Chapter 17
Competition
The late radio and television pioneer David Sarnoff once remarked, “Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in men.”
The first part seems incontestable to me; the second is highly debatable.
I have always believed that competition pushes people, companies, and organizations to higher levels of achievement. I was always driven to be the best, to be first among our competitors. We competed in the arenas of stock price, market share, and reputation. But the other guy didn’t set the higher bar. We set it ourselves.
My current careers in philanthropy and collecting contemporary art involve competition of a different sort. I’m competing against myself again—but it’s not for profit. It’s for the satisfaction that comes from making positive change and enriching more lives each year.
Just Because There’s a Winner Doesn’t Mean There’s a Loser
Competition in business benefits the customer by stimulating better products and service and lower prices. The same holds for higher education, which has benefited from the strong rivalries between private and public institutions for faculty, students, and donors. In my hometown, for example, I doubt UCLA would be as exemplary a school as it is today were it not for the presence of USC and Caltech, among others.
But America’s K–12 public schools have, until recently, been a monopoly. Most alternatives, such as private education or home schooling, are available only to families with resources. The rise of high-performing public charter schools has injected a much-needed dose of competition into our education system because they give parents a choice in where to send their children to school. Charter schools are public schools that operate under a granted charter that gives them greater flexibility in exchange for more accountability. If a charter school doesn’t perform, it can be closed. The same doesn’t hold for traditional public schools, many of which limp along with declining enrollment and abysmal student achievement. Charter schools have the flexibility to lengthen the school day, hold classes on Saturdays, pay their teachers more, and engage students through personalized learning. Because parents have the choice of sending their children to a traditional public school or a public charter school, the very existence of these schools creates competition. And when state and local funding go to whatever school a student attends, it’s in a school’s best interest to keep its students and attract new ones. Some of our highest performing charter grantees even use the term coopetition to describe how they cooperate with one another and share best practices. While each strives to produce the highest student achievement gains, they root for one another because they know the true winners are the students.
It’s wrong to think that competition automatically means there are winners and losers. Our foundations encourage fair competition, with no losers, through initiatives like our $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education. We award it annually to the urban public school districts that show the greatest improvement in student achievement while narrowing gaps among poor and minority children. None of the finalists for the prize loses. We award college scholarships to students in the winning school district and to students in the finalist districts. Districts have even set the goal of winning The Broad Prize in their strategic plan, and we’re happy to provide an incentive that encourages them to boost the academic progress of their students. Because of the success of The Broad Prize, we recently launched a $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, which goes to the charter management organization that annually demonstrates the most outstanding student gains and that helps students of all backgrounds advance.
Architecture—The Purest Form of Competition
Competition exists, to a certain degree, in every area—business, families, education, philanthropy. But there is one area where competition is at its purest: architecture.
Architectural competitions have become fairly common for major private and public projects. I have been fortunate enough to participate in several significant ones—most recently for The Broad.
For most projects, you start with a site and a purpose in mind for a building. Then you examine the field and come up with a list of five or six architects to submit their best designs for realizing your vision. They often create elaborate three-dimensional models and present them to a jury that selects the winner. The results almost always are better—often strikingly so—than if you had simply chosen an architect for the commission. (I think the one world-class architect whose work is not improved by traditional industry competition is Frank Gehry. That’s because he’s always locked in competition with himself.)
The Unexpected Pluses of Architecture Competitions
It makes perfect sense that a competition—not to mention all the media attention and expert scrutiny that come with it—would make architects do their best work. But one thing I find fascinating about these competitions is that they often push the jurors and patrons as hard as they do the architects. Like spectators witnessing any competition, jurors examining architecture designs are often moved to reconsider their personal limits and set their ambitions a little higher.
Take, for example, Zaha Hadid’s design for The Broad Art Museum at my alma mater, Michigan State University. We brought in a nationally known architecture and design writer, Joseph Giovannini, to oversee the competition. An initial field of 30 firms was reduced to 10 semifinalists. Then five were invited to submit final designs. At the start of the process, the university’s president, Lou Anna Simon, had given us all a strong caution that she thought the final building had to respect the traditional brick-and-ivy architecture of the campus. But when the final designs came in, President Simon was the one pushing for the most extreme entry—Hadid’s building, an intensely sculptural series of low-to-the-ground, interconnected metal and glass trapezoids. Given where President Simon started, I found her transition instructive about the power of observing competitions. Even if you’re not in the game, you’re driven to expand your mind.
Another competition I was involved in managed to transform not just the jurors but also the whole idea of how to construct an affordable public building in California. The state wanted to build a new California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) headquarters in downtown Los Angeles’s civic center. Then Governor Gray Davis told me he wanted it to be an important piece of architecture but within a strict budget. I convinced him to scrap the traditional request for proposals process and instead undertake an architectural competition. He asked me to spearhead the selection, so I brought in the head of the Art Center College of Design, Richard Koshalek. With both Davis’s desire and the budget in mind, we came up with a new way to run the competition. We asked each architect to team up with a developer and a contractor. Together, they would submit not only a design but also a plan to construct it at a fixed price.
The winner was Thom Mayne of Morphosis, who produced an extraordinary design, but he ultimately said he couldn’t bring it in on budget. At the last minute, I had to intervene to help cut costs. I convinced Caltrans they would have to accept tandem parking in the garage, told the contractor his contingency fee was too large, and then broke the news to Thom Mayne that he just wasn’t going to get everything he wanted in the design. After all sorts of finagling, we still were $2 million short, so Edye and I stepped in to cover the shortfall. They named the building’s plaza after us. The best thing, though, was that the civic center got a striking piece of architecture.
Sometimes a competition produces a winner but no building. That was the case with the contest we conducted for the redesign of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) campus.
I was on the LACMA board at the time, and in my typical fashion, set about putting together an architecture competition as fast as possible. To kick things off, I borrowed a jet from Hank Greenberg of AIG so that I could take museum officials to meet the architects we were considering. We left from the Van Nuys airport at 6:30 AM and arrived in Europe at 12:30 AM the next morning. We visited architects in five cities—London, Paris, Berlin, Basel, and Rotterdam—over four days. (Then LACMA Director Andrea Rich called it the Bataan Death March.) The architect I wanted the most was Renzo Piano. He had designed the Beyeler Foundation, an art museum in Switzerland, among several other great buildings known for their smart use of light. But Renzo informed us that he doesn’t participate in competitions. With him out of the running, we got proposals from five other architects and finally selected Rem Koolhaas.
Koolhaas’s proposal was completely different from everyone else’s. He also gave a standout in-person presentation. He managed to persuade us that he could tear down everything and rebuild the museum within a huge, tentlike structure that would stand on stilts, leaving a big public space underneath. He said this could be done in stages, but after five or six months and a lot of meetings, we discovered that wasn’t possible. At the very least, the entire museum would have to be shut down for two or three years, which was out of the question. We suddenly realized why, brilliant architect though he is, a lot of Koolhaas’s buildings never get built.
That was disappointing because I thought his design was fascinating, but it did open the door for us to add a new contemporary art museum to LACMA. Edye and I pledged $50 million toward the construction of The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and added another $10 million for art acquisition. LACMA had undertaken a competition whose winner produced a design that couldn’t be built. But that failure freed us to recruit the architect who had no interest in competing but who I knew would design a wonderfully functional building.
Edye and I flew to Paris to convince Renzo Piano to do the design. I told him it would be a great commission because we knew what we wanted, we had the money, and he wouldn’t have to deal with anyone but Andrea Rich and me.
As I expected, Renzo was not an easy sell. First he said he had too much work. Then he said he would think about it while he went sailing over the weekend. I asked him where he would be the next Monday. He said London. I said I’d meet him there. It was in London that we convinced him to come to Los Angeles and take a look at the site.
Renzo gave us another no. He said he wasn’t interested unless he could execute a more sweeping master plan. With that, he went back home. I flew after him for one last ask—as I said, I don’t take no for an answer the first few times. This time we met in his office in Genoa. It sits on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean, accessible only by a little rail car that runs up the steep incline. I prevailed on Renzo to commit to BCAM, and he finally agreed.
After all that time-consuming back-and-forth, Renzo designed a building that is a marvel of efficiency. I like to say that the best buildings result when there is a strong client and a strong architect. One of my unreasonable demands was to maximize the gallery space. I questioned every convention of a museum: Did the stairs need to be inside the building? Could the electrical and lighting systems be designed another way? Did we really need multiple bathrooms? Clearly, I lost on that last point. In the end, Renzo designed BCAM so that 90 percent of the building is devoted to gallery space.
Concept Over Cost
As an architectural patron and client, I will often sacrifice cost for concept, something I would generally not do in business.
After serving on architectural competitions for years, I recently had the opportunity to run our own competition for The Broad. And for someone who likes to control the process, this was my chance to do things my way. What I found, though, was that even when you have oversight and ultimate accountability for every aspect of a project, it’s not without a fair share of frustrations.
When Edye and I decided to build a museum to house our personal and foundation art collections, we wanted an architecturally significant building. When we selected the site on Grand Avenue, we knew our museum couldn’t clash with neighboring Walt Disney Concert Hall, but it couldn’t fade into the background either. The building had to serve two functions: as a public museum and as the headquarters for The Broad Art Foundation’s lending library. It would mean that in addition to expansive galleries, the building had to have storage space for artworks when they weren’t on public view in our museum or elsewhere. And the site had its own restrictions. It was a full city block—a nearly perfect square parcel—and had a three-story height limit. What we would ask of architects was, essentially, to build a box. Architects aren’t often thrilled by restrictions.
We invited six internationally renowned architects to compete, convened a jury of architecture scholars and museum directors, and finally selected the design of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York team that had designed and renovated the expansion of Lincoln Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art on Boston Harbor, and the innovative High Line park in lower Manhattan. Architect Elizabeth Diller came up with a unique concept for combining public exhibition space with storage. Dubbed “the vault and the veil,” Liz’s proposal was to make the storage space the literal core of the building. The heavy opaque mass of the second floor “vault” would be in constant view, hovering midway in the building, while its carved underside shaped the lobby and its top surface provided the floor of the exhibition space. The “veil,” then, would wrap the entire building with a cellular structure made of concrete and provide diffused natural daylight.
We picked the design because it accomplished all of our objectives, even though it was estimated to cost $10 million more than the other designs.
The unreasonable nature of art and architecture is that it usually fails to conform to convention. We found that to be particularly true when it came time to build The Broad. We fell in love with the design because it was truly unique and had not been done before. That carries with it a risk and, in our case, a much larger price tag. We had been assured that a fabricator in Southern California could build the concrete veil, but the costs kept escalating. We finally found a fabricator in Germany who could use a different material but keep the integrity of the design. Alterations and compromises are often required to bring a great concept to reality.
The museum is under construction and expected to open in early 2014. Although I scour the budget and question every expense, I know that, whatever the cost, we will get exactly what we wanted: A public contemporary art museum in the heart of the city’s cultural center and an iconic piece of architecture that could have resulted only from pure competition.