This "Survivor" for architects is part of a federal government program — Design Excellence — to improve the architecture of public buildings. It usually takes the General Services Administration, the federal government's landlord and developer, years to build a courthouse or other major buildings. Yet on a crisp December day, it picked an architect for such a project in the equivalent of a bureaucratic millisecond.
The GSA used the same frenzied, one-day bake-off for much larger courthouses in Nashville, Tenn.; Austin, Texas; and Toledo, Ohio.
The one-day competitions were created to help small firms, which can't spare big teams for several months to produce designs for typical architecture competitions. Whoever gets top nod from the jury, which judges the entries the day after the competition, usually gets to design the actual building.
The competition rules are strict. While nearly all architects design on computers, the teams here are limited to colored pens and pencils, tracing paper and rulers.
With the rules outlined, the 20 architects — four on each team — are led to the building site, a single square block containing piles of gravel, a couple of aluminum sheds and a row of parked police cars.
Across one street is a city park shaded with giant oak trees. Across the other is a rundown and shuttered train depot.
The GSA picked the five firms for the final competition from a crop of dozens who submitted portfolios and relevant qualification documents.
Anniston, located two hours west of Atlanta, sits in the foothills of the Appalachians. It has suffered in recent decades as a major Army base closed, textile factories fled and industrial pollution was discovered in its water supply. Locals see the courthouse as a chance to reinvigorate the city.
The new courthouse will replace the current 1906 building, an elegant three-story marble-clad jewel box. Inside, conditions are unfit for working, says the presiding judge.
Most of the teams begin the day talking through concepts and doing rough sketches. Then they start to prepare their final presentations, though many still have kinks to work out in their ideas.
At 6 p.m., the deadline time, each team's drawings show a modern-looking building, most of them with hints of classical courthouses. Many include street maps of the area, emphasizing how the new courthouse could enliven the neighboring blocks.
The next morning, a jury made up of two architectural writers and one practicing architect chose the winner — Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects' boxlike vertical courthouse.
Wolf Architecture, Malibu, Calif., came in second, followed by Hodgetts + Fung, Studio Gang and Predock_Frane Architects of Santa Monica, Calif.
But it's not the jury's decision to make alone. A separate evaluation board made up of Judge Sledge, GSA representatives from Washington and Atlanta, and an outside architectural adviser met later that day to make the official selection.
The evaluation board is meant to incorporate the jury's evaluation into a larger score card that also takes into account personal interviews with the architects and their overall portfolios.
But in this case, the board effectively ignored the jury's rankings, did its own evaluation of the competition boards and chose the winner, three members of the panel said later.
The new winner: Studio Gang, the team that came in fourth place with the jury. Two members describe the decision as unanimous, another as mostly unanimous.
In dozens of other similar competitions the GSA has held, the jury's top pick has gotten the commission every time but one.
The competition aside, it's not clear if the courthouse will even be built. Congress appropriated more than $4 million to start the design and acquire the land. But the courts have yet to give the go-ahead.
