Charles Holland on the Sterling Prize

Charles Holland, writing about the Sterling Prize (awarded to Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi in Rome), and how it awards architects for buildings ignoring the role of the many hundreds of other people involved in the actual manifestation of a building:

There is an enormous gap between the process of designing and the physical reality of building. Architects get so used to equating drawings and models with buildings – despite the vast scale, material and factual differences – that they assume an equivalence between them. Perhaps it is this sense of equivalence that allows them to gloss over the work done by other consultants and contractors and claim sole authorship. This equivalence affects architectural education in particular, where buildings and images are discussed as if they are literally interchangeable.