“We are convinced”, said the judges at last, “that they present a concept of an Opera House which is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world.”Ĭonstruction began in 1957 with the driving of 588 concrete piles into land in and around Sydney Harbour to support the huge new building. The judges kept returning to the young Danish architect’s thrilling drawings even after they had discarded them several times in favour of more obviously practical designs. It had all begun happily enough when, in 1957, Utzon’s proposal was chosen from the 233 entries in an international competition held by the government of New South Wales for the design of an opera house on the site of a tram depot fronting Sydney Harbour. The story is as dismal, and as necessary to recall, as the opera house is glorious. Today, few of the 1.2 million people who buy tickets for performances each year, and many fewer perhaps of the seven million who come to Sydney’s Bennelong Point from around the world to gawp at this architectural marvel, would ever think that its visionary architect was once treated like a pariah by the government that commissioned the building. From now on, there could be no doubting the supremely special qualities of this astonishing yet once hugely controversial building, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973. This must have been a deeply moving moment for Jorn Utzon (1918-2008), the brilliant and poetic architect of the Sydney Opera House. The famous building, with its soaring, sail-like roofs, that is often said to define the city, country and continent, was promoted to join ranks with the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the cathedrals of Chartres and Durham. “It stands by itself as one of the indisputable masterpieces of human creativity, not only in the 20th Century but in the history of humankind.” With this ringing endorsement from Unesco in 2007, the Sydney Opera House was declared a World Heritage Site.
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