rchitectural competitions are no longer simply professional praxis for architects and a recurrent exercise for students at schools of architec- ture. The competition has also turned into a field of research, and this book is part of an effort constituting the architectural competition as a field for studies with scholarly claims. The first doctoral dissertations on competi- tions were presented in the 1990s in Europe. Another clear manifestation of research interest is the growth and spread of scholarly conferences on archi- tectural competitions.
The contributions to the book show in a convincing way that the architec- tural competition is an interesting and rewarding object for research. The competition processes bear rich empirical findings to which one may refer for knowledge about architecture as professional practice, as educational subject and research platform. The architectural competition illustrates processes
of change in society that are technical and organizational as well