The Chamber of Architects will adjust the competition rules according to the opinion of the Office for the Protection of Competition

Prague - The Czech Chamber of Architects (ČKA) will modify its sample competition conditions in accordance with the opinion of the antitrust authority regarding the transparency of public procurements. Milan Svoboda, a member of the chamber who is involved in competitions, stated this in response to a question from ČTK. The chamber is responding to the fact that the Office for the Protection of Competition (ÚOHS) recently annulled a tender announced by the National Museum (NM) as irregular for solving its exhibition displays according to the competition rules of ČKA.

The National Museum announced a competition for the development of new exhibitions and visitor operations in its two buildings in July 2015, with the results known last spring. The ÚOHS canceled the competition at the beginning of June this year.

According to the ÚOHS, the errors influenced the selection of the most suitable offer. The competition conditions allowed for a competition proposal that did not meet the mandatory conditions of the tender not to be excluded from the competition.

The National Museum stated that it is responsible for the integrity of the competition, but it only adopted the competition rules of the ČKA into the competition conditions. Any architectural competition, to be declared legitimate by the chamber, must be announced in accordance with its competition rules. The museum director, Michal Lukeš, refused to appeal the decision partly to avoid wasting further time during which the museum could prepare new exhibitions in another way.

“The decision of the ÚOHS also has a significant general impact, as it states that all competitions announced according to the competition rules of the ČKA are essentially irregular and contrary to the law,” he stated.

Svoboda said that the ÚOHS found a contradiction between the chamber's competition rules and principles of transparency in one provision of the rules, not in the competition rules as a whole. According to this provision, the jury does not have to exclude competition proposals that are not compliant with the mandatory conditions of the competition if the deviations do not favor the proposal. The NM did exactly that and left the proposal in the competition.

For the chamber to recognize the competition as legitimate, and thus for its members, most of whom are architects, to be able to apply, the competition conditions must, according to Svoboda, comply with the most significant provisions of the ČKA competition rules. These include ensuring the participants' right to equal, transparent, and non-discriminatory access from the organizer, ensuring the evaluation of proposals by the jury, or stating the financial conditions of the competition.

“The NM had the opportunity to exclude the provision in question, which the ÚOHS considers problematic, without affecting the legitimacy of the competition,” Svoboda stated. “The decision of the ÚOHS was not challenged by the participants through an appeal, so this decision could not be reviewed by a higher authority or court; we believe that if that had happened, the result would have been different,” he added. The ČKA cannot file an appeal. It added that no architectural competition has previously been annulled due to the illegality of the ČKA competition rules.