Risk for designers in Lottery jobs

Designers working on Lottery projects for the millennium are taking “serious risks” with their fees, says the designer working on the crisis-ridden Earth Centre in South Yorkshire.

Bath consultancy Feilden Clegg is designing the Sustainable Futures Pavilion for the 100m centre. The project has been shrouded in doubt due to the 50m needed to match a promised Millennium Commission grant, though both the Earth Centre and the commission say the project will definitely go ahead.

Partner Peter Clegg says there is “a problem with millennium projects which the public and not even the commission has understood. It is a huge risk for designers to work on these projects”.

His consultancy would lose “a lot of fees” if the project folded, as he feared it would. “We’ve received back a small amount of the money we’ve spent, but we would have lost a considerable amount. But we are now satisfied that the project will be going ahead,” he says.

A Millennium Commission spokeswoman says it is “up to the designers whether or not they participate in a proposed project”.

Future Systems is designing the centre’s Millennium Ark and Alsop & Strmer is designing its Science and Industry Centre.