Barangaroo vision

The attack on the proposed cultural facility at headland park, Barangaroo, and its designers by a group of local architects is misplaced ("Culture to bloom in Barangaroo bunker", September 10-11).

As a member of the Barangaroo Design Excellence Review Panel over the past two years, I have seen the evolution of this scheme by a design team led by the leading American landscape architect Peter Walker - co-designer with Michael Arad of the National 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, New York City - in association with Sydney-based architects Johnson Pilton Walker - designers of such outstanding cultural facilities as the Museum of Sydney, the New Asian Galleries at AGNSW and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

The outcome to date is a visionary scheme, folded into the reconstructed landscape of Millers Point in a dramatic series of voids, light shafts and entrance-ways as compelling as the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, or the Chichu Bijutsukan (art museum in the earth), Naoshima Island, Japan.

There has been extensive consultation with the arts community and the general community on the future use of the cultural facility, which together with its superb landscape setting stands as the finest proposal for public works in Sydney since the Opera House.

Professor James Weirick

Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW