Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has taken a swipe at City of Sydney councillor Philip Thalis and other critics of his vision for the headland park at Barangaroo, proposing they "might learn something" after the reserve won an international architecture award.
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But Mr Thalis has hit back, suggesting Sydney is lucky Mr Keating wasn't around to impose his views when Danish architect Jorn Utzon won the design competition for the Sydney Opera House.
Barangaroo reserve has been named the 2017 landscape design of the year as part of the annual American Architecture Prize.
The jury said it "transforms a huge expanse of empty concrete into humane, usable space, marking the transformation of an industrialised site into a modern reinvention of its more sustainable past".
Mr Keating, a former member of the Barangaroo Design Excellence Review Panel, pushed hard for a recreated "naturalistic" headland destroyed a century ago for commercial maritime use.
But the NSW government's decision to back Mr Keating's vision set him at odds with Mr Thalis, whose team's winning design referenced the site's maritime and natural history.
Mr Keating told Fairfax Media the award "is a compliment to everyone involved in imagining such a naturalistic form and bringing it to reality".
He singled out American architect Peter Walker, Australian firm Johnson Pilton Walker, the design excellence panel, the Barangaroo Delivery Authority and its former chief executive John Tabart "without whose investment and belief the headland park would never have happened".
But Mr Keating also took aim at opponents of his proposal, expressing hope the design's "impact on American landscape architecture is noted by the local landscape design community here".
He said his vision was met with "almost complete derision" from the NSW Institute of Architects, the Heritage Council, National Trust "and most of all, the aggrieved 'winners' of the former design competition - Hill Thalis Urban Projects, Jane Irwin Landscape Architecture and Paul Berkemeier Architecture".
"Notwithstanding Philip Thalis's constant deprecation of the naturalistic headland since, I hope this award might tell him and colleagues something. That they might learn something," Mr Keating said.
"Landscape architecture in America, because of the scale of that economy, operates on a much wider and deeper front than landscape architecture in Australia.
"So the fact that the American landscape profession has awarded this prestigious prize to Barangaroo should at least encourage local critics to re-examine their modest local frames of reference."
However, Mr Thalis said: "Maybe we're lucky that Paul Keating wasn't around to impose his vision when Utzon won the Opera House international competition."
"Where is Keating's advocacy against such urban atrocities as the Packer casino, WestConnex, Darling Harbour and other destructive projects for Sydney in this most rapacious period in our city's history?" he asked.
"The green headland isn't Paul Keating's invention. Lots of people propose and defend them all around the harbour as we did at Barangaroo."
