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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 20, 1973
Sydney, Australia
53 years ago
The Sydney Opera House, the performing arts center on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, designed by Jorn Utzon and formally opened on October 20, 1973.
On October 20, 1973, Queen Elizabeth II stood on a windy platform on Bennelong Point and declared the Sydney Opera House open, before a harbor packed with boats and a crowd of hundreds of thousands. Fireworks followed, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. One name went unmentioned in the speeches. The architect, Jorn Utzon, had not been invited to speak, and in any case was not there. He had left Australia in 1966 and would never see his building completed.
The project had begun in 1956, when the state government of New South Wales announced an international competition for an opera house on a disused tram depot site jutting into the harbor. There were 233 entries from some thirty countries. The winner, announced in January 1957, was a little-known thirty-eight-year-old from Denmark whose submission consisted of little more than a set of striking sketches. According to a persistent story, the American architect Eero Saarinen, arriving late to the jury, pulled Utzon's entry from the pile of rejects.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect who won the 1957 competition, solved the geometry of the roof shells, resigned from the project in 1966, and was awarded architecture's highest honor in 2003.
The government estimated a cost of seven million Australian dollars and a completion date of 1963, and, for political reasons, insisted that work start in 1959 before the design was resolved. The trouble was the roof. Nobody, including the engineers at the London firm of Ove Arup, knew how to build the soaring free-form shells in Utzon's drawings. Years went by. The answer, which Utzon reached in 1961, was to derive every shell from the surface of a single imaginary sphere, so that the curved ribs could be cast from repeating molds, like segments of an orange. The roof was eventually clad in more than a million cream and white Swedish tiles.
By then costs had exploded, and much of the money was being raised through a state lottery. A new state government elected in 1965 took a hard line. The minister for public works, Davis Hughes, questioned Utzon's designs for the interiors and stopped paying his fees. In February 1966 Utzon resigned, expecting to be asked back. He was not. Protesters marched through Sydney, but he left the country that April. A team of Australian architects led by Peter Hall redesigned the interiors, changing the uses of the main halls, a compromise that left the building with acoustic and staging problems for decades. The final bill was 102 million dollars.
Almost no one now thinks the money was badly spent. The building became the symbol of a city and then of a country, recognized in silhouette everywhere on Earth, and it hosts well over a thousand performances a year. Reconciliation came late. In 1999 Utzon agreed to draw up design principles to guide future changes, and one refurbished room was renamed in his honor. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2003. The Opera House was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, one of the youngest buildings ever included. Utzon died in Denmark the following year at ninety. He had never gone back.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The Opera House is one of the defining buildings of the twentieth century. Its sculptural form on a spectacular site showed that a modern building could be a national emblem, and it set off a worldwide appetite for landmark cultural architecture.
It pushed engineering forward. Solving the roof required some of the earliest uses of computers in structural analysis and new methods of precast concrete construction, advancing techniques that later became standard.
It is the classic cautionary tale about large public projects. Starting before the design was ready, underestimating costs for political reasons, and changing clients midway produced a fourteen-fold overrun. That the result is beloved does not stop planners from citing it as a warning.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 20, 1973, the Queen opened a building that had taken fourteen years instead of four and cost 102 million dollars instead of seven. The man who imagined it was on the other side of the world, and stayed there. Sydney got one of the wonders of modern architecture. Utzon got a prize, thirty years later, and an apology of sorts.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building.”
— Attributed to the American architect Louis Kahn, on the Sydney Opera House
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Sydney Opera House, the 1957 design competition, the engineering of its famous roof, the departure of Jorn Utzon, and the building's eventual recognition as a World Heritage Site?
