The year is 1988 and it's the Bicentenary celebration for Australia. The area around Darling Harbour, once the domain of working docks, warehouses and rail lines to ship goods in and out have been transformed into a community precinct served in part by a monorail service from the city. Going counter-clockwise from the west you had the Sydney Maritime Museum, followed by the Harbourside shopping complex (which housed mostly touristy shops and eateries, and still does) followed by the Convention Centre, followed by the Exhibition Centre (which we'll see in a later PAD), then loop around and you had the much vaunted Chinese Gardens which people would leave with a sense of awe. That they actually paid money to enter them, that is.

It is now 2014, 26 years later. And I don't like to speculate on how quickly those 26 years have passed. However, for a building 26 years isn't normally a vast expanse of time. Nonetheless the decision was made to obliterate the Convention Centre and the Exhibition Centre and build new buildings in their place. The Exhibition Centre in particular won the Sulman prize for public architecture. None of this can get in the way of the smell of money, of course, so down they go. To be honest I always regarded the Exhibition Centre as being a bit of a barn. But on the other hand, it's hard to see how else you could design the interior of a building intended to be used for an infinite array of exhibitions.

I recall going to computer systems exhibitions back in the days when they still had bikini clad babes on the display stands notwithstanding that the bikinis, much less the babes had absolutely nothing to do with the products on offer. I went to motoring shows there back in the days before automotive companies realised that they really weren't making enough sales to justify a seven figure fee for attending the shows and stopped going.

The Convention Centre was also somewhat barnlike but from the outside they were not unattractive. The proposed new building looks like one of Picasso's more vivid nightmares and I'd be very surprised if the interior is in any way an improvement over the existing buildings.

In any case, it's all too late. By the time of posting this, hoardings had already been erected around both buildings and demolition was well underway. The tilted angle seemed fitting in the circumstances. Seems a hell of a waste of resources to destroy buildings which are barely a quarter of a century old and still seemed to perform their functions well. But as I said, the smell of money is an irresistible lure. In the meantime, we have a "exhibition centre" consisting of some demountable buildings and plastic sheeting over at the old car terminal. You'll see the luxury of this building in later photographs.