The Competition We Ran

There is a big project given to the company that I work for (RaayFan), about planning and designing a large industrial complex. I'm not directly engaged in this project and the guys in urban planning division have been working on it. One day, the client (Mr. Teymoori) went to the project manager (Mr. Zoueshtiagh) and wanted him to design a kind of entrance for this complex. Mr. Zoueshtiagh called me and wanted me to draw some primary designs and sketches. After a while he told me that he had talked to the client and made him accept that our company ran an architectural competition between young designers. Finally the client accepted to pay $2000 (20000000 Rials) as the competition prize in sum. We divided this prize to three portion for the first till the third winners of the competition:
First prize: $1200
Second prize: $500
Third Prize: $300
As you can see the first prize is not bad for such a small competition (at least in Iran). I wrote a competition brief and its rules after it was finalized, we announced it. The deadline for the competition was at 17:00 on Wednesday 23 August 2006. We received 24 proposed designs and the jury on Tuesday 29 August had a meeting and the and the winners were determined.
The matter that I want to point out is not the story of competition, I want to write about the works. Although the subject of the competition referred to a small object as an architectural project, but the prizes were enough for it (at least according to the fees and costs in Iran). So I expected that many good designers and even well-experienced architects would participate in this competition.
Before the judgment day, I took a look to the works. Overally they were sadly weak and ordinary. In my opinion, none of them were good enough for the first prize. At least, 10 of the designs were really awful. You can see some of them below:

These 3 designs were appreciated by the jury but they have some fundamental problems or didn't follow all of the competition rules:

And, finally the followings are the winners:

III


It was such a small local competition but the managing of it was really hard. I will never directly handle the establishment of an architectural competition.