Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

A quick blog about conflicting relationships on my design project.

(Credit to Glynn Tomsett for the title)

I am currently working on a project which involves developing a base concept design for upgrading the Melbourne Airport short stay car park, serving Terminals 1-3, in line with a wider airport expansion programme.

The design includes re-configuration of the current floor plans to include pick-up and drop-off, additional entry and exit ramps to cater for increased traffic flow and development of pedestrian access to the terminals.

The client, Melbourne Airport, engaged my design consultant along with  an architectural firm to take on the work late last year. They subsequently contracted a PM firm to manage the project.

I attended an interim client meeting a week or two ago, which involved the design consultant (us) and architects presenting their ‘optioneering’ to the PM team ahead of delivery to Melbourne Airport’s Board of Directors. During the presentation it became apparent that we were pulling in slightly different directions from the architect, who was eager to push the ‘all singing all dancing option’  with a new orientation space (structure) in front of the car park and 2 new fandangled pedestrian bridges. It might have been that there were 20+ bodies crammed into a single glazed room with broken air-conditioning on a sweltering Melbourne day, but I could definitely sense a bit of tension in the air, so I did a bit of digging.

It turns out that when we were originally engaged on the project with the architect there was no direction on who was to lead the design effort so both parties went off in their own direction. Predictably, the architects came up with a number of flowing designs that boasted ‘confluences’ and ‘spaciality’ etc, but which required extensive structural work and in some instances were unfeasible.

By all accounts they did not take kindly to the engineering advice from Aurecon about the feasibility of some of their ideas and this caused some early conflict between the parties. It wasn’t until the PM firm were engaged that the matter was resolved after they appointed Aurecon the lead coordinator of  the design effort.

From what I have seen however, this hasn’t stopped the architect from attempting to force their ideas on the project and they are obviously keen to retain as much influence/control over the design as possible, including what information gets delivered to the client.

Following the meeting I attended, the PM team identified quite a few areas in the presentation that needed further development and tightening up ahead of delivery to the Melbourne Airport Board of Directors. It was agreed that the architect who had compiled the original presentation would send it through to us work on update. What followed was a frantic 1 1/2 days of pulling together the required information ahead of the meeting.

The team were literally working to get the presentation up to scratch right up to the minute the taxi arrived to pick them up. I didn’t attend this meeting, however, when the design manager got there the architect had already arrived and had a presentation on the screen ready to go. When she explained that she had the updated presentation which the team had worked hard on, the architect refused point blank to swap it over and after some discussion (conscience not to cause a scene in front of the client) she ceded and the presentation was delivered using the original  version which had only a few minor amendments made by the architect.

I was quite surprised at this level of childish behavior, an indication I suppose of the architect’s need to maintain some control over the project to justify their position and inject as much architectural scope as possible.

I wondered if anyone else had any other anecdotes about conflicts between parties from their placements?