LFA competitions offer exciting and challenging opportunities for creatives from across the industry to get involved with and gain experience from live projects. Competitions offer established and emerging designers the chance to work on some of the most interesting public realm projects happening within London, contributing to conversations about creating meaningful change in the city.
We work with a range of commissioning organisations including leading cultural organisations, local authorities, business improvement districts and private organisations, with whom competition winners work with to deliver their winning design, alongside support from the LFA. To date, the LFA has commissioned more than 100 designers to deliver projects in the public realm.
Benefits of entering
- Opportunity to gain experience with a live brief for an exciting public realm project
- Industry recognition and press coverage if shortlisted
- An honorarium fee for shortlisted teams to develop their designs during the second stage of the competition
- Opportunity to win the commission of a built public intervention within London
View our live open calls or browse our catalogue of previous competitions.
Happy Street by Yinka Ilori © Luke O’Donovan
Testimonials from past winners
City Blocks © Agnese Sanvito
“It was fantastic to be able to deliver a public project which anyone could visit and come across them in their everyday life. As a small practice, gaining that high level exposure in the design world and recognition by design experts and judge was invaluable. We also now had a couple of projects that we are working on at the moment which have been a direct result of our City Blocks!”
Irene Astrain, Director of Astrain Studio, Winner of City Benches 2020 competition
McCloy Muchemwa, The Buoys Are Back in Town © Luke O’Donovan
“We have thoroughly enjoyed working on LFA competitions – We’ve entered maybe 10 of them by now! […] Without these early projects and the great platform of the LFA our practice probably wouldn’t have made it into the Architects’ Journal 40 Under 40, the Architecture Foundation’s book ‘New Architects 4’, or into practice profiles in Wallpaper* magazine and the RIBA Journal. Our visibility has increased and we’re now being invited to work on projects, bids and competitions with absolutely fantastic collaborators and clients.“
McCloy + Muchemwa, Winner of City Benches 2018 & Pews and Perches 2020 competitions
Find out more
If you would like to contact the LFA team and find out more about how to enter one of the competitions, please contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.