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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Whatever



No shit. Really?... the process is flawed and the designs chosen uninspiring... Anyone reading this blog and my previous posts on the subject - based on my experience of the Britomart design process - already knew that.

It's jacked up so that Warren & bloody Mahony - or someone with similarly austere track record - will win the contract. All the public consultation and submissions will count for naught because the deal is already done. That's how it works at our tin pot Tammany-type Town Hall and that's why I didn't bother wasting my time entering.

Mr Clarke, writing in the Herald yesterday, said three teams were chosen to go to the final stage even though they did not submit an entry at the first stage of the competition.

"For the three selected teams, it's a bit like being entitled to sit an exam after the answers have been published."

Mr Clarke, whose entry did not make it past the first stage, said poor management of the competition continued with a brief that was unwieldly, self contradictory and inadequate.
[...]
Architectural sources are picking the Tasman Studio team to win because two of the partners, Warren and Mahoney, and Moller Architects, are flavour of the month with the Government and Auckland City Council.


No shit. Unlike Clarke I said all this before the comp. and cannot be accused of being a sore loser - as Cr Bhatnagar suggests:He's the one who is defending the screwing of this scrum and it's a lame to non-existent defence.

The designs had to have a passenger terminal for cruise ships AND keep the ugly sheds. The wharf's primary focus is the RWC 2011 public space, but obviously another stage or two must be developed... afterwards. So why confuse things by putting in a terminal now? It's a mess.

The other wharves to the East are also blank slates and will, logically, become part of the recreational and cruise ship area - but these are excluded from the design brief. No doubt we will have separate comp's for them too - one having nothing to do with the next - no master plan - no strategic vision.

It's just another piecemeal muddle from the city and government that brought you a four lane harbour bridge, a motorway-only transport network that is still 20 years from completion when it was due to be finished "no later than 1973," an OTT Britomart rail station with no allowance to complete a loop that has been on various planning books in some form since the 1930s, an electrification of the rail lines that will never happen as long as Wellington pulls the purse strings and yet they keep spending money on earthworks and alignments for an overhead system etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. They can't even get a simple bus stop right without having to have two goes at doing it. They can't even arrange to have clocks to be put in the railway stations! These turkeys are hopeless.

Is it even worth bothering to look? Click the banner.Whatever.

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