According to information that appears to have been leaked, there were legitimate concerns about the composition of the jury, the excessive presence of government representatives, the lack of anonymity, and the limited disclosure of the scores and criteria used during the selection process. A jury made up of local and international members should ensure that the chosen proposal is the one it considers best suited to Ecuador’s urban and landscape context, climate, museological programme and social conditions. A public competition of this importance demands the highest degree of transparency, not merely a results ceremony.
Four days later, one of the jury’s most prominent members, Minister Roberto Luque, rejected the winning proposal, “Ecos del Sol”, after an arbitrary wave of criticism erupted on social media. The gesture was institutionally devastating: the state ceased to defend its own rules and treated instant reactions to a set of renderings as sufficient grounds to disregard months of specialist evaluation. The resignation of the Deputy Minister of Culture and the uncorroborated allegations of political pressure further strengthened the suspicion that the problem had never been purely architectural.
A new “final phase” was then announced. In reality, it amounted to a third stage invented after the verdict had already been issued, and it did nothing to remedy the underlying problem. Public participation was introduced hastily, further clouding the outcome, since citizens were asked to vote based on limited information and a shortlist drawn up under rules imposed after the fact.
The jury was altered, some of the previously selected teams were invited to participate again, and a public consultation was introduced with an insignificant weighting of 15 per cent, compared with 85 per cent for the technical assessment. This was despite the claim that, because “the people had spoken”, the selection process had to be repeated. Several participants chose to withdraw, an unmistakable sign of the arbitrary nature of the process and of the fact that confidence in it had already collapsed. Public participation, added only after the controversy, seemed less like a consistent policy of democratisation than a mechanism for legitimising a decision reconstructed on the fly.
Several international institutions issued public statements defending the integrity of public competitions. Ten of the shortlisted teams signed a manifesto in support of transparency and fair play in such processes. Even more strikingly, and even though it was never disclosed from among which teams the new selection was made, some architectural teams allowed themselves to be drawn into the political game and, without hesitation, continued to take part in this parody of a competition.
Winning proposal in the final phase of the competition to design the new National Museum of Ecuador. "Living Strata", by SANAA together with A0, CPA and JHS.
Winning proposal in the final phase of the competition to design the new National Museum of Ecuador. "Living Strata", by SANAA together with A0, CPA and JHS.
None of this proves that the final project is architecturally superior to the previous one, even if it may become a valuable museum. The problem lies elsewhere: a good building does not automatically correct a bad competition. A museum whose objective is to preserve the collective memory of a country begins its own history accumulating a dark legacy: evidence of a flawed process; the lack of judgment shown by the final participants in defending the architectural work; a demonstration of the arbitrariness of the country's institutions, their subservience to the questionable voice of a limited social network, and their disregard for the value of public discourse.
