"The construction of the Sydney Opera House was an outright fiasco. Setbacks piled up. Costs exploded. Scheduled to take five years to build, it took fourteen.
The final bill was 1,400 percent over the estimate, one of the largest cost overruns for a building in history.
...
The key force behind the opera house project was Joe Cahill, the premier of the state of New South Wales. Cahill had held office for many years and was ill with cancer. Like so many politicians before and since, his thoughts turned to his legacy. And like other politicians before and since, he decided that the public policies he had ushered in were not enough, that his legacy must take the tangible form of a grand building. But Cahill's Australian Labor Party colleagues did not share his dream. New South Wales faced a severe shortage of housing and schools, and pouring public money into an expensive opera house struck them as folly.
Facing a classic political dilemma, Cahill chose a classic political strategy: He lowballed the cost, helped in part by an estimate prepared for the contest judges that simply filled the large blanks in the plan with optimistic assumptions and concluded that Utzon's design was the cheapest of the leading contenders.
And Cahill rushed the process. He decreed that construction would start in February 1959, whatever the state of planning. Not coincidentally, an election was due in March 1959. He even instructed his officials to start building and "make such progress that no one who succeeds me can stop this. It was the "start digging a hole" strategy discussed in chapter 2. And it worked for Cahill. By October 1959, he was dead, but the opera house was alive and under construction -although no one knew precisely what they were building because the final design had not been decided and drawn."
Trechos retirados de "How Big Things Get Done" de Bent Flyvbjerg.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário