The Opera House at Fifty
Fifty years ago, I embarked on a relationship with my partner.
Fifty years ago, I finished art school and began my life in art.
Fifty years ago, The Opera House opened. I feel as though I am just getting going, which means that The Opera House is still new.
I grew up at Cremorne and every day on the ferry to school I passed by the Opera House when it was under construction.
Every day I was struck by its beauty, as the arcs grew and unfurled into the sky. I knew that I was witnessing a miracle and that I and all who were there at that time were privileged. Before I went to art school, I worked as a file clerk at The Opera House, after Utzon had left and I got to know every niche, every tunnel and staircase in the building.
Because it was at such an informative stage of my life, The Opera House became part of me. The standard set by The Opera House invited me to emulate that standard as much as I was able, as much as my culture could find equivalents.
The Change (Figure 1.) was made in 1987, 25 years after I left art school. This work borrows from several influences, one of which was The Opera House.
Figure 1. The Change Michael Snape 1987 Hickson Road, Sydney
As a consequence of the arrival of this building, we didn’t need to go overseas to witness what could be achieved with our vision and our imagination. From this example we were given the license to aspire here.
Gough Whitlam was voted in around this time also, fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago, Picasso died.
In the fifty years since the building was completed, no work of architecture or art, has come to inspire us more than this building does.
My contention is that The Opera House is the single most important artwork of the twentieth century. It achieves much more than any American art did through the heights of abstraction. It leaves all of what European and British painting and sculpture achieved over that period. Architects over the years have sought to achieve as much as this building does, but the shadow cast by this building is so big nothing comes close. Even all the wealth of the Middle East could not dislodge The Opera House from its standing.
Beauty cannot be employed as a measuring stick. I am proposing however, that this building is incomparably ‘beautiful’.
What is it that is so moving about this building?
The Opera House qualifies as a masterpiece. No matter how many of its virtues are described, it continues to escape characterisation. It always remains more than the sum of its parts. No matter how many times you come upon it, from whatever distance, it always takes you by surprise. It always lifts your spirit. The Opera House lifts the spirit and it also changes. It is a shape shifter.
The building begs metaphorical reading.
It’s a lotus flower floating on the harbour with its petals opening. It is a flotilla of boats straining at the line for the starter’s gun. It may be that the curved forms of the shells are simply alluring. The outer shell is underwear and the building is flaunting itself. Could it be that this building is not only excellent but also erotic, to explain its appeal?
For its complexity of form, the building reads simply. Even when you are far away, you are close to it.
The building exists as a fragmented object. It is not represented as one form. It is both highly shaped and dispersed. Its separated parts are related so well that we see one object. To be both fragmented and integrated draws the eye, to induce us to make sense of it.
We accept its fragmentation of parts without question. We see one object and yet it is a field of arcs that swing and collide as freely as if describing a dance sequence. You may register the ‘fact’ of the building, but it exists as a dream. For all of what it may remind us, it is an ‘abstract’, in the purest sense.
The building is also mathematics. The geometrical principles from which the building is derived gives the building its shape.
The Opera House may remind us of other things, like sails and flowers. It reminds us also of art to which it owes some debt. It borrows from Eero Saarinen, (See Fig.2) the architect who re-introduced the language of concrete shells to architecture. It borrows from the Italian futurist, Alberto Boccioni. The figure in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, (See Fig.3) strides exultantly into the twentieth century. The Opera House is the destination this figure was striding towards. The building is ‘futurist’ in a literal sense.
Figure 2
Figure 3
As beautiful as The Opera House is, it is also frightening. It looms and reaches out of the harbour. Not even a shark has this many teeth. We can see the belly of the beast behind the great glass walls as it rears out of the harbour.
The Opera House is like a midden. These tiled shells are oyster shells and remind us of what was here before. From its scattered parts the building is like a ruin. It is as if bleached, like The Acropolis and stands on Bennelong point like The Acropolis stands over Athens.
The Opera House is timeless.
It is a nest of eggs, hatched, and we are the life produced.
The Legacy for Architecture.
Since its completion, the building transformed the profession of architecture, particularly here in Australia.
This building showed what a building could be. It made every other building of the twentieth century relatively prosaic. The conditions out of which The Opera House grew, would never be repeated. There would never be as open a brief to let The Opera House in, with its unproven construction methods. There would never be a budget that would be allowed to bleed as much as this one did. There would never be a government naive enough to undertake the task of this construction. There would never be a country young enough and on the edge of becoming as this one was. There would never be another Utzon, so ready to reap the rewards these conditions offered.
No architect again would enjoy the conditions from which The Opera House prospered. Thereafter, buildings were shaped by budgets and briefs. No site would again offer the same three-dimensional potential, without the prospect of being spoiled by neighbours.
From this example, architects were encouraged to believe their buildings could be equally ‘aspirational’. Because no brief would ever be offered with as much scope, those architects would be disappointed.
In this age of ‘starchitects’, Utzon was more priest/architect. He inspired devotion and even those architects who originally worked with him became ‘disciples’. They had been touched and were revered. By this time The Sydney School of Architecture had become well established however, its principles were grounded more than lofty. This new benchmark was unstainable.
Utzon’s disciples became ‘priestitects’. They made buildings that were ironically ethereal, as if nothing was better than a pale comparison. The buildings the disciples made were nature compliant, invisible, as if only the opposite of what The Opera House proposed, was achievable.
The Opera House succeeds as a work of art but failed as a building.
Where the cathedrals of Europe provided an interior which was as exultant as the exterior, The Opera House delivered an interior which offered comfort and competent Danish design.
The outside of a building makes a promise to deliver an equivalent interior. While the interior of The Opera House is not a lie, one is always let down on entering the theatres of The Opera House. The quality of culture provided in the theatres can make up for this loss, but it’s a big ask. (See Fig.4)
Figure 4. From left, this writer, centre, Leon Fink, right, Stuart Purves
As with pottery, a building is a vessel. If the building fails to contain its contents, if it metaphorically leaks, then it fails in its task to be a building.
When I was working as a file clerk in 1970, the inner skins had still not been fully constructed. I used to climb through the gaps between the outer shells and the scaffolding and sprayed concrete armature of the inner skin. While I might have distrusted my then nineteen year-old intuition, it felt wrong. Whether Utzon was pushed, or whether he resigned from the pressure, my contention is that he never found an interior equivalence for the outer shells. He may have been grateful to pass on the task to others.
Among architects, this notion has no traction, such was his standing.
This interior failure constitutes the absence of an interior. The building can therefore be appraised for its exterior form, which is inescapably sculptural. A ‘sculpture’ is not obliged to contain, in the same way as a building or a pot. The Opera House is best experienced as one experiences a sculpture.
You can view The Opera House from a distance. From a distance you can be enticed towards it. From having come there, you can walk around it. You see it from so many parts of Sydney. It fails as a building because it is sitting in the middle of a gallery! (See Fig. 5)
Figure 5. The Opera House viewed from The Overseas Terminal
The quality of a work stands when it shows that after a time, it has not aged. It is not the expression of its time, where fashions can dominate.
The Opera House stands, as if completed yesterday. Other buildings constructed fifty years ago, show their age, or have been demolished.
We all occupy a bigger space as a consequence of the presence of this building and we are invited by its presence, to share its spirit.
PS. This is a quote by Jorn Utzon sent to me by Basil Patrick
“I have made a sculpture… you will never be finished with it - when you pass around it or see it against the sky…something new goes on all the time… together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes a living thing.”