Maya Lin gave the nation its greatest war memorial. Never forget. But today her name is a false flag when it comes to public debates about design.

Lin was 21 years old when she won the commission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in an open design competition. Now, whenever leaders and critics name-check Lin in arguments over architecture, they usually do so in calls for free and fair competition—and to decry a modernist they don’t like. Conservatives have summoned Lin in House committee hearings and National Review editorials alike, claiming her as an avatar in their battle against Frank Gehry and the commission that selected him to design the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.

Maya Lin’s many fans on the right aren’t doing architects any favor. Open design contests—such as the competition Congress held for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1980—are terribly overrated in commissioning architecture today. Where monuments, memorials, museums, and other civic structures are concerned, the most democratic path is no longer the best means of making the big calls.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Flickr user digitonin

Consider the design contest held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for a new museum branch in Helsinki. That contest yielded a staggering 1,715 submissions. Each design rendering represents dozens of hours of work from multiple architects and staffers, totaling millions of dollars’ worth of free labor. Which means that only firms that can afford to give away their work for free can afford to compete.

Only firms that can afford to give away their work for free can afford to compete.

Just look at the field of entries. In the Guggenheim Helsinki contest, each one is more aggressive than the next in trying to catch the eyes of the design jury. (Mind you, the jurors can’t hope to give all 1,700 individual designs the attention they each deserve.) Plates of spaghetti, floating eyeballs, piles of string cheese—the designs don’t inspire a lot of confidence. Elsewhere, the 74 designs submitted in the open contest for a London bridge are all essentially fancified placeholders: Functionally, structurally, and aesthetically, many of these concepts would never move beyond the rendering stage.

Open architecture contests encourage a downward dynamic in today’s era of computer-assisted design and fully realized renderings. On the one hand, students, small firms, and emerging designers looking for a big win work their asses off on conceptual renderings that they might never be able to build. On the other hand, ginormous firms can throw man-hours at contests all day, doing the bare minimum work necessary and filling in the details only when they win. At either end of the spectrum, it’s a lot of wasted work by a lot of talented people.

Alternatives to open-ended calls for designs can lead to better outcomes all around. There’s the GSA’s Design Excellence Program, for example. Since 1994, the Design Excellence Program has overseen some 1,750 peer-reviewed proposals and selections—including at least six projects by Pritzker Prize–winning architects. Sure, critics have come to vilify the Design Excellence Program as a federal back-door for pre-screened starchitects, but that’s mostly the irrational ire over Gehry’s Ike design talking. (Gehry won the commission through a Design Excellence competition.) By shortlisting qualified talent, the Design Excellence program has fostered, well, design excellence from plenty of lesser-known, emerging architects—such as the award-winning U.S. Land Port of Entry in Warroad, Minnesota, designed by Julie Snow and Matthew Kreilich. (Who? Precisely.)