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…
September 5th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
Hey Marcus and antoinette….think you may have heard about the public meeting by now but if not, i will give you a brief summary;
The meeting was organised by the Working Harbour Coalition so was set up as an ambush attack on any decision to move industry off the site. The government seemed to have got wind of this (was working harbour coalition a give away?) There were no representatives from the government (except chris johnston) to enlighten us on the reasons behind the decision.
The original decision seemed to be a lame political stunt from Bob C. which promised more jobs to the alternative port cities of Port Kembla and Newcastle and exponentially more jobs to the truckies who will bring all the stuff back to sydney - (forgetting all the jobs lost when the current site closes down - oops…I am sure morris is not amused..)
So everyone from Clover Moore to John Brogden (tasteless joke deleted) weighed into the government - all chris could do was shrug his shoulders and say that his involvement might have been a bit late seeing that everyone was packed and moving out already…and he just had this empty piece of tarmac on his hands…
A distinguished panel of architects et al, salivated at the chance to get stuck into chris and the competition brief - which didn’t seem to have eventuated from any detailed analysis of the site or address its former working nature. Rick Le Plastrier gave an emotive speech in which he renamed the site West Rocks Docks (..or was it west docks rocks..? - save that for the bumper sticker..)Lawrence Neild labelled all the entries ‘eye candy’ due to the brief being one of the most shocking, lame, terrible, worst written briefs ever written in the world, ever.
Richard Francis Jones was a no show.
You will be happy to know that your anonymity quetsion was asked by your highly paid staffer. CJ’s response was similar to that posted by Russell Rodrigo above. Hope you are both having fun.
p