Worse still, a stadium would drain the kitty
Artbeat Column by Peter Entwisle, Port Daniel Press, www.portdanielpress.com
Opinion, Otago Daily Times, 29 Sep 2008
A model of the proposed Awatea Street stadium has been displayed which won’t end the dispute about this contentious project (ODT 23/9/08). Still, design changes after this will be “minor” so it’s time to review the design and other aspects relevant to the arts. I’ve said I think the project’s too much public money for too little public good. The points made here aren’t the whole story but are part of what tips the balance.
A large building on this prominent site is an opportunity to do something exceptional. It calls for a statement like the Sydney Opera House but this is far from that. The Caketin on Wellington’s waterfront is bolder and more dynamic. HOKSport’s Sydney Olympic stadium is much more exciting and they are the designers for this. Why is it so less successful?
The unkind have said it’s pitched to the limitations of the conservative, provincial client. Malcolm Farry seemed to confirm that by saying at the Sport in the City forum last year that he knew it wasn’t wonderful but reflected the very tight budget. Quality of design doesn’t depend on money but the uninformed often think it does. The explanation will deflect some critics. The less discerning will like the design because it seems an up-to-date version of the familiar, such as the old Caledonian gymnasium on the Anderson’s Bay Road. Limitations probably did play a part in the birth of this design.
The rectangular pitch and ground plan preclude the dynamism of circular or elliptical stadia. This isn’t helped by the addition of rectangular boxes to the west and east elevations or mitigated by the curving roof. A dated form is obscured but not redeemed by what reads as unintegrated clutter. The formerly interior roof trusses are now external but serve only to obscure the potentialities offered by the ETFE roofing.
This is a newish plastic recently come into its own for large-scale buildings. Its extraordinary, biomorphic possibilities are on conspicuous display in the Allianz Arena in Munich and the Aquatic Centre in Beijing. Here it might be so much glass and it’s where the challenge was lost. For the same money you could have had a building of radically innovative form. Instead we have klutz and clutter.
Since the stadium was first proposed the claims for it have been progressively watered-down while the acknowledged costs have risen. Early on it was going to have art exhibitions but it has no atmospheric or light control so top-end shows will still go to the public art gallery. This reduction has been back-handedly acknowledged by reference now to “expos” and the like. These are things like the trade shows catered for in the Edgar and Dunedin centres, both city-owned and the latter scheduled for expansion. Why would you want any more?
Then there’s concerts. At one time four a year were proposed each with crowds over 14,000. The peer reviewers thought that was unlikely so their revenues were moved to a less certain part of the budget. But Wellington-based nation-wide concert promoters Ian Magan and Paul Sprey have questioned even these projections. Mr Farry suggested on radio (21/9/08) that where there’s a will there might be a way. But another promoter, Murray C. Stott, of long New Zealand, including Dunedin experience, has given an overview of the changing entertainment industry and the detailed demographics and costs which show this is unlikely.
There has been a similar reduction over claims for conferences, shifting of seating and other fit out costs to other budgets to make the often-repeated projected completion cost of $188million more achievable. The now-proposed facility will suit fewer purposes and/or be more expensive to use. And this is without looking at sports codes’ usage where similar things are happening.
The peer reviewers were also concerned the true overall completion costs to the city and regional councils were not made clear in the figures considered by the city council on March 17 when it voted conditional support. A recent ODT report (23/9/08) had the Transportation Manager Don Hill acknowledging $1.5million in such additional expenditure, due to SH88’s further stadium-required realignment, which is probably an understatement. Other “extras” are still unacknowledged.
And at least some regional councillors managed to vote for the project under the illusion it would operate at an annual “profit”. This was regional councillor Gretchen Robertson’s statement recorded on 25 June. But the city council’s Chief Executive’s report of March 14 shows the facility would annually cost the council at least $9.7million.
The indifferent design, progressive loss of function, unacknowledged additional start-up costs and failure to grasp the true continuing burden are causes for general concern. But the arts, like others, have to also face the opportunity costs.
The city’s borrowed $91.4million for this wouldn’t be available for an 800 seat theatre, South Dunedin library - or anything else.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Viewed the model on the weekend; and as far as a covered field design goes it gives the appearance of a functional new building - of its time - that is not unattractive. It is well made, competent, and merely indicative as all scale models are.
It suggests that less may not necessarily more in terms of hosting uses that require more than a paddock, goal posts and seating terraces.
You can’t be too literal when critiquing an architectural model at 1: 300 scale. No point. Now we need to see the detailed design in the form of drawings to understand how it works - and to view its thinness and main preoccupations for use(s).
Peter Entwisle is unduly negative in mentioning the model (and the building?) in comparison to the Sydney Opera House - the latter is not such a hot building, it has some very poor details that are regularly overlooked in favour of visual puns for its roofing system (sails, humping turtles, nuns’ hats…) - and the famous Water Cube at Beijing.
I’m not sure Dunedin needs a one-off statement for the architecture of a new stadium when clearly we aren’t producing ‘magnitude’ statements for other building types here.
Some time ago, Dunedin stopped building public architecture that elevates the spirit, perhaps the Richardson Building (formerly known as the Hocken Building) on campus was the last attempt at impressive height, scale and presence…
The stadium model can only suggest, not confirm, a poor understanding of pedestrian level design dynamics (is this true of the actual building proposed?); it suggests (very clearly) a poor relationship with the Leith stream, an important landscape element and amenity space; there appear to be monolithic expanses of the structure that avoid sufficient levels of articulation and modulation (yes, it’s just a model) - but the people of Waverley will perhaps learn to live with ’something’ that outscales existing building scale and form in the area.
New not best is the trade-off. Cost is still an overpowering issue - but really, $188 million doesn’t buy much these days.
Dunedin would be very lucky to get all the model suggests for that price, but only if the need for extensive public funding and monumental debt servicing was entirely removed.
September 29th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
New skyscraper post tells us the stadium model was made in Auckland by The Model Workshop. See their website http://www.themodelworkshop.co.nz
Click on “Recent Work” to see more photos of the model - says it took 25 days to build.
September 30th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Peter Entwisle has appraised the design of the proposed stadium as it is presented by a model currently on display in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. He has looked at it from a design as well as relevance-to-the-arts perspective and found the design wanting. He suggests some might see the design as “pitched to the limitations of the conservative, provincial client.” While he says such a view might seem unkind, to me it hits the nail on the head. My subjective opinion as a non-stadium aficionado it that it could not be much worse. Seriously, why propose to build something that looks so incompetent? Why would one want to squeeze every drop of blood out of the Dunedin and Otago community to build something new, when a comparable clutter has already been achieved at Carisbrook? All it needs is a roof. And new toilets. Surely, those many specialist consultants involved from the start would have had some idea of what money would be needed to build the kind of stadium upon which the stadium idea was promoted and on which the decision to go ahead was based. After all, some $11 mill have been spent on ‘investigations’ to date. Do you think the councillors, who have got us in this bind (read: mess), would so happily have accepted the proposal if the truth had been known then?
But Peter Entwisle has also evaluated the design against the expectations ratepayers have about potential usage based on previous conceptual drawings and announcements. These have ranged from the ordinary to the outlandish. What it appears we will now be getting, if this unfortunate building should be built, is a whole lot less than anticipated by the constant ‘talking up’ of the project. Let me remind you of the papal visits and swimming competitions (hello, we have an Olympic pool in Moana Pool, in case it has been forgotten). Yes, I know, laughable.
It is convenient to have found the word ‘overlay,’ very convenient indeed, to obfuscate the truth about the bare shell that would emanate from the spending of public funds well above the capacity of the city and region. It is particularly concerning that even ‘ordinary’ use, for example a basketball game, would at a minimum appear to involve the hiring of a floor.
I would be interested to know how 10 x 40 foot containers (storage for some of the non-permanent seats) can be strategically placed around the complex without adding to the clutter.
There are so many issues. I thank Peter Entwisle for his enlightening assessment of the o-r-d-i-n-a-r-y design of a facility that “will suit fewer purposes and/or be more expensive to use.”
PS. Can you not just see the sea gulls perched on those external trusses! Wonder what the impact on the EFTE would be.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Whatever I could add to Anne Elliot and Peter Entwistle’s comments on the stadium design would be superfluous. Well stated. Thank you.
Peter Attwooll
September 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Thank you Anne, Peter and also Elizabeth who pointing out how poorly this great barn sits in relationship to the Leith. It’s an area I love, the Leith boat harbour area, and could be brilliant if they had thought of it as something more than a bare block of land. While the Sydney Opera House might not have worked too well functionally, and Elizabeth is not in love with it ‘visual puns’, you have to admit it sits beautifully on the harbour. HOK had the opportunity to celebrate our harbour - it’s a site to die for - and for whatever reason they decided to give us what has been likened to - variously - a shearing shed, a shoebox and a Goldaire fan heater. (Remember them? Very 1970s, just like HOK’s stadium.)
September 30th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
To be fair the criticism of “shearing shed, a shoebox and a Goldaire fan heater” is completely biased, without balance and of course lacking any credibility. Remember a shoebox is rectangular, a Goldair Fan - please where did that gem come from, and as for a Shearing Shed, who’s shearing shed is that dammed impressive, I want to go and watch shearing there.
Not wanting to point out the obvious, if this project didn’t go ahead at that location, there were no plans what so ever to regenerate that area, there were no plans to connect the people to that land, indeed the land and plant surrounding the Leith have been left to rot for the last 40 years or so. Could I be so obvious as to point out and/or ask which of the current cool stores, wool stores or other industrial plant in that area show any connection or sensitivity to the Leith? This is not an opportunity cost situation, there simply wasn’t any movement to gentrify the area.
As for the claims that it doesn’t sit too well with the area, I find just a little hard to believe. If, and this is a massive IF one was to walk on the side of the leith, along a non existent track, looking back across the leith to the back of the stadium, one wouldn’t necessarily be too offended. Where were you people when the genuine architectural monstrosities (Mitre 10 Mega, The Wharehouse and any other generic tilt slab concrete business) were built.
Peter’s criticism is somewhat astounding in that he is either being disingenuous in suggesting that we should be aiming for some grand architectural statement, because it would simply cost too much (which would surely have had the autonomous collective known as the StS) in palpitations. As for other more organic forms, yes please, but by all means grin and bear the half billion dollar price. The rectangular form is a response to the primary function. In NZ we have become accustomed to Elliptical or Oval forms for stadia as they were designed to accommodate cricket, which this stadium isn’t. Thus to have gone with any form other than a what is currently on offer would have resulted on the fans and spectators being further away from the action resulting in less of an intimate atmosphere. As for the clutter, that too is a little unfounded? How less cluttered could one wish to achieve in the form of a rectangular roofed stadium. I don’t see elaborate spiralled staircases or concourses, there are no grandiose suggestions of form that aren’t needed, flying buttresses etc.
This is of course a rehash of the argument put forward by Peter back in March 2007 in which he bemoaned a grand plan. Anne I am a little dismayed at your criticism, “Seriously, why propose to build something that looks so incompetent?” Could you please explain what you mean by ‘incompetent’. That would imply that the roof doesn’t meet, or that there weren’t any public amenities like toilets. This is somewhat harsh and un-called for and baseless.
Mind you, if we were to get the likes or Allianz Arena or the SOH, let alone a stadium version of Bilbao the StS (as an autonomous collective) would still find criticism of it.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Meg said, “While the Sydney Opera House might not have worked too well functionally, and Elizabeth is not in love with it ‘visual puns’, you have to admit it sits beautifully on the harbour.”
That’s not what I said at all, sorry Meg - I was making the point that comparing the stadium with the Opera House is not appropriate.
They have different missions. And by comparison the stadium model does suggest a more full detail resolution for function than the Opera House denotes.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Further, the model and the design is doing what it should. As Paul says, we can’t afford a grand architectural statement - echoing my first post on this thread. The design is more akin to a ’sports pavilion’, enclosed. However, that’s a very satisfactory distillation of the more unwieldy, ambitious dreams had earlier - I expect for $188 million that we do get a stripped back functional piece of building; being user friendly and keyed to primary users; providing good daylighting; meeting green star accreditation; and being relatively ‘light’ in its skin and framing, honed by an engineering aesthetic.
Maybe it isn’t a stadium - as Malcolm Farry asserts (differently) on the CST website - but neither can it be a “Colosseum”.
Looking the way it does (in the model) - it’s not unimpressive - I still struggle with the idea the stadium will come in at the GMP.
In a larger city this ‘building design’ might seem like a cheap answer to community need - in Dunedin it’s an expensive, and likely to become more expensive, solution to community need.
If those in the private sector like the model (the current vision) then now would be a good time to talk to CST and directly alleviate the stress of its fundraising targets, and further, start reducing the inflated demand on Council coffers and debt servicing.
Dunedin City Council, strongly evidenced by its meeting on Monday, is moving towards prudence and laying in a paper trail to show it.
The project is in a difficult place, clearly.
Aside: Cr Cull has properly observed that Crs Butcher and Stevenson didn’t stick around to assist the Council exercise in limiting risk (there’s a long way to go). Their absence from discussion was highly obvious to all. Ratepayers take note.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Both Paul and Elizabeth have either misunderstood what I’m saying or have assumed a contrary view without saying why they think my claim is mistaken.
I said the site “calls for a statement like the Sydney Opera House” but I also pointed out that “quality of design doesn’t depend on money”. It’s true the Sydney Opera House was very expensive for the functions it performs, and is also an outstanding building. But outstanding buildings don’t have to be fabulously expensive. That’s my point.
Elizabeth doesn’t think the Sydney Opera House is such a very wonderful building because some of its detailing isn’t so good. Maybe but its forms are striking and dynamic and it is widely regarded by architectural historians as both a high point and a historic one in the evolution of Modernism. I think that assessment is right.
Elizabeth also thinks that comparing the Stadium with the Opera House is inappropriate because “they have different missions”. Well, one’s a stadium and the other is an opera house, but given the site and the relative scale each can serve as a contrast and a signifier for the urban centre they adjoin. That’s my point. That Dunedin hasn’t built anything with much of that sort of intention since the Richardson/Hocken building doesn’t mean it couldn’t again and the Awatea Street site is good for that purpose: more so than Castle Street where the Richardson/Hocken building is.
Paul says there were no plans to regenerate that area before the stadium was proposed. That isn’t actually so. There had been a proposal to put some residential buildings on part of the site, which didn’t gain resource consent. And the university has been contemplating that area as a site for its c $150m worth of faculty buildings in the pipeline which I believe is the material reason it is supporting the stadium. That way the city will push for the plan change needed for the university to build there.
Against another of Paul’s points, I’m aware the rectangular form is a response to the rectangular plan which itself is an expression of function. The point is the form doesn’t have to so slavishly follow the function and with ETFE there is a potential to do something formally innovative. Neither the Sydney Opera House nor the Bilbao Guggenheim’s forms are a direct expression of those buildings’ functions - which has a lot to do with their aesthetic success.
There was a possibility here to do something different, but also formally innovative, for the same money. The model shows we’re not being offered that.
Even if we were I’d still say the facility isn’t worth that much public money given it’s rather limited public benefit.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:31 am
Peter given the Universities poor track record of aesthetic environmental sensibilities, regardless of their plans to locate buildings in that area, this would not have seen a marked improvement. This University is the only one to not have a policy on it’s environment. While Canterbury has undertaken a massive program of recycling and composting along with the likes of the Okover Community Garden and stream regeneration. Otago puts it’s grass and other green waste in plastic bags in the rubbish skips - in this day and age that’s reprehensible (well good for my compost at home).
Peter like you at the start of this (the very reason for my blog) I was keen to see a different form. I agree 100% that there could have been a greater expression of form, more innovation etc, this I will never disagree with you on.
However some 18 months down the road and with a very limiting budget (something more like the Auckland budget would have been needed for anything different), we have our form, and that form has been reworked considerably from what was first announced or revelled (did anyone really think the first drawings were going to be the final construction designs?), and we have a much more subtle expression of what is going to be.
One of my concerns Peter (and I had outlined it) was the use of the term clutter? I fail to see where the clutter is?
There are other similar sized stadiums around the world which play on the more organic forms, but these don’t have roofs. And we have been told ad nauseam that roofs are expensive and there isn’t the money to play with said expression of form. Otherwise Peter I agree, hence the very title of my blog “What if?…”
October 1st, 2008 at 8:03 am
You can’t see the clutter Paul? Obviously the CST can, or they wouldn’t still be using the clean shining lines of the original concept drawings to advertise the stadium on their site. You’re on record as saying you liked the new plans better because the clutter had been removed from the inside. Now it’s outside, on the roof, where (if the stadium was built) the public would have to suffer it all day and every day inside of the occasions they actually used the stadium. And I’m not getting into a debate about how often that would be.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:30 am
That ‘clutter’ you talk about (not Peter) are structural forms. If we had the spare billion dollars or more then form and function could have moulded together nicely into some organic form as seen in the Water Cube. But we don’t and it’s a simple architectural rule in this case form follows function.
However one person’s clutter is anothers strong architectural form. For me the placement of the roof trusses on the outside gives the building more solidity and sense of architectural function, something that was missed in the original drawings. There is more drama about the current workings. If the roof trusses are to be classified as clutter (which is somewhat of a weak architectural argument), could some please teel Mr Rogers and Mr Piano they have some work to do on the Centre Georges Pompidou.
As for the facetious comments about their web site. I’m guessing they just haven’t updated their web site, as opposed to some conspiracy theory of hiding designs (the model is there for the world to see in person). And if they did update the web site there would be a letter to the editor “did you know the CST is wasting public money on flash web sites…”
October 1st, 2008 at 4:21 pm
An architect said to me today, what about the birds’ nests in the interstices between EFTE and trusses. Hmmm, “the bird’s nest” NZ-style.
Now that would be unhelpful non self-cleaning clutter.