Kevin Clarke: Ramshackle contest in need of redesign

With the dropping of the requirement for 'iconic', 'legacy' development from the design brief, Auckland has been deprived of huge future revenue. Photo / Supplied

Conventional wisdom has it that to win a major architectural competition, you have to throw a double six first time. Anything less won't do. The competitors are simply too good.

Not so for the Queens Wharf competition, however. By far the most assured path to winning the Queens Wharf competition was to not enter it in the first place. Sounds strange but it's true.

The Stage 2 designs for the competition were due to be submitted last Friday. Three of the eight submissions will have come from three teams who did not need to take part in the competition at Stage 1.

It is almost certain that one of those three teams will win the competition, with a design that has not been seen previously. It is almost certain that none of the Stage 1 finalists has any realistic prospect of success.

Here's how this curious outcome was engineered by the competition's organisers.

The Queens Wharf competition conditions effectively required the five selected design "finalists" from Stage 1 to then team-up with one of three selected "consultant/delivery teams" for the development of their designs during Stage 2 of the competition process.

If the so-called "Stage 1 finalists" team up with one of the three selected "consultant/delivery teams", they are required to waive their copyright, will have no design or any other real authority and will be set in competition against the "consultant/delivery team" they join.

The three selected "consultant/delivery teams" were selected on the basis of their delivery credentials, rather than their designs. However, the three selected "consultant/delivery teams" are entitled to produce designs of their own, during Stage 2, without firstly having to compete in the design competition.

What sort of "design competition" is that ? For the three selected "teams", it's a bit like being entitled to sit an exam after the answers have been published.

To produce winnable schemes, the three selected "teams" would need to eliminate the serious and almost universally fatal flaws embodied within the so-called "finalists"' schemes.

There is virtually no chance that they would bother doing that, since the three selected "teams" would inevitably wish to focus their resources on their own schemes, rather than spend time and money on almost certain losers - for which they would gain no revenue at Stage 2, and no design recognition either.

The three "consultant/delivery teams" are not in competition with the competition's approximately 240 competitors. They are not even in competition with the five so-called "Stage 1 finalists", since four of the five finalists' proposals have no realistic chance of satisfying the competition's brief.

Rather, they are in competition with the two other selected "teams". As such, Stage 1 of the competition has been rendered worthless by the competition's conditions.

The poor management of the competition did not stop there. The brief was unwieldy, self contradictory and entirely inadequate. It failed to even vaguely outline the functional requirements for an international cruise ship terminal. Not such a flash outcome for a competition that included the requirement for such a terminal.

The Stage 2 submissions will be judged over the next few weeks. The chairman of the "design advisory panel" recently acknowledged that in selecting the Stage 1 "finalists", that panel did not recognise the competition's briefing requirement for an "iconic' or "legacy" design.

The lacklustre outcome of that decision was missed by virtually no one.

Superb iconic developments generate huge revenues for the cities in which they are built. As an example, the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao transformed that town, and generates $200 million dollars in tourism revenue annually - two or three times the cost of the Queens Wharf development.

By the simple act of dropping the competition's briefed requirement for "iconic", "legacy" developments from further and serious consideration at the Queens Wharf development, Auckland was deprived of huge future revenue.

However, much worse, it was condemned to accepting less than the world class proposals that could easily be afforded.

That decision also dismayed the great number of New Zealand citizens who are alive to the enormous urban benefits that only superbly iconic developments deliver.

Slamming out an inadequately briefed and hastily evaluated development solely for the purpose of staging the Rugby World Cup is pointless when the city already has a comprehensively developed platform and infrastructure for staging the event, at the Viaduct Basin.

Everyone knows that the Viaduct site comfortably accommodates huge crowds, that its northern plaza can be quickly fitted out to provide world-class televised pizzazz required for the World Cup and shelter for its large crowds.

The rest of the required catering and infrastructural requirements are already there, and would benefit greatly from the World Cup festivities - in a glittering setting.

The city and country owes it to itself to have a superb international cruise ship terminal, a superb urban extension on to the Queens Wharf, and a superb location that Auckland's citizens and its visitors can delight in at a harbour-edge site that is uniquely Auckland, uniquely attractive, directly accessible to its CBD and readily able to be done.

None of these outcomes is likely, unless the current Queens Wharf agenda is dropped now and restaged properly. However, all those worthwhile outcomes are easily possible, if responsible management and sound urban planning are allowed to supplant knee-jerk, half-baked political gameplay.

* Kevin Clarke is an architect who entered Stage 1 of the competition. Written on behalf of the NZ Institute of Architects North Shore practice group.