Plans for a spectacular $1.5 billion office and apartment complex, designed by acclaimed Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid and to be developed by Sama Dubai at the Melbourne Docklands, appear to have been dropped.
London-based Ms Hadid -- the first woman to win architecture's top Pritzker Prize -- is understood to be no longer involved in revised plans for the Docklands Batman's Hill precinct site, where Bruno Grollo had once hoped to build his world's tallest office building.
Neither Ms Hadid nor the development group behind the project, Middle East investment company Sama Dubai, would comment on the future of a project that less than a year ago was heralded as Australia's greenest and most expensive residential complex.
VicUrban, the Victorian Government authority that runs Docklands, is expected to announce a replacement project later in the year.
The revised plans may still involve Sama Dubai, but not the high-profile architect.
Melbourne architectural firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall, which was involved in the original Hadid design, has already confirmed it is no longer playing a role.
According to one source, the Hadid building would have been too expensive to build.
Ms Hadid's reputation for single-mindedness and lack of compromise is legendary. That has put her offside with clients and, according to Britain's Design Museum and the British Council website, made her famous, not for buildings she has built, but the ones she hasn't.
Her major works include the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, Rome's Contemporary Arts Centre, a BMW factory in Leipzig, Germany, and even a skijump on the Bergisel Mountain in Innsbruck.
Only sketchy details of Ms Hadid's plans for the Docklands were ever made public. But the project involved four buildings, the tallest of them a 50 to 60-storey tower that would have been the tallest at the Docklands.
The project was earmarked for land known as Site 6, one of about a half a dozen zones quarantined for future development by former Docklands Authority head John Tabart, who headed Australia's most successful urban renewal project before he left the job in late 2005.
Mr Tabart moved to Dubai to take a senior executive role with Sama Dubai.
Some months later, Sama announced plans for a Dubai-type tall tower. That raised the hackles of rival developers who claimed Mr Tabart's intimate knowledge of Docklands gave him the inside running.
Mr Tabart and former Jones Lang LaSalle real estate agent Patrick Smith are directors of Sama Dubai Australia.
Neither could be contacted for comment.
