While historically a building design process involved a typical top-down, client-architect relationship, this hierarchical process is no longer effective in addressing the emerging heterotopic conditions of a contemporary city. With an evolving image of a Creative City, a term borrowed from Charles Landry, as a product of accumulation of collective cultural capital replacing the more traditional image of a city as system of hierarchies of control, it is evident that a client-architect power struggle prevalent in traditional linear methodology of programming is becoming obtrusive to effective programming processes of urban spaces today.
Even though the prevalent top-down approach to programming still serves as a model for programming of most of the building projects in the United States today, it is becoming inadequate at keeping up with the emerging requirements for multiplicity of user needs and typologies in its limited contextual and physical response to dense urban environments. A potential for reformulating the current methodology of programming into a transversal and participatory decision-making process can be established by examining several major architectural competitions and the structural dynamics working within them.
The derived methodology can serve as a model for conducting successful design competitions in the future that will be more likely to result in context-informed design solutions that take into an account multiple clients and stakeholders. This methodology and the participation of multiple stakeholders, in turn, will be able to ensure that the architectural responses to the proposed design challenges address a project’s potential for longevity and adaptability through contextual implications of the dense urban fabric of a city.