The Shit Hits the Fan

Then up jumped the Council's resident architect and engineer, Alan Nightingale. Nightingale is chairman of the Committee on Site and Building Development and Utilisation, and is thus in a powerful position regarding the introduction of any new building developments. It is under the eye of his committee that many of the new buildings on campus have been designed, approved and constructed.

Nightingale said he had to make his position plain. Firstly, he considered the proposal was "insensitive to major needs of the University". Secondly, he was of the opinion that "planning was of a very poor second class". He had considered the proposal in some depth and could identify 12 items in the brief given to the consultants which were not complied with. This led him to ask, "did the consultants understand the brief?"

Council was stunned. To begin with, this sort of public attack by one member of a profession on another is not at all becoming, either to the individual concerned or the organisation he represents. Even more incredibly, Nightingale's remarks were not substantiated. He gave no explanation of why the proposal was "insensitive", and even had the audacity to state that the meeting was not the proper place to reveal which 12 items in the brief had been ignored. Without any facts, the consultants could not reply other than to say that the brief was an outline only and that they had understood it. (It is worth noting that the brief given some time ago to the University's usual architects, Kingston, Reynolds, Allardice and Thom, for a replacement building for the Hunter site, is considerably more detailed. (Salient will be examining the discrepancies between the two next week).