Super Colossal

UTS Broadway! Gallery!

The first stage of the UTS Broadway Competition is over, and the shortlist has been confirmed. This is the first open competition in Sydney for a major public project and it attracted a great deal of interest from local, national and international practices. We were pumped, our buddies were pumped.

But now it is all over for all but the lucky six, and there seems to be no plans for an online or offline exhibition. That we had to rely on word of mouth and later actually contacting the organisers to find out what is going on is a little disappointing and there is still nothing on their site about the status of the competition at time of writing.

So, in lieu of any formal exhibition of entries, we have put together a quick online gallery of the entries into the first stage of the competition. If you entered and would like your scheme put up on the page, then follow the directions outlined on the ‘participate’ page and we will get it up there as quickly as we can. It would be fantastic to get as many up there as possible.

desription

Link to Gallery.

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The shortlist for Stage Two of the competition is:

  • Bates Smart
  • BVN Architecture
  • Cox Richardson
  • Denton Corker Marshall
  • Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp
  • Lacoste Stephenson + Daryl Jackson Robin Dyke

The list contains many very good architecture offices and no doubt their proposals will be of a very high standard, however, we had hoped for greater diversity in the list &#8212 for our international readers, all but one (Lacoste Stephenson) are well established large commercial practices &#8212 as this would have helped Sydney to move beyond the list of usual suspects for public and institutional projects. Surely the role of creating a shortlist is to accept and embrace at least some risk…

There have been some misgivings expressed about this outcome, which are being documented and debated on a discussion board hosted by Terroir. We encourage you to participate in this discussion if you feel strongly about these issues, as too often the bitching and moaning takes place in private.

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Marcus Trimble

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4 responses to “UTS Broadway! Gallery!”

  1. peter Avatar
    peter

    ?…is there an implication that large established firms do not employ young creative architects?

  2. Marcus Avatar
    Marcus

    Not at all!

    Apart from BVN of course, who seem to have been struggling for the last two years or so… ; )

    As I said, these are all very good offices. I had just hoped for greater diversity on the list – diversity being essential to a healthy ecology and so on. That and that given that there are six practices on the shortlist, that UTS would have accepted at least a little risk in accepting a couple of untried offices.

  3. rachid Avatar
    rachid

    the opera house shadow looms large…..its a shame that ‘sydney’ has sought to use the utzon experience as a negative, a way of consolidating and justifying its mediocrity with respect to the arts and architecture rather than looking at the opera house as a catalyst or exemplar worthy of [in part] replication.

    its a fingers burnt lesson learnt approach and the term conservative does not do it justice. its toddler and lowest common denominator logic and it has to change.

    the fundamental conservative core that had utzon ousted is the same core that puts forward the usual suspects as exclusive executors of architectural interventions.

    they might well be good firms but their tricks are old hat.

    we should all move to melbourne or sweden or better yet have them move to melbourne or sweden and start afresh.

    r

  4. Gustav Avatar
    Gustav

    Rachid
    If you were referring to Utzon as Swedish, he is actually Danish and as far as Sweden goes in contemporary architecture we have been struggling for quite some while now, coincidently, since architects like Utzon, Asplund and Aalto left the building. Trust me I’ve seen it up close, both Sweden and Sydney)

    Although I do agree with both yours and Marcus argument, competitions like these should be more playful… allowing more different views to be expressed rather than just by the big offices which tends to be more serious and sometimes in my opinion a bit mainstream. Especially when dealing with such a landmark building, the architectural community in Australia could really thrive on some new blood making it in to the six.

    Ps.
    Marcus – don’t think BVN have been struggling too much since I left however I’m really glad to see your work, it’s always very inspiring. Let me know if you’re heading for London sometime and I’ll show you around the AA.

    Gustav

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