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

Open sesame … Jean Nouvel shows his model to the Andorran minister of culture. Photograph: The Competition

Sleepless nights, set-tos and screwed-up paper retrieved from the bin – all the stuff great architecture is made of. Right?

For anyone with the slightest suspicion of the insidious, futile processes at work behind the glossy facades of the world's so-called 'starchitects', a new documentary by Spanish architect Angel Borrego Cubero makes for compulsive viewing.

The Competition, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican tonight, follows the trials and tribulations of five stellar practices competing in a doomed bid to build a new national museum for Andorra, back in 2009. As the global financial crisis hit rock-bottom, no job was too small for architects whose dreams of dotting Middle Eastern deserts with their snazzy signatures had been revealed as a hopeless mirage. A museum the size of a department store, for a tiny microstate nestled in the folds of the Pyrenees, was not something to be sniffed at.

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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.

It is a routine, familiar to anyone who has worked on competitions of this kind, that jumps and jolts between utterly different proposals: one minute the answer is a ground-scraper; the next it is a willowy tree. We see Gehry's assistants diligently screwing up scraps of paper and piling them into crumpled totem poles. Perrault's staff, stuck for inspiration, turn their model upside down, and hey presto, it makes sense! Nouvel's team start sketching a gaping yonic gash through the centre of their building: “In section, when it looks like something sexual, we are close,” quips the designer....Continue Reading

> via The Guardian