Of the architectural commissions available today, few are as prestigious, or as high stakes, as those associated with a museum or cultural institution. While competitions are the norm for these commissions, the process has been challenging for reasons including nepotism, unclear briefs, uncompensated labor for participants who don’t win, and entries that can’t actually get built or don’t fully address institutional need.

Within the last 30 years, a new field of consultants ranging from cultural strategists to competition organizers has emerged to make the process more fair and effective for all parties involved. These consultants have become substantial power brokers in the field of architecture and have remade commissions in the process, serving as hands-on shepherds of capital projects and, ultimately, curators of architects. Their ultimate goal is building more thrilling, ambitious buildings and discourse-defining architecture. Is it working?

What consultants bring to the competition sphere depends on their specific services—strategic planning, architect selection, competition administration—but revolve around a core theme: Completing a capital project is an extremely intensive undertaking that benefits from someone with architecture expertise. An institution’s leadership might only commission one building during its tenure, and likely has little experience doing so, so bringing in an outside expert to lay the groundwork before any sort of design happens can help smooth the process. Contrary to a common assumption of people outside the field of architecture, choosing an architect isn’t the key first step to a commission—it starts with developing a robust brief. “Architects are not there to be diagnosticians, like a doctor,” said Susanna Sirefman, who in 2008 founded Dovetail Design Strategists, a consultancy that has worked with Storm King, Jacob’s Pillow, and the New York Public Library, among other clients. “They’re there to solve the problem.” And that problem needs to be well articulated and clearly defined in ways that architects can understand. “The narrative of the project is absolutely fundamental,” said Malcolm Reading, whose eponymous firm has run more than 200 competitions worldwide since opening in the mid-1990s.