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Hadid set to transform Melbourne's Docklands

wyliepoon

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The Age (via Arch Record)

Link to article

Visionary architect set to transform Docklands

By Royce Millar
August 2, 2007

One of the world's leading architects is designing a Melbourne landmark for Docklands that will be Australia's greenest and most expensive office and housing complex.

Iraqi-born, London-based Zaha Hadid will oversee design of a spectacular $1.5 billion scheme earmarked for Collins Street by Middle Eastern investment company Sama Dubai. Ms Hadid, 57, was the first woman to win architecture's most prestigious award, the Pritzker prize, in 2004.

Property and State Government sources say Government approval looks likely for the proposal. It consists of four buildings - Docklands' tallest tower and elaborate civic spaces over two sites and on decking over Wurundjeri Way.

The scheme was recently presented to former premier Steve Bracks, whose response was believed to be encouraging. Docklands development agency VicUrban has supported it in principle.

Ms Hadid's work is variously described as ultra modern, supremacist and utopian. A major influence was pre-Stalin Soviet constructivism. She gained international fame with her design for The Peak country club in Hong Kong in 1983. Once known as an architect whose work was often too ambitious to be built, she is now sought after. Her built works include the Lois Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio; the BMW factory in Leipzig, Germany; and a National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Rome.

Royal Australian Institute of Architects Victorian president Philip Goad described Ms Hadid as a "colourful, larger-than-life figure" who would bring much needed "style and finesse" to Docklands. "Docklands could do with a much greater degree of architectural sophistication," he said. "It needs to rise above the developer schlock we now have."

The proposed tower will be 50 to 60 levels high and would occupy the site once earmarked for the failed Grollo Tower.

The proposal includes sophisticated water features and extensive use of recycled materials. A Government source said the proposal was so green it would deserve an eight-to-12-star energy rating. The current rating system extends to six stars. The only two completed buildings to have achieved six-star accreditation in Australia are in Melbourne: the Melbourne City Council's CH2 in Swanston Street and a nine-storey building at 140 Albert Road, South Melbourne.

But the Sama Dubai proposal is already controversial given the involvement of John Tabart, the former VicUrban chief executive who now works for the company. After a decade at the helm, Mr Tabart left VicUrban (formerly Docklands Authority) in December 2005 bound for Dubai.

Last September VicUrban agreed to deal exclusively with Sama over the Batman Hill sites for three months. Ten months later the exclusive negotiations continue. Local developers, competitors for the sites, are furious at what they claim is special treatment for Sama.

"They got preferential treatment because Tabart was the CEO of Vicurban," one disgruntled competitor said this week. "It stinks."

Mr Tabart is not involved in negotiations between VicUrban and the Government.

Such is the wealth of Sama that it may build the Docklands complex speculatively, gambling that tenants will be found later. Such risk-taking has been rare in Melbourne since the property meltdown of the early 1990s.

The cashed-up company has billions to invest across the world and is believed to be targeting stable Western economies for investment. But it is highly sensitive to any potential hostility to Arab investment in countries such as Australia.

A theme of the proposed project is the re-establishment and celebration of Batman's Hill, once a city focal point and location of John Batman's home from 1836. The hill, now more of a rise, was levelled to make way for Spencer Street Station in the mid-1860s.

Architects Ashton Raggatt McDougall and development investment firm EPC Partners are believed to be among local firms involved in the Sama scheme. Major Projects Minister Theo Theophanous issued a carefully worded statement to The Age this week that sounded promising for the developers.

"No decisions have been made about the future of this project," it said. "However, we are keen to keep expanding the Docklands, which is a vibrant community."

VicUrban said it did not discuss proposals under consideration.

Responses could not be obtained from Sama Dubai or Ms Hadid.
 
We usually get one 'starchitect' every 10 years to lift the bar just a tad for the local firms... SOM in the 60s/70s (140 William St), IM Pei in the 70s/80s (Collins Place), Kisho Kurokawa in the 90s (Melbourne Central), Hadid in the 00's?

But the firm Hadid will be partnering with recently unveiled their proposal for a building in a multi-firm competition at the CUB site at the top end of the CBD:

cub2_2507_gallery__295x400.jpg


ARM are well known for being pretty hair-brain, so having two is hopefully going to produce something interesting.

Carlton & United Breweries site

Hadid @ Batman's Hill Docklands (from post #203 onwards).
 
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23624491-25658,00.html

Docklands project axed
Maurice Dunlevy | May 01, 2008

PLANS for a spectacular $1.5 billion office and apartment complex, designed by acclaimed Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid and to be developed by Sama Dubai at the Melbourne Docklands, appear to have been dropped.

London-based Ms Hadid -- the first woman to win architecture's top Pritzker Prize -- is understood to be no longer involved in revised plans for the Docklands Batman's Hill precinct site, where Bruno Grollo had once hoped to build his world's tallest office building.

Neither Ms Hadid nor the development group behind the project, Middle East investment company Sama Dubai, would comment on the future of a project that less than a year ago was heralded as Australia's greenest and most expensive residential complex.

VicUrban, the Victorian Government authority that runs Docklands, is expected to announce a replacement project later in the year.

The revised plans may still involve Sama Dubai, but not the high-profile architect.

Melbourne architectural firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall, which was involved in the original Hadid design, has already confirmed it is no longer playing a role.

According to one source, the Hadid building would have been too expensive to build.

Ms Hadid's reputation for single-mindedness and lack of compromise is legendary. That has put her offside with clients and, according to Britain's Design Museum and the British Council website, made her famous, not for buildings she has built, but the ones she hasn't.

Her major works include the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, Rome's Contemporary Arts Centre, a BMW factory in Leipzig, Germany, and even a skijump on the Bergisel Mountain in Innsbruck.

Only sketchy details of Ms Hadid's plans for the Docklands were ever made public. But the project involved four buildings, the tallest of them a 50 to 60-storey tower that would have been the tallest at the Docklands.

The project was earmarked for land known as Site 6, one of about a half a dozen zones quarantined for future development by former Docklands Authority head John Tabart, who headed Australia's most successful urban renewal project before he left the job in late 2005.

Mr Tabart moved to Dubai to take a senior executive role with Sama Dubai.

Some months later, Sama announced plans for a Dubai-type tall tower. That raised the hackles of rival developers who claimed Mr Tabart's intimate knowledge of Docklands gave him the inside running.

Mr Tabart and former Jones Lang LaSalle real estate agent Patrick Smith are directors of Sama Dubai Australia.

Neither could be contacted for comment.
 
...this is getting silly now.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/05/13/1210444438488.html

Melbourne, are you ready to be Fosterised?

Royce Millar
May 14, 2008

Advertisement
ONE of the world's pre-eminent architects, Norman Foster, who is regarded as "Mr Landmark", has been hired to put a signature stamp on Australia's biggest and most expensive office and housing projects at Melbourne's Docklands.

Well-placed property industry sources yesterday confirmed that the prolific London-based company Foster+ Partners would shape a $1.5 billion scheme proposed by Middle Eastern investment company Sama Dubai for Collins Street.

Foster+ Partners is renowned for iconic designs in cities worldwide from Bilbao and Berlin to Beijing, including the contentious Swiss Tower (known as "the Gherkin") in London, the Lumiere residences Sydney, the Hearst Tower in New York and the Reichstag dome restoration in Berlin. It has designed one of the new towers at the World Trade Centre in New York.

The firm's founder Lord Foster, 72, was recently described in an Australian newspaper as "the architect whose stamp on the British capital is exceeded only by Sir Christopher Wren's in the late 17th century".

On the Sama project in Melbourne, Lord Foster, a winner of architecture's most prestigious award, the Pritzker prize, will replace another Pritzker winner, Iraqi-born, London-based Zaha Hadid. Last year The Age revealed Ms Hadid was the project's lead architect. It is not clear why she is no longer involved.

News of Sama Dubai's and Ms Hadid's parting of ways had led to speculation that the Docklands project had collapsed. But State Government sources denied this yesterday and insisted the proposal was alive and well.

Royal Australian Institute of Architects president Carl Fender welcomed the prospect of a major international firm working in his hometown.

"I don't have a problem with great architecture being produced by great architects from other countries. I don't think we're so parochial. It's obvious he's (Norman Foster) produced some of the great talking points of architecture," said Mr Fender, a partner of prominent Melbourne firm Fender Katsalidis.

Sources have confirmed the project is larger than earlier thought, with as much as 250,000 square metres of commercial and residential floorspace over two prized Docklands sites and decking over Wurundjeri Way. It boasts a minimum six-star green rating and sophisticated water features.

An important theme will be the re-establishment and celebration of Batmans Hill, once a city focal point and location of Melbourne founder John Batman's home from 1836. The hill, now more of a rise, was levelled to make way for Spencer Street Station in the mid-1860s.

The Sama Dubai proposal has been controversial due to the involvement of John Tabart, the former VicUrban chief executive, who helped put together the scheme for Sama. Mr Tabart is not involved in negotiations with the State Government development agency, VicUrban, which oversees Docklands. Sources close to Sama insist Mr Tabart is no longer involved in the Docklands project and is now based in London working with construction firm Laing O'Rourke.

In September 2006, VicUrban agreed to deal exclusively with Sama over the Batman Hill sites for three months. Negotiations have now drawn out for 20 months.

Commenting on the length of the negotiations, VicUrban chief executive Pru Sanderson said: "This is one of the biggest projects on one of the most significant development sites in Melbourne. It would be naive to expect that a developer would have everything in place for such a development within a short period."

Local developers competing for the sites are peeved at what they claim is special treatment for Sama.

Yesterday a VicUrban spokesman said that as a matter of policy the agency did not disclose details of negotiations over Docklands sites.

He did confirm VicUrban negotiations with a developer for that area but there was "currently an exclusivity arrangement in place".

The director of Sama Dubai Australia, Pat Smith, declined to comment.
 
And a response to the above article was in today's Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opini...1210765051024.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Melbourne is a landmark city, but not a city of landmarks
Michael Shmith
May 16, 2008

YESTERDAY morning, for a change, I walked to work. Not along main roads, but through the back streets of Richmond and Jolimont, skirting the MCG, across the William Barrack Bridge with its peculiar disembodied indigenous Muzak, along Birrarung Marr and following the northern bank of the Yarra to Spencer Street.

At walking pace, freed from the capsule of car or tram and out among the myriad beauties of a city turning from autumn to winter in the slanting, gentle light, I found it beguilingly easy to realise how Melbourne is, in fact, a whole series of changing aesthetic experiences. Melbourne is like one of those photographs that, at first glance, appears to be a single image and, on closer examination, is revealed as a mosaic of scores of smaller pictures in a trompe l'oeil arrangement.

Look deeper into the city — past the golden greenery, brown water, glass and steel — and there are countless joys to behold.

These reveries are not, alas, shared by those who have other ideas of Melbourne; those who wish to impose grander, more outlandish schemes, designed to make this city something it isn't. Calling us a "cultural capital" is bad enough, especially since there is no such thing; but worse is the seemingly unquenchable notion that Melbourne needs a landmark to justify its place in the world — that this will somehow assuage the long-held belief that, in having been without one for so long, whatever is proposed will become a landmark by default.

This week, The Age reported that the London-based architectural firm Foster + Partners has been hired to design a $1.5 billion office and housing project for Melbourne's Docklands. All very well, and good luck to those who intend to work or live in it. But inherent in the argument — I suspect, its main selling point — is that the involvement of Norman Foster, the architect who restored the Reichstag in Berlin and grew a gherkin in the City of London, will automatically raise the new development to landmark status.

If there's one term worse than "landmark" (let's disregard "world-class"), then may it be its semantic bedfellow, "iconic". Just because we happen to lack an Eiffel Tower, Guggenheim Museum or Sydney Opera House in the immediate vicinity, does not assume that a latter-day Gustave Eiffel, Frank Lloyd Wright or Joern Utzon will be able to supply a substitute prefabricated for landmarkhood or iconiclass.

Besides, cities and buildings proposed for them are not always mutually compatible. "I can think of several more desirable places in the world to build his great museum, but we will have to try New York," Frank Lloyd Wright said of Solomon Guggenheim's choice of location. Mind you, another Guggenheim, in Bilbao, by another Frank, Gehry, has diverted a dreary Basque backwater into the mainstream of visual arts, which is more than it might have done for Geelong, a one-time site for the Guggenheim franchise.

In truth, Melbourne may be a landmark city, but it is not a city of landmarks in the same way, say, Sydney or Paris or New York are. Some metropolises just can't help being landmark-heavy — indeed, New York has so many they are officially registered, and it's not easy to qualify. The city's Landmark Preservation Commission acts in accordance with the Landmarks Law that specifies first off that "a potential landmark must be at least 30 years old and must possess a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the city, state or nation". No playing fast and loose with the L-word there.

Yes, we have various items of national and international heritage (step forward, Royal Exhibition Building) in which we can and should take considerable pride; but they have earned their status and a skyline without them would be unimaginable. But to assume that because someone who designs unusual buildings is bestowing his skills on this city, and that this means the structure will cause crowds to gasp and stretch their eyes, is putting the drawing-board before the actuality.

Incredibly, the trait has never gone away. Remember that unsuccessful competition in the 1970s to roof over the railyards at the southern end of the city? Or, in late 1997, when Bruno Grollo proposed the construction of the world's tallest building, a tower in Docklands? Mr Grollo, perhaps with illusions of grandeur, said this "will be talked about 1000 years from now — like the Colosseum and the Egyptian pyramids". Eleven years on, not everyone can recall the Kennett government actually approved the project. Be thankful it disappeared, along with the government, after the 1999 state election. Be worried, however, that the let's-build-a-landmark mentality is still with us.

Michael Shmith is a senior writer.

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Foster has become the biggest brand-name starchitect and nearly all of their buildings ignore what's around them - just big blobs of cookie- cutter floorspace - take Deutsche Bank in Sydney for example. yawn?
 
tayser: Do you know if that nice young Mr. Foster is bringing some of his Big Hair Starchitecture to Moonee Ponds, as rumoured? There's talk of a new railway station that'll make us the talk of the antipodes.
 
Foster has become the biggest brand-name starchitect and nearly all of their buildings ignore what's around them - just big blobs of cookie- cutter floorspace - take Deutsche Bank in Sydney for example. yawn?

I didn't think it was physically possible, but our new "Foster" (Fauxster?) Pharmacy Building both sucks and blows.
 

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