The Rockliff Government’s litany of untruths surrounding the Macquarie Point stadium can now be revealed with indisputable clarity.

Working as an architect in Sydney (now retired in Hobart) I have seen many large private and government projects awarded to firms who have used blatantly false or misleading conceptual renderings in order to secure major contracts.

Yet I am not sure I’ve witnessed anything more deceitful than the computer graphic imagery conjured over recent months by compliant architects to support the self-aggrandisement of one unqualified town planner who – prompted by an AFL salesman – considers himself qualified to subjugate an entire state to a Big City sporting and gaming empire in exchange for a license to play just one of the many nationwide games it already plays.

Until this week, the Macquarie Point stadium ‘artist’s impressions’ have deliberately excluded all existing parameters or familiar edifices by which to scale the siting or height of the proposed stadium.

But now the hoodwinking, the fudging, and the downright lies can be revealed. All we needed was the inclusion an existing survey monument lying on an exact parallel of latitude with the architect’s cross-sectional centreline.

And finally, here it is: the 1901 Gasworks brick chimney stack at 38.1 metres high (Australian Height Datum).

The architects have unwittingly included the Gasworks stack in their own east-west section as shown below.

This confirms the absurdity of the CGI rendition (below) which also – big mistake – includes the stack but shows it to be miraculously around the same height as the 54-metre documented elevation of the stadium dome.

No lay person needs a degree in architecture to understand the lie embedded in this montage.

WARNING TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES

The astonishing height difference revealed in this drawing is likely to be as great as the wide-angle misrepresentation of all the previous renderings, falsifying many extremely tight spaces to make them appear endlessly expansive.

This is the trickery used by international architectural practices and imagemakers to attract new clients or to satisfy the whims of those already committed.

Herewith see more of the what the real visual impact will be.

Mark B Pooley is a retired architect living in Hobart.

Editor’s note: after we published this piece, Mark Pooley was invited to speak to anchorman Ryk Goddard on the Hobart Breakfast show on ABC Radio. The interview starts about 1:36 into this recording.