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Jorn utzon architecture12/18/2023 ![]() If the Empire State Building is a monument to corporate wealth, success and power, then the Opera House represents a city, and even a country, harnessing its aspirations to a cause that's almost beyond criticism: the pursuit of high culture. Gehry himself said, when Utzon won the prestigious American Pritzker prize in 2003: "It changed the image of an entire country." Of course, it wasn't the first landmark building to help define a nation - that title belongs to the Egyptian pyramids - but it was the first since the 1931 completion of the Empire State Building in New York, leaving aside the fearful projects commissioned by Hitler. Mansel FletcherÄecades before Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao was even a messy sketch, the first impractical architectural landmark of the modern era was built in Sydney. In March 2006 the Queen opened a new colonnade at the Opera House, which was designed by Utzon and represented the first change to the building's external appearance since it was completed. The space was named the Utzon Room in the architect's honour. ![]() It included a new parquet floor and careful reconditioning of the concrete beams. Work on the reception hall, the Opera House's only authentic Utzon interior, was completed in 2004. ![]() Sadly, even when the appointment was made, Utzon, who lives in Mallorca, made it clear that he wouldn't be returning to Australia - he hasn't seen the Opera House since he left Sydney for Hawaii in 1966, which was before the shell roofs were constructed. Utzon's original departure left the interior design unresolved and the local architects who finished the building in his absence gave it jarringly pedestrian interiors. Utzon's job was to draw up a statement of design principles that would guide the future conservation and maintenance of the building, and guide the interior refurbishment. In August 1999, 33 years after he resigned as the building's architect, Jorn Utzon was appointed as a "design consultant" to the Opera House. ![]() While almost anything Utzon did during the design process is justified by the Opera House's success, his "artistic" behaviour (which included undertaking a series of travels that rendered him incommunicado for months) was unlikely to endear him to officials already mistrustful of a poetic and imaginative architect. Meanwhile, costs rose from the estimate of A$7m, to a final bill of A$102m. The last of these saw what had been a relationship of close collaboration with the engineering firm Ove Arup descend into mutual antagonism. ![]() The catalyst for Utzon's resignation was the suspension of fee payments by the NSW Public Works Department, but his journey from the joyous moment in 1957 when he won the competition to the bitter end of his involvement in 1966 (by which time the Opera House was still six years from completion) was marked by a series of cost increases, design changes and technical challenges. So perhaps, given the ambition of Jorn Utzon's scheme for the Opera House, it's unsurprising that the relationship between Utzon and his clients, a varying cast of Australian government figures, soured to the extent that Utzon resigned from the project in 1966. However, it's revealing that truly original buildings seem particularly likely to cause problems Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament spring immediately to mind. Most great architects fall out with a client or two over the course of their career, and their critics leap on such squabbles with alacrity. ![]()
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