and abilities. In the same way that memes develop through the network of connections built between modifications and reposts, each version of Notre Dame in glass or crystal offers a different perspective on the same proposal. Like memes, this process might have exhausted itself, or it might re-emerge as the dominant, obvious solution, should a competition eventuate.

Memes offline

It is tempting to dismiss internet memes, and this essay with them, as a juvenile internet phenomenon, comically ill-suited to serious study. Milner and Shifman, however, have characterised such patently un-comical internet trends as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street as memes; built on slogans and images online but effecting real change. 30 Milner, The World Made Meme, 219; Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 129–38. What was published online will ultimately influence any future Notre Dame competitions: we can only speculate whether this will prompt glass roofs, exhaust the appetite for ‘outlandish’ designs or foster an atmosphere of further experimentation. Indeed, proposals like UMA’s pool and Fuksas’s crystalline spire have already inspired entries in the real GoArchitect’s ideas competition. On the other hand, the proliferation of unsolicited proposals has arguably stoked public fears of an insensitive architectural solution, contributing to the French Senate’s decision to block an official competition.

Milner writes that at their best, memes become sites where multiple voices converge to exchange ideas on a relatively equal field. Popular culture provides a common language for diverse groups. 31 Milner, The World Made Meme, 111. Indeed, Notre Dame bypassed the traditional black box of anonymous entries and jury deliberations, opening the discussion to critics like Wainwright and the public, who both communicated with images. Through a network of interactions on social media, architecture media websites and online competitions like that of GoArchitect, it engaged architects, designers, politicians and enthusiasts in conversation over the future of a beloved icon. Despite this, specific disciplinary knowledge has continued to separate architects and non-architects, leading to the sort of disorientation that characterised the comments on Dezeen.

Tracing the ways that the Notre Dame controversy resembles a meme uncovers many of same institutional and disciplinary structures that have characterised competitions in the past. Even without becoming an official project, Notre Dame remained under the control of different branches of the French government, who announced the competition, cancelled it and established its terms and parameters. Mainstream design websites acted as gatekeepers little different to traditional journals, deciding which schemes to publish from social media, while architects produced proposals and renderings without immediate financial gain. 32 As Milner notes, memes are often still dependant on cultural gatekeepers like BuzzFeed to achieve mainstream success. On another level, recommendation algorithms within social media platforms themselves also contribute to a meme’s popularity. Milner, The World Made Meme, 199–201. Meme producers exploited an intimate knowledge of both architecture and internet culture, acting from within the discipline.

Notre Dame may have become a meme, but in many ways it still resembled a traditional competition. In simultaneously reinforcing existing power dynamics while opening new modes of engagement and experimentation, it exposes an institution in transition. How well this existing model adapts to the internet, or prompts the emergence of an entirely new model, will depend on how future competitions grapple with these issues of anonymity, public engagement, reward, gatekeepers and even memes. Ultimately Notre Dame might simply reveal online competitions as a future reality: neither nightmare nor utopia, but as much a part of architecture culture as competitions offline.

 

  1. Jon Henley, ‘France announces contest to redesign Notre Dame spire’, The Guardian, 18 April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/17/france-announces-architecture-competition-rebuild-notre-dames-spire. Other journalists were quick to point out the political utility of Emmanuel Macron’s calls for ‘a more beautiful cathedral’ to be built in just five years, in time for the Paris 2024 Olympics, projecting an image of a progressive, modern government, distracting public attention in the midst of the populist ‘yellow vest’ protests. Dorothy Wickenden, ‘The Notre-Dame Fire Could Be a Turning Point for the Macron Presidency’, The New Yorker, 18 April 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/the-notre-dame-fire-could-be-a-turning-point-for-the-macron-presidency.
  2. Since then, none of the promised funds have been released, prompting some commentators to accuse France’s billionaires of cynically exploiting tax loopholes and of pledging support only to wield disproportionate influence on the reconstruction when it begins. Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires’, The Guardian, 18 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-notre-dame-billionaires-french-philanthropy.
  3. Linda Varlese, ‘Massimiliano Fuksas: “Immagino un pinnacolo di cristallo di Baccarat per la nuova Notre Dame”’, Huffpost, 16 April 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.it/2019/04/16/massimiliano-fuksas-immagino-un-pinnacolo-di-cristallo-di-baccarat-per-la-nuova-notre-dame_a_23712564/.
  4. Tom Ravenscroft, ‘Seven alternative spires for Notre-Dame Cathedral’, Dezeen, 25 April 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/25/notre-dame-spire-alternative-cathedral-designs/.
  5. Tom Ravenscroft, “Seven of the most outrageous proposals for Notre-Dame,” Dezeen, 15 May, 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/15/notre-dame-rebuild-outrageous-proposals/. BoredPanda, a non-architecture website aggregating memes and general internet culture, attributed the carpark design to Pascal Smet, minister of mobility and public infrastructure for Brussels, who had retweeted the image. Giedrė Vaičiulaitytė, ‘9 Ridiculous Proposals for the Notre Dame Restoration’, BoredPanda, https://www.boredpanda.com/notre-dame-cathedral-outrageous-redesign-proposals/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic.
  6. Sebastian Errazuriz (@sebastianstudio), ‘This little piece’, Instagram, 17 May 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxidsq_BHFT/ . ­
  7. Tom Ravenscroft, “Notre-Dame must be restored to ‘last known visual state’ says French Senate,” Dezeen, 29 May 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/29/restore-notre-dame-cathedral-french-senate/.
  8. Liam James, ‘Notre Dame design competition seeks new roof for world famous Paris cathedral’, The Independent, 21 June 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/notre-dame-cathedral-roof-fire-design-competition-paris-france-a8968791.html.
  9. Peggy Deamer, ‘The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition: What Is the Value Proposition?’, The Avery Review 8 (2015), 1-5, https://averyreview.com/content/3-issues/8-8/1-the-guggenheim-helsinki-competition/deamer.pdf; Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Can Architecture Be Political?’, lecture at the Architectural Association, London, 6 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dd73Sd0xpU.
  10. Andrew Kovacs, ‘Archive of Affinities Making Architecture from Architecture’, Architectural Design 89, no. 4 (2019): 54–61; Mark Foster Gage, ‘Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture’, Log no. 33 (2015): 95–106.
  11. Deamer, ‘Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’; Derreck Leavitt, ‘Why Open Competitions Are Bad for Architects’, Modative Blog, 18 May 2010, http://www.modative.com/modern-architects-blog/bid/31683/Why-Open-Architecture-Competitions-Are-Bad-for-Architects; Taller de Casquería, ‘Guggenheim Helsinki: Architectural Competition Data’, 15 October 2014. Infographic video, 4:31. https://vimeo.com/109085572.
  12. Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media, ed. ProQuest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 3.
  13. The original definition comes from Richard Dawkins: ‘a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 41.
  14. As Milner notes, the ability to easily appropriate an image is a key indicator of the popularity of a meme, allowing users to easily use it for their own purposes, making it their own. Milner, The World Made Meme, 29.
  15. Milner characterises this more broadly as an image’s resonance. Milner, The World Made Meme, 32. Shifman writes that ‘a fundamental feature of many memetic photos is a striking incongruity between two or more elements in the frame’. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 90.
  16. Milner sees this sort of ‘shared resonance’ and collectivism at the heart of meme culture. Milner, The World Made Meme, 33.
  17. Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger, ‘Introduction: Unpacking Architectural Competitions – Project Design and the Building Process’, in Architecture Competition : Project Design and the Building Process, ed. Ignaz Strebel and Jan Silberberger (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 1–27.
  18. Deamer, ‘The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’, 4.
  19. UMA, ‘Notre Dame’, accessed on 18 January 2020, https://www.u-m-a.se/filter/Featured/NOTRE-DAME.
  20. ‘The competition temporarily endows architecture with the autonomy of those fields [literature, the fine arts]. When architects compete, the dependency on the sponsor is suspended and the act of entering formal competitions gains them the kind of autonomy historically accorded to artists. A competition is thus the space in which architects can act as if, and believe themselves to be, full-fledged, relatively autonomous creators.’  Hélène Lipstadt, ‘Experimenting with the Experimental Tradition, 1989–2009: On Competitions and Architecture Research’, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 21, no. 2/3 (2009): 15. See also Paul Gottschling, ‘Where Design Competitions Matter: Architectural Artefacts and Discursive Events’, Journal of Material Culture 23, no. 2 (2018),: 151–68.
  21. As Elisabeth Tostrup writes, even while architects believe themselves to be working in an autonomous system, juries increasingly consider the public reaction to a work in their deliberation. Elisabeth Tostrup, ‘On Competition Rhetoric and Contemporary Trends’, in Competition Grid : Experimenting with and Within Architecture Competitions, ed. Maria Theodorou and Antigoni Katsakou (London: RIBA Publications, 2018), 24. See also Hélène Lipstadt’s preface in the same publication.
  22. Susan Holden, ‘Megastructures and Monuments: The Dilemma of Finding a “Permanent Image of Change” in the Plateau Beaubourg Competition, 1970–71’, Fabrications 21, no. 2 (2012): 83–112. See also ‘The Pompidolium’, The Architectural Review (Archive : 1896–2005) 161, no. 693 (1977): 270–72.
  23. Naomi Stead, ‘The Brisbane Effect: GOMA and the Architectural Competition for a New Institutional Building’, in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015): 627–39.
  24. Aureli, ‘Can Architecture Be Political?’
  25. Deamer, ‘ The Guggenheim Helsinki Competition’, 4.
  26. Adam Nossiter, ‘In Aftermath of Notre-Dame Fire, Macron Urges Unity in Fragmented Nation’, The New York Times, 16 April 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/world/europe/notre-dame-fire-investigation.html.
  27. Hélène Lipstadt and Barry Bergdoll, The Experimental Tradition : Essays on Competitions in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), 15.
  28. See, for example, Crossman’s account of the Opera Bastille competition (1986) where jurors chose a scheme they thought produced by Richard Meier, ‘but was in fact penned by an unknown Uruguayan practicing in Canada named Carlos Ott’. Camille Crossman, “‘Jury boards as “risk managers”: Analysing jury deliberations within architectural competitions against the background of risk management’, in Strebel and Silberberger (eds.), Architecture Competition, 117.
  29. Neil Leach, ‘The Culture of the Copy’, Architectural Design 86, no. 5 (2016): 126–33. Urtzi Grau and Cristina Goberna, ’What Kinds of Copies?’ Log no. 31 (2014): 139–42.
  30. Milner, The World Made Meme, 219; Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 129–38.
  31. Milner, The World Made Meme, 111.
  32. As Milner notes, memes are often still dependant on cultural gatekeepers like BuzzFeed to achieve mainstream success. On another level, recommendation algorithms within social media platforms themselves also contribute to a meme’s popularity. Milner, The World Made Meme, 199–201.