As I started thinking about how to create a retreat centre, I knew I needed a location and I had a rough idea of what it should include; some accommodation, some spaces for self actualization, some amenities.
I had also chosen to focus my location scope to the southern half of Portugal for the time being, although Spain, Northern Italy, and even Slovenia were also of interest. But I knew the more options I had the more time I would spend on research and analysis.
Part of the concept for the retreat centre was that it should support local as much as possible, and I’ve always been a fan of encouraging young talent, so I came up with the idea to host an architecture competition where architecture students would propose their ideas for the retreat centre.
I had no experience doing something like this, so I started where most people would probably start: Google.
The Competition Brief
After finding examples of other architecture competitions online, they all had a “competition brief” that covered things like
- Timing and Phases: What steps did a competition usually entail and what was the runway allowed for those steps. I needed to ensure I could give myself and the contestants enough time to do what we all needed to do
- Prizes: What kinds of prizes were usually offered, how were contestants recognized
- Requirements: What was usually provided to contestants of architecture competitions as base info, how were requirements described, what are the components of the submissions
- Registration: How do contestants usually register and what information was collected
ChatGPT for the Introduction, Overview, and Images
I needed some help to get the ideas flowing and create some context for the competition requirements. So I employed ChatGPT and simply told it what I was trying to do. Below is full transparency into my prompts:
Now I had ideas for some of the sections, but I needed to put my assistant to the test.
I asked ChatGPT to write a first draft based on the outline it already proposed. I asked it to remove the Organizational Support section, and provided links to a few other retreat centres and campsites I found inspiring from the web.
We had leaned in too heavily on luxury. I wanted to tone that down and focus more on retreat. So I asked ChatGPT to tweak the copy.
Excellent! Now I had a solid base to work from. I could later tweak this to get the tone and voice right, and of course I would need to add competition requirements. (see below).
But first, I wanted to make the brief look good, so I employed my faithful assistant once more.
I asked: “Thanks, please create an image that could act as the cover image for the competition proposal”
Me: “Thanks, please go ahead and create the image”
Image:
This was a pretty good start, but I knew I didn’t have the budget for land with a beautiful lake on it, I needed something with less water and more green to make it realistic.
This is how I learned that ChatGPT is not very good at refining images.
- I asked it to remove the water and replace it with trees. It gave me an identical image, but with one house instead of two. 🤷
- I would ask it to replace a large ares that it had filled with water with “lush greenery” and the resulting foto had only tightly packed buildings.
For the most part, I found retrying with new prompts was generally more successful than trying to have ChatGPT edit an image it had already created. Although this does work, it’s not very reliable.
We got there in the end, here are two of the images I ended up using for my Brief.
Competition Details and Requirements
Most of the rest of the document came down to defining deliverables, timing, prizes etc. Here I’ll cover how I defined those parts.
Timing & Phases
Architecture competitions, from what I found, spanned many months, this was both good and bad. I needed to find the right balance so that I had enough time to promote the competition, contestants had enough time to create their submissions, and the timeline was short enough that it didn’t drag on forever, I didn’t want contestants forgetting about it.
I figured 6 months was the longest I was willing to work on this part of the project, and the longest I was willing to wait to wrap it up. It was early May, and this is how I broke it down for myself:
- 2 weeks (till the end of May) to create the requirements (the brief) and figure out how I was going to promote the competition
- roughly 2 months for contestants to register while I also promoted the competition
- roughly 2 months for registrants to complete their submissions
- 3 weeks for submission review and winner announcement
Prizes:
This was relatively straight forward. Most competition are either for size money or “reputation” if it was a famous recurring competition.
I had no reputation, so it would have to be money. The competitions I could find were not dealing in thousands of Euros, so I decided to commit €1,000 Euros to the competition, splitting the prize between the top three submissions:
- Winner: €500
- 2nd Place: €300
- 3rd Place: €200
I felt this was a decent amount of prize money that wouldn’t break the bank, would be interesting for students, and spread the pot a little bit so more than just a single person benefits.
Requirements
Where the Introduction, Background, and Overview describe what the competition is about and the motivations, the requirements is where you need to create the boundaries and guide competitors.
I needed to find a balance between to vague and too prescriptive. I didn’t want to restrict their creativity, but I also wanted ideas I could use. This section really came down to trying to lightly define what I had in my mind while also considering any restrictions I was already aware of, like most municipalities would require me to have over 50,000 square meters of land, and students should assume it was inland, because I didn’t have the budget to get ocean-front property.
I knew the retreat should be relatively sustainable, so concepts should make use of sustainable building materials and practices. I encouraged use of photovoltaic for power, low cost construction materials, and I knew it should be a large hotel-style building. Given my small budget, it was also clear this location would be inland, so contestants should not rely on water views. In Portugal, many tourist approvals require large pieces of land, so the brief instructs contestants to assume more than 50,000 square meters.
The brief encouraged small accommodation units, lots of local flora,. We didn’t need to be on the grid, since we could use photovoltaic. There needed to be a balance here too. I wanted the submissions to help inspire my ideas for the retreat centre, but I also didn’t want my existing ideas to bias the submissions.
I then used Pages on Mac to pull all the copy and images together, format, page layout, and final PDF creation.
You can check out the final brief here
In a future post, I’ll get into how I promoted the competition.