Page 4019 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 30 October 2013
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As we heard about for most of this morning, the city plan, which is currently open for public consultation, proposes that the Australia forum be sited in the long-stay car park near the Assembly towards Commonwealth Avenue. However, I note that last May the Canberra Convention Bureau was concerned that the City Hill site would not be big enough and it still preferred the West Basin site, as the City Hill site would not be able to accommodate the functionality needed nor any expansions which may be needed in the future.
To address this issue, noting that the ACT government were keen on the City Hill site, a workshop on the Australia forum was held last month. This workshop was specifically designed to look at whether the City Hill site would be able to deliver on the criteria within the 2011 scoping study and the functional brief. The workshop gathered six architects, including world-renowned architect Larry Oltmanns, who is referred to in Mr Barr’s amendment and who has been discussed in the conversation already. My information is that this was a highly successful workshop which specifically worked through issues around putting the new convention centre on the City Hill site. The Convention Bureau, I understand, is now happy to work with the proposed City Hill site and believes it will be able to accommodate the Australia forum functional brief as long as there is flexibility in the design to suit the site.
As has been discussed, a dinner was held with Larry Oltmanns the evening after his seminar in the middle of the workshop. For those who did not manage to hear him speak when he was in Canberra, he is an industry expert in planning and designing convention centres around the world, and his key mission is to work with locals to ensure that the right building is created for the right place. That basically carries with it the idea that you do not work with the notion that there is a perfect building for a convention centre, some template you can just roll off the shelf, but, rather, that you get exactly the right building for the city and environment that you are operating in.
That dinner with Larry Oltmanns was very useful, and I appreciated the opportunity to sit and talk with him. It was an informal setting with a small crowd—Mr Barr, Mr Smyth, me and a number of business leaders from Canberra—and we had a very useful conversation where he conveyed much of his experience in designing convention centres and making sure the right building is developed in the right location. One of the key points he talked about in the role of a city was applying the five-minute rule—that is, people will generally only walk somewhere if it is within a five-minute walk, so a convention centre should be very close to the city centre. That particularly underlined the fact that City Hill seems appropriate for a convention centre.
I must say, up until that point, I was more attracted to one of the other options—the site at West Basin. I favoured it personally because of the potential for it to be very iconic with its location next to the lake. I was less convinced about the City Hill site in the regard. But after that discussion with Larry Oltmanns and knowing the workshop took place where a lot of the concerns were ironed out, I am warming much more to the notion of a City Hill site. My previous views were based very much on personal instinct, but, having listened to the much more technical and detailed discussions, I am much more persuaded that City Hill can work and, in fact, work
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