The great Danish architect died in his sleep last night at the age of 90. While Utzen designed many other buildings over a 50 year career his fame came from a building which he was unable to complete due to politics: the Sydney Opera House.
This magnificent structure is my favorite architectural design and, for my money, one of the top four or five works of art created in the modern world. The others: Picasso’s Guernica, Springsteen’s Jungleland, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and a toss up between Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (part 1) and the collaboration among Damon Runyan, Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows on Guys and Dolls.
My assessment is based on the pure physical beauty, innovative and sophisticated practicality and Wrightian suitability to location of the Opera House. Few casual observers realize that the interior contains not one performance space but half a dozen, each tuned for a different use, and as such is much larger than images might lead you to believe.
An important, if smaller, aspect is Utzen’s design of the roof tiles. Think about how difficult to clean the steep, slippery angles of the roofs must be– or would be, except that the material and shapes Utzen created are kept sparkling but the region’s normal rainfall!
Forced off the project by politicians offended that something which would clearly become the nation’s icon in the global conversation, Jorn was not able to have much of a hand in the interior other than broadly shaping the division of spaces and some of the muscular ribbed ceilings.
Decades later Australia’s leadership attempted to reverse their predecessor’s poor judgment by asking for his assistance in updating some of the interior and by awarding him an honorary degree but Utzen was to ill to travel around the world and so never saw his magnificent creation with his own eyes.
With Thanksgiving just the other day I will say that spending time in and around the Sydney Opera House twice in the last decade are memories I will treasure however much longer I have here myself.
BillSaysThis 