Australia's Own Taj Mahal

It would be hubristic for any architect to expect a more spectacular site. Bennelong Point in Australia's Sydney Harbor is almost encircled by water. There is green parkland behind it, and to the west new skyscrapers and the arching, spidery profile of Harbor Bridge. Any structure built on the point would be thrust forward in a vast parenthesis of sea and air, displayed like sculpture on a plinth, and visible from almost every angle of the harbor. It would not be part of a street--not, therefore, "fac,ade" architecture.

This, in the minds of the competition judges who were deciding back in early 1957 on the design for a new Opera House, must have ruled against the pat solution of an International Style box. But nobody in the architectural profession, in or out of fe Australia, could have predicted what the judges finally selected from the 233 entries that had been submitted from 32 countries.

It was a rough, schematic set of plans and elevations that showed a flowering of concrete shells, like sails or beaks, rising to a height of more than 200 ft. above a horizontal podium. There was only the sketchiest indication of function. The architect, an almost unknown 38-year-old Dane named Jo/rn Utzon, had worked none of that out; he did not, as he later remarked, expect to win. Utzon's victory, it is believed, was largely due to one of the judges, the late Eero Saarinen, whose own fondness for shell construction had been embodied a year before in his design for the

TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport.

Utzon's idea was entirely sculptural and poetic. The son of a naval architect, Utzon had grown up near ship and sea and within sight of Elsinore castle.

The Opera House would be a grand near metaphor, its unfolding shells echoing the billow of the spinnakers and jibs on the water below, its mat beige and glossy white tiles responding to every nuance of light in the sky. Scarcely a building in Sydney had any relationship to the harbor, but Utzon offered a design as close to its marine environment as the calcined wreathings and sea-cave fenestration of the Piazza San Marco are to the lagoon of Venice.

The Danish architect, who drew his sketches without visiting Australia, was struck by photographs of the dark landscape and tangled foreshore scrub: "There is no white here to take the sun and make it dazzle the eyes--not like the Mediterranean or South America. So I had white in mind when I designed the Opera House. The final effect will at times resemble what we call Alpengluhen [alpenglow], the color you get on snowcapped mountains when the sun is setting, the beautiful pink and violet reflections from the combination of mat snow and shiny ice." The bouquet of shells, holding the main hall, two secondary theaters, art-exhibition space, a chamber-music room and a restaurant, would be anchored to float above a massive platform containing the several hundred utility rooms of the Opera House. Utzon's podium originated with a 1949 visit to Mexico, where he studied the ruins of Maya architecture: the monumental stairways and levels of buildings like the Temple at Uxmal in Yucatan were to be reflected in the Opera House's huge entrance stair. Finally, vaults and base were to be linked by hung glass walls with plywood ribs, flexing outwards like the primaries of a gull in flight.

There was no sense in which this heroically audacious and problematically vague design could have been "justified" in terms of a functionalist theory of architecture. For instance, Utzon never meant there to be a direct relationship between the soaring exterior shells and the internal acoustic properties of the opera theater and concert hall: the inside spaces could be designed in whatever form their use dictated. That was anathema to the average Bauhaus purist. But the question Utzon raised was a fundamental one, which Architectural Historian Sigfried Giedion formulated in the 1967 edition of his massive Space, Time and Architecture: "Are we prepared to go beyond the purely functional and tangible as earlier periods did in order to enhance the force of expression?" There is no functional reason for the height of a 13th century cathedral nave either; such building goes beyond a simple equation of material cause and effect. So it was with Utzon's shells.

The Opera House, then, entered the sluggish and provincial context of Australian architecture in the late '50s like some pearly nautilus visiting a mussel bed. Architecture students and leading younger architects were enthralled by it; this was the grand leap of the imagination that Australia badly needed but had not yet made. Some older and more conservative local architects objected to the design as fanciful. And in between, through a barrage of publicity and cross-argument such as no building had ever received from the Australian press, the public realized that it had a myth of sorts on its hands. The Opera House would be Sydney's Taj Mahal. Thus it became a talisman well before it took form as a structure, and one can hardly think of another building erected since Paxton's Crystal Palace in London (1851) that so mobilized the interest of a major city, becoming a cult object of enthusiasm, dissent, jokes and hobnailed political infighting.

It was politics that both created and fettered the Opera House. If its cost to date of $148.5 million* seems and is astronomical--it is, after all, nearly one-third of what the citizens of New South Wales annually spend on booze--the first estimate was absurdly low. The New South Wales state premier, JJ. Cahill, who wanted the government irrevocably committed to the project, announced in 1957 that it would cost $9.8 million, deliberately falsifying the sum.

The English firm of Ove Arup & Partners spent more than 300,000 man-hours calculating and revising the vaults before the concept of a double-membrane concrete roof cast in situ on aerial formwork was abandoned. Utzon finally came up with an elegantly simple solution: the new vaults were slices of a sphere 492 ft. in diameter, "peeled off" like a skin from an orange.

State Lotteries. In fact, the cost never became a drain on public money; it was mostly defrayed--appropriately, since Australia is a land of gamblers--by a series of state lotteries with a first prize of $280,000. These raised $116.2 million over the years. But other technical and functional problems were proliferating.

There was no provision for parking.

There were conflict and confusion over the seating requirements. Worst of all, the feasibility of producing an opera in the main hall came into doubt. Utzon had provided only the smallest space for wings and for a while planned to raise the scenery from storage chambers down below in huge, costly elevators.

Meanwhile, a new state government, the conservative Liberal-Country Party coalition, won the 1965 election, and one of its promises was to "get some sense into the Opera House," which was now several years behind and $57.8 million above its original estimate. Utzon now had to deal with a new minister for public works, Davis Hughes. One of Hughes' first acts was to tighten up on Utzon's money: in effect, plans had to be produced before any more advances on his fees were given. When Hughes refused to take prompt action on $142,800 that Utzon claimed he was owed, Utzon flung down his resignation.

Hughes happily accepted it. Utzon closed his office, had his name removed from the site board at Bennelong Point, and in April 1966 flew back to Denmark to become a phantom of the Sydney Opera. (Secluded at home in Hel-lebaek during the opening festivities last week, Utzon no doubt shared the sentiments of another melancholy Dane from Elsinore: "This majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.") When Utzon was forced out, his supporters raised a storm of protest; architects of the caliber of Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius and Paul Rudolph cabled their petitions to reinstate him; there was even a street demonstration in Sydney, involving 1,000 people, against Davis Hughes. It had no effect. The government wanted to be sure of finishing the Opera House without that awkward creature, the architect as uncompromising artist.

Accordingly, Davis Hughes selected a design architect who would function as a compleat bureaucrat. He was a 34-year-old Australian named Peter Hall, an admirer of Utzon's. But, as the Australian architecture critic Robin Boyd predicted in 1967: "He will inevitably solve every problem that has arisen since he took over--and every one that arises from now on--differently from the way Utzon would have solved them. His solutions will certainly be more rational, more predictable, and probably much more in line with the consensus in world architecture at this time." (The "consensus" was, of course, functionalism.) Utzon had left a lot unsolved--the detailing of the glass walls, the seating, the ceilings. It was not an easy legacy, but Hall and his partners settled for what Utzon would never have tolerated: less than complete control over the building. The result was a series of compromises with Utzon's ideas, varying between efficiency and tattiness. For example, the problem of operatic staging in the main hall was not solved but simply dismissed--by moving opera to the second theater and demoting the main hall to concert use only.

It would be unfair to call Hall's work on the Opera House a failure. But, in aesthetic terms, the passage from Utzon's exterior to Hall's interior is a wrenching drop from poetry to grandiloquent decor. The main hall fulfills its function:

its acoustics are good, and it seats 2,700 people. It lacks the frigid and pompous vulgarity of theaters like the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center or, worse still, Edward Durrell Stone's monstrous box of upholstered Mussolini at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. But that is not saying a great deal. The design, with its pleats of white birch, hanging plastic doughnuts and faired-in lights, is weirdly Art Deco: it could be the set for a lavish Buck Rogers movie from the '30s--"Desist, Zorka, or you will destroy the Intergalactic Confederacy."

The huge tapestry curtains woven at Aubusson to designs by Australian Artist John Coburn are soggy pastiches of Matisse's paper cutouts. In the foyers, no effort to mask and confuse the nobly strict curves of the roof ribs has been spared: one is met by a jumble of well-made but visually meaningless joinery, as if some gnome from the stingyback forests had gone berserk promoting the rarer Australian hardwoods.

Still, there it is, opened last week with a production of Prokofiev's War and Peace, and ready now for its ceremonial visit by Queen Elizabeth II--an Opera House that marks a watershed in Australian cultural history, if not (as was once hoped) in that of world architecture.

-- Robert Hughes

* The cost of New York City's Lincoln Center, which includes six major buildings: $152 million.

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