Yesterday was, barring today, the greatest day of our lives. Mostly because Grimaldi’s was right around the corner from ARCHDL V’s Galapagos location, but mostly actually because of the duel. Stay tuned for an incisive IM post-game, but in the meantime, a run-down of what went down, with pictures.

The brief was to design a spaceport that could and would launch white-collar criminals to the Diller + Scofidio ARCHDL I-winning moon prison. The location was Coney Island. The materials were five monopoly boards. The costumes—Front Studio’s Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita dressed like accountants, Weiss/Manfredi’s Justin Kwok and Alice Chai like baller-bankers complete with W$M bling—were tremendous.

First round, thirty minutes of sketching. Most greatest was to watch the difference in communication—Yen and Michi sat on the same tiny chair (for a while) and talked semi-quietly while they drew, totally mind-melded, while Justin and Alice moved around a lot and seemed like they were throwing out way more ideas—and starting to watch the architecture hit. We’d asked both of the teams beforehand if they thought architecture could be made in an hour and a half, and they both said yes. So we were interested to see how. Short break, then an hour of model-building. That’s where there’s magic.

The LVHRD setup—stage, two tables separated by a screen—is always brilliant because you can watch every moment of divergence. Lots of good architecture seems good because it’s difficult to imagine that building being any other way—of course the New Museum looks the way it does, it has to!—but one of the reasons we’re so freakishly supportive of the duel is that it illuminates just how fritzy and personal the design process is. Yen and Michi’s model got smaller and tighter, Justin and Alice’s got bigger and more elaborate. Bottles got involved. Glue guns were used. Monopoly money showed up.

And then, the presentations. Front Studio went first, with Yen explaining that their building was essentially a giant and very well-enunciated croissant. Weiss/Manfredi went next, with Alice proposing a re-integration of the criminals into society (this didn’t go over so well in these Global Financial Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions times) and pointing out the beer-bottle-turned-parachute jump, which was, actually, adaptive reuse thankyouverymuch.

And then, the voting. We tried to convince the one person in our party who had managed to get hold of a ballot to vote correctly but, oddly, The Bostwick had other ideas. Still, with a 90-to-77 margin, Front Studio won.

At this point, our bias is clear. So, we’ll keep it short.

Booyah.