So, as a Londoner, this was obviously a disaster >MVRDV had a small budget for the design phase: £10,000 GBP. For us, this implied a significant loss on the pr

So, as a Londoner, this was obviously a disaster >MVRDV had a small budget for the design phase: £10,000 GBP. For us, this implied a significant loss on the project with staff hours alone far exceeding this. Wut. >During the virtual presentation in London, both institutions demanded investigations into the effects of the installation. This is standard for everything built in england. There'll be an extraordinarily expensive investigation into whether you'll disturb something (this is one of the reasons HS2 was a disaster). >The cost of the whole project would be £1.25 million, of which 0.8 percent, the £10,000 mentioned, was set aside for the design. I think, on balance looking at this, the mistake MVRDV made was going along with a clearly wrong budget - presumably in the hopes that Westminster would sign off on spiralling costs rather than half-arsing it. Maybe this is a good thing, because it's clearly a modus operandi for some firms to underquote and then explode costs later on. In this case they went with a ridiculous quote in the hopes that once the project started they could push their client into sinking more cash into the project, but instead their client said "We paid you what we said, deliver" and MVRDV (and other contractors) delivered what they could for the money, which unsurprisingly was shit. Because let's face it, The design phase budget was about the same cost you would pay for an architect to draw up plans for an extension to a semi-detatched house in Wimbledon. Insanity.