"The Competition", a documentary about the real world of starchitects

Sleepless nights for interns, tearful tantrums, and structures that resemble fossilised turds. A new documentary by Spanish architect Angel Borrego Cubero called The Competition exposes the world of iconic architecture at its worst.

With an application form open to anyone who had won the Pritzker Prize, “or similar qualifications”, the callout attracted the likes of Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel – as well as the Pritzkerless but plucky Dominique Perrault.

The documentary, to which the architects agreed as part of the entry requirements, charts the surreal process by which “iconic” projects are conjured, over a matter of weeks, by bleary-eyed interns, in a mysteriously haphazard manner.

There is an air of desperation throughout, as the competing teams grasp blindly for novelty forms, trying to second-guess the desires of a client they have never met, in a context they have never seen, for imaginary future users they will never know. The entire process is exposed as an absurdist endeavour, fatuous shapes dressed up with just enough detail to be convincing for the jury presentation, seductive images geared towards massaging the vanity of a culture minister.

The architects' offices are revealed as factories constructed for maximum inefficiency, where untold hours are spent churning out multiple options, only for the maestro to arrive at the last minute and overturn the tables. There are late-night pizzas and despondent cigarette breaks, as teams await the arrival of their prima donna principals, who swoop in to damn the product of their labours.

Want to see famous architects yell and get angry? Watch the trailer !