The gauntlet has been left lying on the ground.

FOA’s scheme is not something that anybody is obligated to use in their submission; if they win on the first round - and go to the final six - they still do not have to use it in developing detailed proposals.

But what they suggest does have to be BETTER.
 
My view is that the scheme is a tremendous success whether it is developed further or not - in itself another garden in the space that has had as much currency and mileage in the world of gardening as the Pope’s ( or my mother’s) real gardens in the same place. Any proposal for the Parabola, or any real garden there, cannot now avoid commenting in some way on all three, but perhaps the FOA one is the most present.
 
Nicholas O’s piece is the clearest statement of how their proposal should be regarded at this point - it didn’t start that way of course, but has ended up so precisely because of the impetus it itself imparted to the debate (and because the debate itself was ‘encouraged’ to modify the design process).

Eventually the zig-zags were indeed overwhelmed, at least for now, by the competitiveness of the marketplace;  in the meantime we have been given the perfect tool for testing their quality (if only in retrospect), and not least because serious designers and architects now feel inspired to over-top them, and are competing.
 
I know this is a difficult progression to convey within the exhibition format, but it is fundamental to demonstrate that the whole endeavour was for me an enquiry during the first two years of its existence. The key question was how a designer is chosen, and what role he or she actually plays. It has become properly a search for the best designer only since we finally launched the Competition three weeks ago.
 

Just to clarify something…
 
Reading the website & on-line correspondence I obviously appreciated that there was to be a greater degree of flexibility about whether the FOA layout would be adopted or not, depending on the winning submission.
 
But reading your email below  it sounds more like the proposed layout has already  been abandoned altogether.
 
Can you confirm this - it would affect how the exhibition narrative develops