“To leak confidential information to the media, please press 4”

“To leak confidential information to the media, please press 4,” read one hotline prompt imagined during Canadian Center for Architecture’s How to: reward and punish workshop, which shared its results during a Zoom webinar on Saturday morning. Led by Lev Bratishenko with George Kafka, this gathering worked virtually to realize a soft tactical guide to architectural awards systems, which are either private, elite transactions, or reduced to monetized trinkets, driven by a profit motive and the neoliberal need for distinguishing features in the global marketplace. An award is a gimmick, Sianne Ngai might say.

“The more they proliferate the more meaningless they seem,” was the consensus from the workshop. They analyzed the timeline of Architizer’s prizes (so many categories) and the organizational charts of award-granting entities before presenting new tools—notably the aforementioned hotline for awards participants and a set of Joker cards. The gathering felt intimate—even smaller than the group of people who care about architectural awards are those nerdy enough to want to hear about revising their impact (a NYRA regular asked two questions). The group’s output shows ways to shake things up.

One surprise finding: A secret award—gasp, no dopamine hit of public recognition—that’s given via email whose prize is a recipe that the winner must cook and share at dinner with friends who, while eating, will decide its next recipient. Is it real or is the start of a beautiful rumor? Who cares anymore? Maybe this is the start of a “new typology: cheap, warm, and out its organisers’ [sic] control.” What if awards promoted good actions instead of beautiful photography? What if they had the influence and invisibility of gossip? What if they were the start of greatness, not the deadening finality of its conclusion? If you want to change things, this guide will help you mess with the system. But, as it states, “if you’re out for blood, you already know what to do.”