Millennium Masterwork: Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House

It is pretty hopeless as a venue for

opera, it took 17 years to build, its

architect was forced to resign, and it

was never properly finished inside.

None of this matters. The Sydney

Opera House, by the reclusive Danish

architect Jorn Utzon, is the mother and father of all modern landmark buildings. It

has come to define not only a city, but an entire nation and continent. This unique

building is Australia.

Beyond that, it is a global expression of cultural modernity. Everyone in the world

with media access knows what the Sydney Opera House looks like. Even Paris's

celebrated Pompidou Centre, by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, is a local

hero in comparison. First designed in 1956 and finally declared complete in 1973,

the opera house was the single best known modern building in the world until the

arrival of Frank Gehry's equally extraordinary Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997. But it

will outlive the Guggenheim as an international architectural icon - because it did

all the difficult work first.

In the pantheon of classic modern

buildings, Utzon's creation has the

status of myth. The myth states that

the unknown Utzon, then in his 30s,

submitted rough sketches - back-of-

the-envelope stuff - to the competition

judges, that he ignored most of the rules, that his design was only selected after

being plucked at the last moment from the reject pile by one of the judges,

architect Eero Saarinen, and that - the clincher, this - the design was unbuildable.

This last claim has some truth to it. Utzon's competition entry was a great deal

less rough-and-ready than legend has it and was never actually rejected. But, in

the late 1950s, nobody had ever tried to build anything quite so audacious as the

overlapping shell roof structure, rising to 197 feet high, that Utzon envisaged - an

abstract response, perhaps, to the waves and sailing boats of Sydney Harbour,

but also intended as a way to conceal the usually lumpen protuberances of

flytowers. In all the battles that followed - many of them with philistine politicians -

Utzon may have lost control of his project, but won the battle to get his

extraordinary roofs cape built. It needed all the skills of the Anglo-Danish

structural engineering company Ove Arup to find a way to make it work.

Source: http://www.hughpearman.com/articles/sydney.htm

(Text copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times. The unedited version of an article published
January 2, 2000, in the "Millennium Masterworks" series)

Q1. Do you know this unique building or any landmark buildings which can
represent any city?
Q2. Do you know about any masterpiece of modern Architecture?
Q3. What could you imagine in similar while mentioning this building?
Q4. Why do the people regard architects who have designed a good building as local
heroes?
Q5. Do you think an aesthetic feeling is important to people? Why?