Shane O'Riley is a man with a vision. He's spent five years working on a dramatic design for an international concert hall for the Elizabeth Quay riverfront development, only now releasing it to the public.

A Perth-based building designer who works on large residential projects, Mr O'Riley said he began the design as a private project to showcase his skills.

"When the second Narrows Bridge went up I thought that was a wasted opportunity to do something with that landscape," he said.

"I knew there was a parcel of land earmarked for Elizabeth Quay before the public knew, and I researched the Indigenous heritage of the area.

"The underlying brief was very simple. It needed to compete as an icon against concert halls and opera houses around the world, not just Sydney.”

His design is already drawing strong responses from the public: some love it, some hate and others have compared it to an echidna.

The projected cost - $1.2 billion - has many doubting it will ever be built but Mr O'Riley says he's resilient and prepared to work long and hard to realise the building.

"I'm thick-skinned and I’m able to take on board the polarising comments that a structure of this magnitude would open up," he said.

"At the same time there has been a lot of very positive feedback on it because I think Perth very much needs this icon."

The design of the entrance for a Perth Concert Hall. ( Supplied: Unique8 Design Studio )

Looking past the price

Mr O'Riley believes that people, especially politicians, need to look past the cost and think about what an iconic building could do for the city.

"If you look at Sydney for example, it is the architectural and urban landmarks that have located it on the map," he said.

"We need to think about things in Perth in terms of what we need iconically and then have everything else revolves around that centrepiece.

"We are not doing that in Perth and I am very concerned that, on the foreshore, there is a mishmash of architecture that has the potential to give us slums of the future and degrade the image of Perth.

"We end up spending good money after bad because no-one is pre-planning the grand vision because I think planning is based around political terms, not visions."

Asked on 720 Mornings about the design, Premier Colin Barnett said he did like it, but indicated it was unlikely to be backed by the State Government.

"We haven't got a lazy billion lying around, but I do think we will see some magnificent architecture go into Elizabeth Quay," the Premier told Geoff Hutchison.

"That site at Elizabeth Quay is reserved for an Aboriginal art and cultural area. That's in the long-term plan; it's not something that is going to happen soon.

"When that is ultimately developed I hope it would be a spectacular building."

Interior design for a Perth concert hall, which is intended as a sculptural representation of music. ( Supplied: Unique8 Design Studio )

Musical sculpture

The design, Mr O'Riley said, was intended to be a metaphor for "what it feels like to be sculpturally inside music, without the experience of the sound".

"The living embodiment is you being inside a musical instrument, a sculpture, something that is dynamic and inspirational," he said.

At the very least, he hopes the design will start a discussion about how the city should look, and points out that the combined budgets of the new sports stadium and Elizabeth Quay total $4 billion.

"No-one cares about making Perth an international city of the future, it's all about developers," he said.

"What I've learnt in building is that you get one shot at things in a location, once you build it is there.

"It's always about our sporting prowess, not our cultural prowess, and we need to grow up."