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The Sydney Opera House
This form, so well recognized and loved today, was, at the time of its design in 1957, completely unique. There had never been a building like it. In fact, the technology to build it did not yet exist. In the years since its completion in 1973 it has given the world a way to remember a far-off continent, as well as a compelling reason to appreciate it. It's almost impossible to think of Australia without seeing the Opera House in the mind's eye, or to imagine the Land Down Under without it. It's been called the iconic structure of the 20th century, and rightly so.
Jorn Utzon
But the ease with which it rests in the collective consciousness belies the difficulty of its birth. The man who created it, Jorn Utzon, Danish architect and Pritzker Prize winner, died a few months ago at his home in Elsinore, relatively unnoticed and unknown.
Like another noble Dane of Elsinore whose fall from grace occasioned Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, Jorn was stripped of his 'crown' in the political power struggles surrounding the project, and forced into exile before the building was completed. He never set foot in Australia again, and so never saw the completed Opera House. Like Hamlet, his career suffered an untimely death, poisoned by the plots and schemes which swirled around the masterpiece that should have ensured it.
Who knew? It's such a happy building. The soaring, white, wind-filled sails of its roof can't help but lift our spirits, even as their scale takes our breath away. The colony of its similar forms seems almost alive, reminding us of shark fins, sea shells, gull wings, and countless other objects from the nautical world.
A building that relies on such unusual, larger-than-life shapes could easily have come off as a strange spectacle, like one of the floats at a Macy's parade. But the lyrical roof structure is perfectly balanced and grounded by the formidable pedestal on which it sits. The result is a daring, exciting form of heroic stature that stands as a reminder of the greatness we are capable of, and a challenge to go beyond our self-imposed limits.
Sydney Harbour
The Opera House is one of those structures that is completely at home in its surroundings. In fact, one has the feeling that it is the surroundings that dictated the structure. It's hard to emphasize just how unusual this is. The whole paradigm of civilization is one of imposition - of ideas, beliefs, structures and infrastructure. We have precious few examples of architecture that aren't about the people who made them happen, but rather the place in which they happen.
And how about those surroundings? The waters of beautiful Sydney Harbour on three sides of the Opera House provide the perfect back-drop for the building's aquatic symbols and suggestive forms. It's as if it's the biggest boat on the bay. Yet it's also tucked neatly beneath the impressive Sydney Harbour Bridge from which yet another magnificent view of it is available. With only a few photos and some nautical maps showing wind, currents, tides and shoreline, Utzon, working from Denmark, produced a building so perfectly in scale with its surroundings, so exquisitely 'right' that it now seems the inevitable outgrowth of the place where it resides.No wonder it captures our imaginations while burning its image indelibly onto our psyches.
There is much to say about the process that brought us this amazing building, all of it fascinating. Utzon was thirty-eight years old (young in architect years) and barely known outside his native land when he beat out 232 other contestants from 32 countries to win this commission.
Prior to establishing his own practice, Utzon worked for two of Europe's leading lights in modern architecture, Gunnr Asplund in Sweden and Alvar Aalto in Finland. His father had been a naval architect, known for fast yachts with pointed sterns based on his study of fish, who impressed upon his son the importance of looking to nature for inspiration. Utzon's first move upon entering the contest was to go sailing around Hamlet's Castle Kronborg in Elsinore whose similar siting on the water and heavy pedestal were the genesis of his Opera House design.
It was seventeen years from the launching of the competition to the completion of the project. The original cost estimate was $7,000,000. The final cost was $102,000,000. The spin at the time was that Utzon resigned in shame over the cost overrun, causing a dark cloud to form over his future.
The reality however, was quite different. Political pressure from those in Sydney who had staked their careers on making the project happen forced a low-ball estimate. These same politicians then forced Utzon to begin construction before the highly experimental design was complete, resulting in the dynamiting and replacing of the first extensive and expensive concrete pylon foundation.
Later, in an attempt to take control of the project, the government withheld payments until Utzon could no longer pay his staff, and then, when the work stopped, accused him of resigning. As recently as a few years ago, the politician responsible for this travesty bragged from his nursing home bed of how he had 'put him (Utzon) out of his misery', and had 'put him down like a dog'. Rough stuff down under. How fitting that the Opera House's opening performance was War and Peace by Prokofiev.
If you'd like to know more, use the link at the end of this newsletter for an excellent article by Geraldine Brooks that appeared in The New Yorker in 2005.
Much has been said about The Sydney Opera House and its creator by people who know something about architecture. Here are a few of their comments:
"Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country. It is the first time in our lifetime that such an epic piece of architecture gained such universal presence."
Frank Gehry - architect and Pritzker Prize jury member 2003
"...a work of genius."
Eero Saarinen - architect and Prtizker Prize Jury member, 2003
"The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building."
Louis Kahn - architect
"There is no doubt that the Sydney Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings of the 20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known throughout the world - a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent."
Pritzker Prize Jury's Award Citation
"Utzon was thirty-eight when he won the competition for the Opera House - how would the work of the mature master have enriched our lives? We'll never know. That's the high price Sydney has imposed by its incompetence in building the Opera House."
Harvard Design Magazine in 2005, professor Bent Flyvberg
But let's let Utzon himself have the last word here. I'll end with an excerpt from the interview with him, drawn from the New Yorker piece mentioned above:
"The main thing is that it even happened," he said, rising restlessly from his seat next to Lis and coming to sit beside me on the sofa. "First, that they would give a foreign young fellow the responsibility to undertake such a thing-the most exciting and the most difficult project you could imagine." Nothing comparable, he said, could have happened in Europe at the time. "We had four hundred and fifty different trades working on that site. It was a fantastic ballet every day. Huge elements-ten-ton pieces of concrete. They would raise them up into the air, and they would meet on the millimetre." His long-fingered hands fanned the space between us as he remembered how it was.
"Everyone was doing more than their best. How can you express this? I asked a Finnish carpenter, and he said the word in Finnish is sisu-the desire for something extra that you pull out of yourself." Designing the Opera House had been a great opportunity, he concluded, in which not one hour had been spent in vain.
Leaning forward, as if he wanted to be sure I was paying attention, he recalled something that the engineer on the project, Ove Arup, had said to encourage him as difficulties began to mount. "He said it is like when you climb Everest. You get a glimpse of Everest, and then it disappears. For a long time, all you see are the rows of hills in your way, and you can't imagine that you will ever get there. And then, suddenly, you see Everest again, sparkling in the sunshine."
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Like much of the rest of the world, I've been fascinated to watch the wheel turn with the coming of Barack Obama. Of special interest to me has been the role of inspiration in bringing about change. What was unthinkable yesterday is undeniable today, primarily because a man spoke the words that moved us.
