I have uploaded a batch of photos from Tokyo (the computer I am on does not have flash, so I cannot rotate them or put them into folders just yet).

Massive, glowing and crowded - we are enjoying it a great deal. More later.

Uploaded to flickr.

We fly to Japan tonight.

But before we do, I would like to apologise to Hill Thallis for writing that they wrote the Competition Brief for the East Darling Harbour Competition. As Phillip Thallis writes:

Hill Thalis definitely did not write, or in any way contribute to, the Competition Brief. What we did do was write a critique of the Brief for the City of Sydney, who were excluded (or did not participate) in any way to the competition or judging (as you know from the Q &A the State Government was the competition proponent). Our critique of the Brief included a more complete site analysis, in contrast to the official Brief. We were engaged by the City to carry out this work before the competition was officially launched, on the express proviso that it would not limit our eligibility to enter the competition. Our completed study was presented to the City of Sydney before the judging of the Competition. We understand that our study was to be made public, though I haven’t checked if its been posted on the web yet. It informed a submission by the City to Minister Knowles regarding planning objectives for the site.

So again, my apologies, and I probably should have doubled checked my sources before publishing

Also, there is a public forum tonight at the Sydney Town Hall to discuss the competition. I will be unable to attend - you know, Japan - but if any of you folk do attend, please let me know how it goes. I would love, of course, to know if they address the issue of Competition Anonymity…

[Updated with a response by the competition registrar below my original enquiry]

I have sent the folowing open letter regarding the East Darling Harbour Competition Shortlist to the parties listed below:

As there are no contact details for the Competition Registrar in either Competition Brief nor the Competition Website, this email is an open letter to the following:

Chris Johnson - Jury Chair,
Dr Deborah Dearing - President, RAIA NSW Chapter,
Elizabeth Farrelly,

I am writing with regards to the recent shortlist for the East Darling Harbour competition in particular the application of Section 5 Competition Conditions. I bring to your attention item 5.10 of these conditions.

5.10 Anonymity and Confidentiality

Strict anonymity is to be maintained by Entrants through Stage One of the Competition. The only means of identifying will be the use of the Entrants unique Identification Number on each panel as stipulated in Section 7 Submission Requirements. In order to preserve anonymity, all Stage One Submissions shall be made without any name, business name, logo or identification mark on the drawings.

Identifying marks such as names or logos evident on any Stage One submission will cause immediate disqualification.

A public announcement of those selected to participate in Stage Two will be made. Anonymity will not carry into Stage Two. However, all participants are required to maintain confidentiality through the Competition process.

No Entrant shall disclose, exhibit or publish the submitted proposals in any form until the completion of the Competition.

In respect to this clause there has been serious concern raised in regard to the compliance of Entrant # 70184 - Lippman Associates, Richard Rogers Partnership, Martha Schwartz Partners and Lend Lease Development. In the submitted documentation this entrant included well known and highly published work by Richard Rogers Partnership; in particular 88 Wood St, London.

We are confident that the architectural members of the jury would be very familiar with the work of Richard Rogers and due to the arrangement of the project references on the presentation panels there would be have been very little doubt as to the authorship of the submssion. As this is a jury that has members at the most senior levels of their profession it is expected that the Competition Conditions and Procedures would have been referred to in this situation. In reference to Section 6 Competition Procedures, the following item is noted:

6.4 Disqualification

Entrants that fail to meet a significant number of the Competition Conditions may be disqualified, in particular where:

- The submission is recieved after the lodgement time and date
- The jury deems the submssion to be contrary the objectives of the brief
- The submission is not submitted in accordance with the submssion requirements, as stated in the document
- The identity of an entrant is disclosed to the jury or any other deliberate offence against the principles of anonymity;
- An entrant attempts to influence any member of the jury; or
- Improperly influence the decision of the jury

On behalf of the competition entrants, clarification is sought by the Competition Registrar in regard to the compliance of Entrant #70184 and on what basis the submission was not considered for disqualification.

Regards,

Marcus Trimble

As always, I will keep you updated with any feedback I recieve. Unless I am in Japan.

The Official Response:

Dear Mr Trimble

East Darling Harbour Urban Design Competition

I refer to your e-mail of 22 August addressed to Chris Johnson as Jury Chair of the East Darling Harbour Urban Design Competition. I wish to advise the following in relation to your concerns regarding Entry No 70184.

Entry 70184 was not in breach of clause 5.10 as it did not provide any “name, business name or logo or identification mark on the drawings”. Inclusion of imagery of built structures is not a breach of this clause and is a common technique in design competitions to illustrate the proposed design language of a proposal. It is inevitable that in a field of 137 entrants there will be visual details - such as images, drawing styles, architectural signatures or graphic languages - that may or may not be clues to an entrant’s identity. If a Registrar were to exclude entrants on this basis then no architect with a clearly identifiable style could enter.

In this case however I can advise that during the entire Jury deliberation no Jury member raised the potential identity of this scheme or any other scheme.

I have also raised the matter with Jury Chair Chris Johnson, who advises, “In judging architectural competitions it is sometimes tempting for jurors with knowledge of the industry to speculate on the identity of entrants based on visible elements. In the case of the East Darling Harbour Competition this was less likely as the Jury was unusual in having architects in the minority - a deliberate strategy by the Government to ensure a wide range of views and professions represented in the Jury. Further, it has been my experience from numerous competitions that such speculation is more often than not incorrect, a point which I made to the Jury during the process. The Jury debate and discussion focussed on the merits of schemes and at no time referred to potential entrant identities.”

I trust this provides you with the information and assurance you require. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can assist further.

Yours sincerely

Russell Rodrigo
Registrar
East Darling Harbour Urban Design Competition

The East Darling Harbour competition exhibition was set up with the 5 shortlisted entries up front and about 30 other entries pinned up behind. A series of A3 folders over in the corner contained the remaining entries.

Anyway, some teams that were not pinned up have sent me their entries to post here.

First up:

01_Mackenzie Pronk Architects - team: Richard Healy, Neil Mackenzie, Heidi Pronk, Lisa Mullen, Scott Falvey

Perspective

Masterplan

Model

02_The Antarctica Group

Masterplan

Model

03_Brown and Storey Architects

Masterplan

Masterplan Axo

Perspectives

Night time perspective

04_RFSH. Team members: Tom Rivard, Olivia Hyde, Janine Campbell, Anika Ekholm, Aryan Mansor, Poune Parsanejad, Wendy Young. And With thanks to: and with thanks to: Roger Swinbourne,Dagmar Reinhardt, Chris Walsh, George Ackerman, Siggi Ackerman, Javier Duenas Estrada and Toshi

Masterplan

Masterplan Axo

Montages

Montages

05_4 Site Melbourne

Masterplan

Perspective

I will update this entry with more Competition entries as I recieve them.

We went to the Powerhouse Museum today to have a look at the Benaki Treasures. I found this wall climbing spider robot locked in a glass box downstairs…

Uploaded to flickr.

As I said the other day, the shortlist for the East Darling Harbour Competition have been announced. There were 137 entries in total. The results are up on the competition page - but in a move that have only been designed to stifle open discussion, it is only possible to take a look at the winning schemes by downloading ENORMOUS pdfs of each A1 panel. I am not talking about 2mb downloads either, I am talking about files sizes in the range of 15-18mb and upwards to 80mb for the delight of seeing panel 2 from Richards Rogers’ entry. An 80mb download when - as demonstrated below - a jpeg 600 pixels wide would suffice.

Anyway, the mammoth download reveals schemes by the following shortlisted entries:

• Peddle Thorp and Walker
• Project Architecture, Hargraeves Associates, Thom Mayne (Morphosis)
• Hill Thalis Architecture, Paul Berkemeier Architects, Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture
• Lippmann Associates, Richard Rogers, Martha Schwartz, Lend Lease
• Lend Lease Design

Lets go through them one by one shall we?

Peddle Thorp and Walker showed all the intellectual rigour of carpet bombing, submitting FOUR separate entries. It worked for them; they hit their target only to murder a few innocent diagrams along the way. To be fair, PTW’s shortlisted entry was the only scheme that tackled the scale of the site successfully and I hope that development of their scheme in the second stage does not result in a loss of clarity of their diagram.

Locals, Project Architecture went in with Morphosis - or should I say Thom Mayne as the office is known post-Pritzker. Morphosis’ scheme represents a bland, real estate driven, masterplan; a series of twisty buildings that bear no relation whatsoever to the immediate site, with a tower to the south. At first glance they appear to connect to the existing street pattern above Hickson Road, but on further inspection it is obvious that there is no thought in their placement; some meet the end of a street, some butt into the front of a row of two storey terrace houses.

What Morphosis’ entry did have was a model made from a 3D printer/router/whetever - something that NO office in Sydney has. Modelcraft, the state’s pre-eminent modelmakers don’t even have one. Instantly signalling the LA credentials of the scheme.

I understand that ARUP and the RAIA had been negotiating with Mayne over the weeks preceding the judgement of the competition to come out to Australia to give a talk. What fortuitous timing that he win a place on the shortlist! He can hardly decline now can he?

Hill Thallis/Berkmeier/Irwin are the local underdogs and proposed the most politically correct solution; a generous harbourside park with a series of smaller blocks connecting to the old street pattern to the east. Hardly inspiring and hard to criticise. “Don’t mind us, we’re just the largest development in Sydney, move along now”. A similar model has been built further south down the foreshore at the King Street Wharf development to mildly forgettable success.

Oh yeah, Hill Thallis wrote the brief for the site too… [I was misinformed on this one. My Apologies!]

Lippman and Lord Rogers et al had the most blatantly cynical to the development minded on the jury by literally stamping the words ‘Self Funding’ on their model. But then, they also had ‘Heart of Government’ inexplicably written in the water on their model so perhaps they were recycling the model from a previous competition?

Blowjobs for the developers aside, their proposal puts the building mass to the south, a crazee technicolour park in the middle leaving the northern point for a beach. The beach is a gimmick, and I am surprised the jury went for it. Nobody swims in the harbour and for good reason: it is murky and there is no surf. I guess it may be the type of beach that Lord Rogers is familiar with back home, but in Sydney we have enough actual beaches readily available to swim in to be suckered into theme park attractions.

Lend Lease Design created the Land Of The Overshadowing…! That and a strange wedge of land that looks like some kind of Japanese transport interchange. At the north of the site. With three roads running under it and two over the top.

Me: Can you see what I’m talking about?
You: That bit to the north?
Me: Yeah, with three roads running under it. And two over the top of it.
You: What is that meant to be?
Me: I don’t know

_

Overall I find the shortlist uninspiring. Apart from PTW, no one took on the enormous scale of the site with any gusto. None turned the corner in this important part of the harbour with any conviction.

There were no big ideas only piecemeal, real-estate driven solutions.

Antoinette and I are heading to Japan for four weeks over September for a well-earned (ha!) holiday.

I am keen to know if any of gravestmor’s hardcore readership has any suggestions on places to visit. Not so much the guidebook, Tadao Ando chapels, Matsushima Bay gear but rather the more obscure stuff. Cool bars, archi-bookshops, hidden temples, stores specialising in robot toys etc.

Oh. And if anyone can tell me where to find that little Bolles Wilson House in Tokyo, I will be your best friend.

Leave any sugggestions in the comments field below.

The finalists have been announced for the East Darling Harbour Competition. This ain’t one of them.

My entry presented an urban strategy rather than an architectural solution. It acknowledged the significance of the site through a singular urban intervention.

The proposal was to cut a new fingerwharf out of the site creating a public park 50% larger than the brief called for. Buildings were placed along the edges of these waterways at a consistent height that matched the height of the adjacent sandstone cutting.

Sydney is a contained city - the CBD is held in place along its edges by the harbour, its parks and arterial roads. It is not a gridded city, it has edges and this scheme builds on this urban morphology.

The presentation boards:

Board 01 - Site Plan

Board 02 - Site Strategies

Board 03 aka The Weak Board - Typical Plans and Sections.

Board 04 - Perspectives. As supplied and required in the competition brief.

The Model

Thankyou to Andrew Cortese (who, incidentally, was the registered entrant) and Matthew Bennett for their help and input.

And to Rose Jiminez and her rotating team of model makers - Hannah Tribe, Valeria Zalin, Matthew Bennett and Antoinette - for making the world’s fastest, sharpest model of Sydney in a day.

Rose, Hannah and Valeria trashing my tiny flat.

I may be bitter about the piecemeal entries that got selected but, gosh, we had fun.

Things have been a bit slow around Gravestmor lately - but do not worry - I am working on a bit of investigative journalism. That’s right, an expose. I’ll just leave that hanging out there but you can expect it to hit hard later this week.

Thanks to Jimmy, Arum and Honi for entering the poetry comp. I would select a winner, but we all know who the winner was. Poetry was the winner. Except for Honi’s entry - which did not rhyme. Shame on you.

Shaping Space: The Drawings of Harry Seidler is an exhibtion at the Tin Sheds on August 19th. Mark it in your diaries. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Harry Seidler, he is Australia’s most consistent and prolific modernist architect. He had a stroke earlier this year and is recovering slowly. This exhibition, being organised by Harvard Matt and Professor Tom Heneghan, concentrates on the drawings of Seidler rather than his buildings. As always: You should go have a look.

Graphics by Wishart Design

NSW State Government has unvieled the evacuation plan for Sydney.

So if you see me in the grip of terror during business hours, chances are I will be headed generally towards the right.