The Competition

The Competition, Spain 2013, 100 min.

Director: Angel Borrego Cubero
Original with English Subtitles

followed by a talk with:

Angel Borrego Cubero, director of the film
Christoph Monschein, former employee and partner of Hans Hollein
Gunther Koppelhuber, former employee of Zaha Hadid
Martina Barth-Sedelmayer, former employee of Norman Foster
Moderated by: Dietmar Steiner, director Az W

The documentary “The Competition“ accompanies five internationally famous architects – Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Dominique Perrault and Norman Foster –, who in 2008 took part in the competition for the National Art Museum in the small landlocked country of Andorra in the Pyrenees.
The masters and, in particular their staff, toil away, design strategies, struggle, want to win. The presentation to the jury, which takes place on a hectic day in the middle of the elections, is a major media spectacle in the small country. The film follows the competition in a highly detailed, almost painfully raw, way offering fascinating studies of the personality, strategy and rhetoric of the star architects – and of the working conditions in their offices. The first documentary film to be made by architect Angel Borrego Cubero – Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS) in Madrid – accompanies the tense process that is characteristic of architecture competitions and questions their sense in a particularly strong way.

Within the framework of Vienna Art Week

Supported by vitra