The premature cancellation of the architectural competition for the MuHKA in Antwerp caused quite a stir this spring. Now that the dust has settled and all sides have had their say, we can look to see what lessons we can learn from this process.

Previous articles ¹ focused, among other things, on the turmoil within the award committee, the alleged squandering of funds, the composition of the design teams and the bumpy history of the current MuHKA’s creation. Rather than causes, these are symptoms of how yet another architectural commission for a prestigious cultural building by the Flemish government has run aground. Elsewhere, the Open Call certainly proves its worth. So where does it go wrong, precisely in those projects where the ambitions are so great? 1 See Jan Lippens, ‘How the architectural competition for the new MuHKA went completely off the rails’, Knack, 24 June 2020, and Pieter T’Jonck, ‘MuHKA, an analysis’, and Marc Dubois, ‘The drama of the MuHKA in Antwerp’