At Last the Sydney Opera House!

We've seen it, and it is an magnificent building.  The Sydney Opera House first attracted my attention in 1999.  The very last moments of 1999, actually.  Sydney was the first major population center to ring in the new century, and I have a vivid memory of the fireworks over the harbour and seeing the opera house, which looked so nautical against the background of the harbour.

Sydney held a competition for the design of the opera house, and from the tour today we saw that most of the submissions were very conventional.  One of the last entries was by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, and it was a strikingly different design.  Utzon build the main performance spaces side by side, along the narrow pennisula.  From the air, the venue actually has three separate roof structures--one basically covers the largest "symphony" space, and the other the "opera/ballet" theater.  A third roof structure covers a restaurant area.  In spite of the three roof structures, the opera house is still one building, since the spaces are connected below.  Also, the opera house holds smaller performance spaces in addition to the two large ones.

So many aspects of this building are intriguing, like the royal purple carpet in the upper foyer of the symphony theater, or the organ in the symphony space that took ten years to build, two years to tune, and is only played five or six times a year.  Because the footrprint of the buildings is so narrow, the opera sets have to be stored below--and some days the set are changed between evening and matinee performances!

The best stories of the Sydney Opera House, though, have to do with the architect and the roof.  The architect, and the team of engineers that was hired, did not know how to build the roof when the project began.  For four years Utzon worked on this problem while the rest of the building was being constructed below.  Quite a dramatic turn of affairs--to have a city spending a vast amount of money on a visionary building, without the builder or architect knowing how the roof was going to be constructed.  By this point, the project was well over budget and well over schedule.

The crux of the problem was that everyone was trying to think of a way to construct the roof out of more or less horizontal "sheets" of material over some sort of supporting structure.  To pour these horizontal "sheets" out of concrete would have required an impossible heavy and strong scaffold, and also would have been difficult to construct and move onto the site. 

The stroke of genius came to Utzon when he realized that he could build the roof in vertical sections and then cover it all with ceramic tile.  The sections could be poured on site, which was much more feasible.  I think it adds to the nautical feeling as well, because the vertical sections are sort of like the ribs of a ship.  Outside of the opera house is a brass display that shows Utzon's thinking about the design and how he thought of it as using the properties of the sphere for the strength of the roof.

And maybe this photo from the inside also helps to see the supporting structure.

Sadly, Utzon resigned under controversy before the project was completed.  There was a lot of political pressure because of the time and cost overruns.  It's easy to imagine that such a visionary architect had a pretty unyielding attitude at times.  Still, it is very sad that the building was finished and dedicated without him.  In the last decade or so of his life, the Utzon and the city not only reached a compromise but the city hired him back as a consulting architect for renovations to the structure's interiors.   Today, in fact, any changes to the building have to be in keeping with the Utzon vision, and his son oversees new work.  But Utzon himself never came back to Australia.  And those cost overruns?   The city started the Opera House Lottery and it paid off the building a year and a half after completion!

The drama sets me to musing about the fine line between vision and leadership, being foolish and being impractical.  It can be so common for groups that make decisions to conclude that, "We can't do that because..."  The because almost always has some version of what will be interrupted or stopped if a new direction is taken.  It's extraordinary that as an architect, Utzon designed a building that he didn't know could be built.  Equally extraordinary is that the design was chosen in spite of this circumstance. Having politicians, on behalf of the tax payers, lose patience with the visionary, is not extraordinary--it's pretty ordinary, actually!  And then the building was paid for by thousands of people buying losing lottery tickets--embarking on the chance that only works as a scheme because most tickets lose, seems an interesting coda to the piece.

At the start of the tour, they took our photo, as has been usual at just about all of the attractions on our trip.  We were positioned in front of a green screen.  At the end of the tour John Roy looked at the photos and got really excited.  He had been wearing his usual green Ireland jacket and look what happened in the photo:

You can call him the "Phantom of the [Sydney] Opera [House]!  We had to succumb to make the purchase of the photos this time.

After our tour we had a nice harbour view lunch, and it started to pour.  In fact, Alan wanted to name this entry "Sydney in the Rain."  They boys headed back to the apartment, but Mark and I continued in the afternoon by visiting the "First Encounters" area of the Royal Botanic Garden.  This area shows native plants and describes how they were used by aborigines in the area.  The displays also tell the tragic tale of the first encounter.  Starvation of the native people, because of the disturbances of the Europeans using resources in more reckless fashion, followed their arrival.  By far the most decimating effect though, was that the English brought smallpox.  Within a few years there were only three identifiable aborigines from the original population left in the Sydney area.  The culture died as well.

I began thinking about what world history would look like if these infections had run the other way:  What if the native American and Australian peoples had given the Europeans a deadly infection instead of the other way around?  Mark explained to me that smallpox is present in human populations due to the domestication of animals.  Smallpox in particular, originated as cowpox, and "jumped" species to humans. So, indirectly, it was domestication that led to history working out the way it did.

We also visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales to view the Yiribana Gallery, which shows modern aboriginal art.  No photos are permitted, but if I could I would show an installation of wooden flying foxes, each painted uniquely with traditional dots painting, hanging from a clothes drying tree.  That piece had a touch of whimsey, but overall, the art was quite solemn and sad.

We walked back through the city in the rain, stopping for warm, rich chocolate at the chocolate bar.  Then we visited Coles market to get bring Alan one more chicken schnitzel for dinner.  We are packed and ready to leave in the morning.