Public scrutiny

BLOG

Perth, 20^th November 2013

9 Nine more to go…
I am counting down to my 1000^th blog post! I would like to take this opportunity to ask all my readers to send in your wishes, comments and feedbacks on how you have experienced the blog, what you have learned from the blog, what you like about the blog, how it has helped you in your life and so on, it does not matter anything you would like to say; all things that that I will then feature in my 1000^th blog as a thank you to all of you out there that have supported me and have taken the time to read my blog, some I know nearly every day. Let’s hear it from you.

While many people like to poke fun wishing me happy holidays when I go back to work in Perth, it has been quite the contrary. Yes I take some time out to spent with my kids, who I obviously don’t see that much when I am up in Singapore or travelling the world, but otherwise it is pretty full on with the projects we have on the board. Not the same magnitude as we have in Asia, but definitely of a much higher level of quality and need for attention. The difference here being that project implementation is subject to far more rules and regulations and when you have projects that involve community or tax payer money, the scrutiny is even higher. Add to that the social pressure for every government, whether federal, state, shire or city, to be seen as contributing to our environment by being “sustainable” and you have a recipe for tedious and long winding design processes. In my meetings this morning I found out that even though we are now appointed to do the design work, there is no guarantee that the project will actually see the daylight (to use a metaphor). Step one of our design process will be to submit our design to a heritage council to make sure we do not impede on the heritage fabric of the site and step two will be to submit our proposed design to a “sustainability” committee of sorts who will assess whether our design will pass the cities sustainability guidelines…public scrutiny is high in Australia…

Light Watch 4-199: Tonight I had dinner with my kids at one of my favourite beachfront restaurants…we have some beautiful and inspirational sunsets in Western Australia…the combination of colours, brightness and lighting followed by the slow incoming darkness is something that even non lighting designers mesmerise at…