Sydney residents fear a harborside redevelopment will ruin their city's most celebrated panorama

By TIM BLAIR

n another setting, it would be an unremarkable building. A little chunky, maybe, and certainly no head-turner, but largely inoffensive. Instead, it is the most despised building in Sydney, perhaps in Australia. Even tourists drawn to the picture-postcard beauty of Sydney Harbour are bewildered. "What are they doing?" asks German visitor Dagmar Salger. Her compatriot Angelika Beller makes a simple judgment: "It's bad taste."

What angers people about the 45-m apartment building nearing completion on the eastern side of Sydney's Circular Quay is not so much what it looks like, but what it conceals. Behind it--and from some angles obscured by it--stands the Sydney Opera House. Says Kel Hutchence, deputy chair of the Save East Circular Quay Committee, which demands the building's removal: "It's disgusting, an absolute miscarriage of so many things, that we have this ugly piece of architecture sticking up so near to probably the greatest building built this century." Well-attended rallies have supported his stand. Talkback radio programs and newspaper editorials and letters columns are white-hot with rage.

But finding a single culprit to blame for the building known throughout Sydney as "The Eyesore" isn't easy. Since 1988, when the New South Wales state government ruled that East Circular Quay could be redeveloped, about a dozen different state and city government departments, planning committees and advisory boards have had a hand in the outcome. Says leading Sydney architect Keith Cottier: "It's a classic example of a bureaucracy at work. There's never been one single person to take responsibility. Committees took charge of everything."

When the $A400 million redevelopment is completed, the building will join two others currently under construction to form what some say will be a wall of blandness, further obscuring views from the Quay to the Opera House and the lush Botanic Gardens that stretch south and east of it. But the treasured panorama is a recent one. Since the 1860s, warehouses and bond stores have occupied the site; it was only in 1989, when earlier buildings were demolished--including one taller than "The Eyesore," on the same site--that the view was opened up. Douglas Webster, director of finance and corporate services for Hongkong Shanghai Hotels Ltd., which owns the controversial northernmost site, says protesters are forgetting their history: "There was a wall of buildings at East Circular Quay when Jorn Utzon designed the Opera House [in the late 1950s]. He specifically did not design it to sit in isolation."

Webster, whose company bought the site two years ago when construction was well underway, is no great defender of the building as architecture--"It's a block of flats"--but he says protesters' demands are unrealistic: "Everybody in Sydney would rather have a clear view of the harbor and the Opera House and the Botanic Gardens. But the problem is, if you have open spaces everywhere, you don't have a city."

And Sydney doesn't have much hope of getting rid of its unwelcome addition, despite the fighting words of Hutchence (father of the late INXS rock singer Michael), who vows to "hold rallies like you've never seen, and lots of other things. If I can get a down and dirty cement truck driver, I'll fill the whole place in." Trouble is, says top-rating Sydney radio host Alan Jones, who has campaigned against the development since 1994, the majority of complaints didn't come until the building was up: "They got involved when the referee had blown the whistle, the players had left the field, and the dressing rooms were locked."

The game may be over, but a winner is hard to find. Webster, weary of standing up for the building, admits: "The mood of my company right now is, For goodness' sake, let's get it over with, sell the damn units and get out of it." Sydney Lord Mayor Frank Sartor, who says he has been "cornered by old ladies in art galleries" angry that his council hasn't been able to stop construction, predicts that within five years the building will "hardly be a blip on the radar screen." That is a high hope for a building that aspires to anonymity, yet for the moment seems stuck in the spotlight.

--With Reporting by Susan Horsburgh /Sydney