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Urban Development

LARGE SCALE REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Some thoughts:

The exacting technology, financial analysis and urban design that necessarily informs contemporary City development is usually about celebrating the present and promising a more perfect model of the future - coming sometime soon. Equally, all our great Cities started off as small and sometimes insignificant places where communities clustered and evolved over time in a regional and historical continuum, often in unanticipated ways.So, ensuring a sustainable legacy needs to accommodate "chance" and the idea of these great social and cultural organisms changing in response to the needs and perceptions of future generations. It will likely happen anyway.

 

PROJECT EXAMPLES:


St Andrews Project, Australia


A 50 Year project

Benoa Harbour, Indonesia


The Virtual Team - Resource Coordination and Improvisation


Cairns Cityport, Australia


         Business Cycles

 

WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT

Some thoughts:

Waterfronts exemplify the old property platitude that value is related to location. Ideas like "sense of place", "ambiance", and "character" are difficult to measure in DCF or IRR terms yet undeniably fire the imagination of most developers. The mixed economic results of waterfront developments, particularly those with commercial components, usually arises from poor understanding of the fundamental complexity (and expense) invoked by waterbased schemes. It is further compounded by the misapprehension that all property values are favourably influenced by proximity to water. Notwithstanding the challenges it is worth considering that many of the worlds' finest cities are urban celebrations of an intrinsically superb waterfront setting.

PROJECT EXAMPLES:

Schoonmaker Marina, San Francisco, USA


           Development and Public Consultation


Ports of Auckland, New Zealand


          Reinventing a Waterfront

 

Melbourne Docklands, Australia



         Role of the Market


Buran Durat, Sentosa Island, Singapore


          Single Layer Government


TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY

Some thoughts:

More than any other development type, tourism has at its core the fundamental tension between dreamers and operators, which is to demonstrate that a business case exists to support the dream. Most contemporary tourism typologies have the same challenging value chain: design or create an 'experience', attract and sell to customers, transport them to the destination, deliver 'the experience', transport them home safely, do this so well that your customers come back again and again and again.

The difficulties of seasonality, service culture, cash-flow management, global terrorism, and other obstacles often conspire to make the entire enterprise seem utterly irrational until it is you that stands on a remote, palm fringed beach, one balmy tropical evening, toasting a spellbinding sunset, across a glimmering azure ocean.


PROJECT EXAMPLES

Cable Beach Club, Australia


         Remote Resorts

 

Pan Pacific Hotels and Resorts International

   


North West Cape, Australia

 

       Treading softly on the landscape.



Serviced Apartments, Cambodia


         Life after the Khmer Rouge

Other Projects - Client List:

Articles:

Design elements of Balinese community based resorts

HERITAGE

Some thoughts:

Cultural interrogation accompanies heritage preservation revealing lost pasts, heroes and values that are central to society’s process of self-definition. Numerous public and private entities are therefore committed to Historic Preservation. Heritage sites are not immune from the ravages of time so the landscape of preservation is commonly populated with difficult issues including: functional obsolescence, public health and safety concerns, urban renewal imperatives, loss of property value, social dislocation. Project feasibility and  heritage stakeholder outcomes often crucially depend on collaborative strategies involving a balance between sensible financial incentives and appropriate preservation statutes, otherwise our past can just as easily lay in ruin and ultimately be lost.

PROJECT EXAMPLES:


Audiffred Building San Francisco

Complexity and finance

Other Projects

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

Some thoughts:

Commercial, Retail and Industrial property is the economic DNA of urban 'Place-making'. As a category it is distinguished by multiple warring personalities. The form is operationally driven by analysts and arcane financial, simulation models leveraging fractions of profit. Spatially these activities often flock together to efficiently exploit synergies in infrastructure, markets, value and supply chains that are fundamental to their survival.  "Lumpiness" and propensity to change shape in response to market demands dynamically influences the urban environment. Social impacts and value differentials evidenced in skid row may be reflected upon in a booming uptown bar.

PROJECT EXAMPLES:


Hawaiian Group


           Portfolio and Risk


Twin Towers, Malaysia

          Vertical Community - Systems of Organisation


RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT

Some thoughts:

Commoditization of the 'bedroom' through mass production in horizontal (suburban) and vertical ( high rise apartment) form has largely been a right brain exercise whose vocabulary is one of trends, demographics, segmentation, cost-benefit, etc.  Developers now seek competitive advantage in beneficial left brain concepts such as: sustainability, healthy community, social equity, sense of place and so forth. The synthesis occurs mostly in a framework of simplistic debate regarding 'sprawl' and 'urban consolidation'. Of course, social alienation and lack of sustainability can occur both in the sprawl of suburbia and the consolidated podiums of inner city apartments. Ultimately, the key elements of successful community creation and urban design programs are easily observed on a daily basis in the rich, detailed interactions of local people at street level. Their vocabulary speaks in terms of imagining a future based on commitment to the particulars of their community. It is a vision invariably facillitated by environment and the character of surrounding built form.

PROJECT EXAMPLES

Capricorn Coastal Village Western Australia

              What is "Place"

ARTICLES


Waterfront Development


            Where complexity and pirates abound.


Audiffred Building

              Architecture as a metaphor for society.

AWARDS


- Commendation, San Francisco Board of Supervisors
- Award of Excellence, California Heritage Society

LINKS


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