Competing Visions: The Kitchener City Hall Competition

128 pp. with extensive B/W and full-colour illustrations. Shallow 1/4" crease at lower back corner of cover. "Architectural competitions have been called risky; their results unpredictable. Despite or perhaps because of such perceptions, Kitchener - a community of 160,000 people - opened its doors to every architect in Canada to submit designs for its new City Hall. Where many competitions have floudered, Kitchener succeeded. The process has been widely commended and the results mark a new turning point for Canadian design. They reveal a younger generation of architects challenging the easy codifications of Post-Modernism through a rethinking and reworking of Modernism's diverse modes of expression. COMPETING VISIONS commemorates this important architectural event with full presentations of the prize winning projects. Critic Larry Richards analyses the results and comes to terms with this shift in design tendencies. Essays by George Baird, Tom McKay, Detlef Mertins, Douglas Shadbolt and Brigitte Shim put the issues surrounding architectural competitions into sharper focus.".