Sydney's shame
- ROBERT HUGHES
Certain tribes in New Guinea build, at the base of their fetishes, small thatched huts. At night, the god descends to rest in them, feastidg on blood and eggs. A Similar kind of tribal faith seems to have informed the decision to
41" build, on the tip of Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, the world's most famous architec- tural fiasco: the Sydney Opera House, designed • by Joern Utzon. Upon its exquisite roof of -,. interlocking white sails, Terpsichore, Erato, Euterpe and Calliope Would flutter down and transform Sydney into the Athens of the Pacific. Australian culture would promptly come of age—an event more eagerly awaited and frequently proclaimed, in Sydney, than the millennium itself—and a thousand name- less Joan Sutherlands would burst into song. It did not happen. And the likelihood that jt will recedes year by year. In 1957, when AIVI_Itzon's brilliant esquisse won the international ,competition, the New South Wales govern- - ment announced that the opera house would cost £A3.6 million and open in January 1963. Today, it is still unfinished, its opening has been 'indefinitely postponed,' and a figure of £30 million hangs in the air. Frustrated by an utter breakdown of confidence and cooperation between his own office and the Ministry of Public Works, and wounded by a press cam- paign intended to pin the blame for every set- back on the architect alone, Utzon resigned and left Sydney in disgust early in 1966. Today, Utzon's plans have been radically tampered with, and even the use of the building has been changed. No opera can ever be performed in the Sydney Opera House. The great stage has been eliminated from its main hall, which will be used instead for lectures, concerts, beery jamborees of the Returned Soldiers' League, and, no doubt, gala performances of Cinderella on Ice. What was to be a smaller theatre, for drama, is now (rumour has it) to be used as a souvenir shop. And some £4 million worth of stage equipment lies quietly rusting in a Sydney warehouse, never to be used. Governments get the -architecture they deserve; lacking the vision and political guts to back Utzon's magnificent building, the NSW Liberal party is now likely to get a mutilated white elephant with no clear function. Michael Baume has written an entertaining and well- researched account of the debacle, and, as he
puts it, the nub of the dispute was that 'Utzon was committed to his ideal of the perfect opera house, while the client wanted only a striking and impressive building that did not cost too much.' Yet Baume rebukes Utzon for 'eccentric perfectionism,' thereby insinuating that perfection is not the business of architects. The Sydney Opera House Affair Michael Baume (Nelson, Sydney 30s) And so he reflects the government's own crassly face-saving view of Utzon as an imprac- tical egghead: as the Premier of New South Waks said, less literately, on the radio, Utzon 'is—r—an aesthetic.' To reiterate, as Baume does, that Utzon could not grasp the facts of architectural life is nonsense—significantly, the leading architects in Australia, not to mention such men as Gropius, Neutra, Kenzo Tange and Maxwell Fry, thought otherwise, and sup- ported Utzon to the last—and it makes one suspect that Baume's book may not be the definitive account of the opera house scandal which the government's supporters will prob- ably take it to be. The most interesting question
of All, moreover, is hardly raised a/ all in Baume's book. What did the opera house mean as a social phenomenon? Why did such a violent polarisation of opinion, such fierce hopes occur round it?
For it was a talisman, that building. I doubt if any structure since Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral in Florence has excited such heat within the society for which it was designed. The reason had to do with the look of Sydney. -In 1957, it was a painfully raw and ugly city, a patchy sprawl of red-tile roofs, asphalt, telegraph poles and neon advertisements for meal pies, with the occasional curtain-wall offide block projecting into the overheated sky like a new porcelain tooth in a boxer's jaw.
This architectural rash lay on the shores of one of the most beautiful harbours in the world; mock-Tudor, pseudo-Spanish, Fisher- man's Quaint, ferroconcrete Georgian, each house seemed designed to murder the shifting landscape of water and air. Sydney was, and still is, a spec-builder's paradise. What remained of the old Georgian colonial buildings, was rapidly crumblingbeneath the wrecker's ball to make way for overpasses and gas stations. And modern design Seemed to be stuck—with a few exceptions, such as the work of Harry Seidkr—at a level of faceless eclecticism which, in memory, made Duvalierville look like Brasilia. There were some dignified churches and barracks, erected by the convict architect Greenaway, a pupil of Nash; but between 1820 and 1957 strekhed an almost un- relieved history of insensitivity to natural environment, timidity, and lack, if not always of conventional taste, certainly of inspiration. Sydney was not a good place to look at.
When Utzon's designs for the opera house were published, we felt that this building could redeem Sydney. For the first time, it seemed that we were to be given one major building, a classic of world architecture. No doubt we were naive in thinking that the opera house, merely by sitting on Bennelong Point, and no matter what was performed in it, could transform a culture. But naively or not, Sidney split into two broad factions—those who saw Utzon's design as a moral necessity to be built at any cost (it was, after all, being paid for by public lotteries with a £100,000 prize), and those who thought it a luxurious bauble for those most contemptible of unAussies, the culture-vulture and' the pseudo-intellectual. The wrangle was exacerbated by two odd traits in the Australian character: on one side, a profound distrust of the exceptional man of imagination, which was to make Utzon seem the Dreyfus of modern architecture; on the other, a ridiculous belief in ibe power of lone masterpieces to work as tradition-substitutes in a country which has virtually no past. Beset by problems, irrationally damned and unreasonably heroicised, the opera house foundered. When it is finished in its compromised form, it may be hard for a later generation to see why we felt so amazed, and, as it were, purified, by Utzon's exemplary and at last frustrated idealism.
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