After the Ingalls skyscraper proved that reinforced concrete could be used to construct large buildings, many architectural and engineering firms were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Two interesting structures in the United States that followed on the heels of the Ingalls Building were Terminal Station (a railroad station) in Atlanta, Georgia (1905), and the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey (1906). Like many reinforced structures of its day, Terminal Station was built in such a way as to make it look like a stone-masonry building. The Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel was more flamboyant and resembled a Mughal palace. Its architectural style might best be termed “proto-Las Vegas.”
By this time, the first reinforced concrete church had been dedicated in Paris, France (1904): Église Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, designed by Anatole de Baudot. Work had begun on the church ten years earlier but was held up because there were no provisions for reinforced concrete construction in the building codes. Like many of Frank Lloyd Wright's works—and those of the Romans—the church's exterior brick was an integral part of the concrete core.
More and more, roads and highways were being made with concrete. In 1891, American inventor George Bartholomew constructed the world's first concrete street in Bellefontaine, Ohio. It is still with us today. Although more expensive than asphalt, concrete holds up better and requires fewer repairs, and so it was deemed ideal for road construction. The culmination of concrete use was the American Interstate Highway System (1956-1992), the largest use of the material in a civil engineering project up to the time.
Large bridges began to be built of reinforced concrete as well, beginning with the hundred-meter-long (ca. 328 ft) Risorgimento Bridge in Rome (1911). The Panama Canal's massive locks were built of reinforced concrete (1914), capping a project that had taken ten years and 5,609 lives to complete,1 and that was easily the largest single engineering feat the world had yet seen. Most of the larger automobile manufacturers, from Ford to Fiat, began building their assembly plants of reinforced concrete before the 1920s. When World War I broke out in Europe, reinforced concrete bunkers demonstrated their formidable power to hold up against small-arms fire, thrown grenades, and even direct artillery strikes. Dams, which had previously been constructed of masonry or compacted earth, began to be built with concrete. Use of concrete reached its twentieth-century apex in the 1930s with the construction of the behemoth Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams. China's awe-inspiring and costly—both in environmental and monetary terms—Three Gorges Dam project, completed in 2009 in Hubei Province, has surpassed all previous civil engineering projects both in size and in the use of concrete for a single site: an estimated 27,150,000 cubic m (35,510,859 cubic yds) of the material.
The explosion of concrete in the construction industry grew with technical advances in its creation and application. In 1927 alone, the first cement-mixer truck with a rotating horizontal drum (United States), the first prestressed concrete (France), the first “aggremeter”—a large hopper that correctly measured the cement mix and aggregate in volume (United States)—were introduced to the world.
As we have seen, the vast majority of the buildings built with reinforced concrete resembled their wood or masonry counterparts. A young generation of new architects, almost all of them deeply influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's work, began using the plastic qualities of concrete to create new styles of architecture. Walter Gropius in Germany introduced his Bauhaus (“construction house”) buildings, and the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) pioneered the “International Style.” German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (born Ludwig Mies), influenced by both Gropius and Le Corbusier, developed a stark form of modern architecture that followed his dictum of “less is more.”2 Austrian architect Richard Neutra came to the United States in 1923 to work under Frank Lloyd Wright, but after a brief stint at Taliesin—Neutra found working under Wright difficult—he moved to Southern California where he launched a successful architectural career designing homes and buildings that featured his creative use of concrete.
Aside from Frank Lloyd Wright, it seemed as if all the adventurous architects in the United States prior to World War II were European. Most American architects were conservative in their designs, preferring to conform to the tastes of their clients rather than trying to convince them to adopt bold patterns or new forms. By the mid-1930s, the European pioneers began seeing Wright's work as passé, and naturally assumed that his best days were behind him. Almost all creative individuals, whether they are physicists or filmmakers, usually perform their best work before the age of forty; after that, their efforts generally follow a repetitive, if still productive, pattern. In the mid-1930s, Wright was approaching his seventieth birthday. Outside of perhaps a few of his admirers, almost everyone assumed that he would experience the same waning of intellectual and creative skills that usually accompanies a person's biological decline. Surprisingly, Wright would go on to produce his best work in his eighth, ninth, and tenth decade of life. It is as if film director Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane in his corpulent senescence, or Albert Einstein had published something as important as his general relativity theory during his quasi-retirement at Princeton. It is not so much that Wright remained productive in his later years—many older people continue to keep active in their respective fields—but rather it is the startling originality of his later work that secured Wright's position as one of the greatest architects of all time. And a key component of the architect's audacious autumnal renaissance was his bold and imaginative use of concrete.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT RETURNS
After the construction of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel in 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural practice slowed to a crawl. Wright's first wife, Kitty, had finally granted him a divorce in 1922 after twelve years of separation, which allowed him to marry his second live-in mistress, Miriam Noel. Wright left Miriam after a couple of years and instituted divorce proceedings after he met Russian émigré dancer Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenberg. He would marry Olgivanna, but not until he had been arrested under the Mann Act for their relationship. The Mann Act was a uniquely American statute against the interstate transport of a woman for “immoral purposes”—usually sex between unmarried but consenting adults. Eventually, Wright and Olgivanna crawled out of the humiliating mess, but the scandal sullied his reputation once more.
Unlike today, “bad publicity” in the 1920s was not “good publicity,” and between the scandals and the onset of the Great Depression, Wright could find little work. He had rebuilt his retreat in Wisconsin and took in apprentices. These young aspiring architects were not only required to pay for the privilege of helping Wright design buildings, but they were also expected to perform unskilled labor around Taliesin. The supposed architects-in-training found themselves performing carpentry and mixing concrete for the continual expansions and renovations to which every Wright residence was subjected. Many of the apprentices moved on after a year or two, while those who stayed usually revered Wright with an almost religious awe. Wright liked to be revered. He also liked the money, for he was always spending more than he earned.
One of his apprentices was Edgar Kaufmann Jr., son of Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a successful businessman in Philadelphia and owner of the Kaufmann's Department Store chain, a common fixture throughout many of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states at the time. Edgar Jr., who had worked under Wright at Taliesin from 1934 to 1935, knew his father was considering building a small mountain retreat for his family on land he owned in western Pennsylvania, so he convinced him to hire Wright for the job. The result was Fallingwater, briefly mentioned in chapter 5 and consistently ranked as one the most beautiful architectural creations of all time. The most striking features of Fallingwater are the cantilevered reinforced concrete floors and decks that project out over a brook's small waterfall. One little-known aspect of its construction—though known to most Wright scholars—was the architect's insistence that just four lengths of rebar be used for the main deck. Everyone, including Wright's former pupil Edgar Jr. and his own onsite supervisor—another acolyte from Taliesin, Robert Mosher—insisted that this provided far too little reinforcement. Actually, Wright's proposal was a bit insane, as concrete cantilevers require an adequate amount of steel to overcome the material's weak tensile strength. According to Edgar Jr., the number of rebar was quietly increased to eight without Wright's knowledge (he threatened to leave the project if his wishes were not followed to the letter). Even then, the use of just eight reinforcement bars was so minimal that workers were afraid to remove the forms after the concrete had set, fearing a collapse. Luckily, no collapse occurred after the forms were removed, but the decks did slump slightly at the ends. One wonders what would have happened if Wright's four-rebar prescription had been filled.
As with most of Wright's commissions, the time and costs of construction exceeded the original estimates. When Fallingwater was completed in 1937, its final costs totaled $155,000 (approximately $2.5 million in 2011 dollars), over three times Wright's original quote of $50,000. Still, Fallingwater is one of the architect's great masterpieces. Time magazine featured both Wright and the house on the cover of its January 17, 1938, issue. For the first time in many years, Wright's work was receiving more public attention than the scandals that attended his complicated lifestyle. The press exposure given to Fallingwater soon brought Wright more clients, especially for upscale homes. His remarkable work and uncompromising nature inspired the reactionary writer Ayn Rand to base her fictional character Howard Roark on Wright in her best-selling novel The Fountainhead. Wright liked the book, but when the two finally met at Taliesin, each was disappointed with the other. Rand found a cultlike atmosphere among the apprentices, who gasped whenever the writer disagreed with Wright, while the architect was disturbed by Rand's extreme views, endless pontificating, and—worse—her chain-smoking. At one point, Wright plucked a cigarette out of Rand's mouth and threw it into the fireplace. After that episode, Rand denied that Wright had been her inspiration for Roark, even though her letters tell a different story.3
Fallingwater would have been inconceivable without reinforced concrete, as were two more buildings Wright designed that are ranked among his very best: the Johnson Wax Administration Building (completed in 1939) in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (completed in 1959) in New York City. Due to space limitations, it is not possible to discuss all of Wright's later works, but these two best represent his new design aesthetic using concrete.
While building Fallingwater, Wright approached the president of the Johnson Wax Company, Herbert “Hib” Johnson, grandson of the firm's founder, S. C. Johnson, about designing their new corporate headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, which was a few hours' drive east from Taliesin. Wright knew that another architect had already designed the plans for the company's new building, but he gave it a shot anyway. He invited Hib Johnson over to Taliesin, and they talked for several hours. Wright used his unique combination of charm and impertinence to win over Johnson, who later remarked of the encounter, “If that guy can talk like that he must have something.”4 Despite being insulted “about everything,” Johnson liked Wright, and the two men bonded, although it was always a tense relationship. Before introducing Wright to the company's top officials, Johnson told him, “Please, Frank, don't scold me in front of my board of directors!”5 Wright convinced the directors to pass on the “awful” plans submitted by the other architect and give him the contract instead.
The deal almost fell through when Wright insisted that the buildings not be constructed at Racine, but at a more pastoral setting several miles outside of town. It was the one point about which Johnson and the directors would not budge. Wright's wife, Olgivanna, convinced him to accept the company's demand that the building site remain in Racine. Her argument was both simple and effective: the Wrights needed the money.
As with all Wright projects, there were significant milestone postponements and cost overruns. Hib sent the architect numerous telegrams complaining about the numerous delays and rising expenses, which Wright alternately ignored or calmly answered, citing unexpected construction difficulties that would be more than offset by the finished building's magnificent splendor. Still, such assurances during the Great Depression could not have offered much comfort for Hib and the company's board of directors. As with Fallingwater, Wright probably expected that most of these complaints would vanish once his clients saw the completed building. And vanish they did.
The Johnson Wax headquarters was remarkable for a number of features. The building had no edges, and all corners were rounded, following the design dictates of the then-popular Streamline Moderne movement, which were first applied to ships, locomotives, travel trailers, and automobiles (both Wright and Johnson owned streamlined Lincoln Zephyrs) to reduce air resistance. Later, the principles of streamlining were used to design stationary objects like buildings and household appliances. The Johnson Wax Building had an especially sleek appearance, enhanced by the tiled exterior bricks covering its concrete walls. Window space was minimal and consisted of thin strips running along the upper portions of each story. Light was supplemented by extensive use of Pyrex® and plastic tubing funneling sunlight from the roof to the building's interior. Walking around the outside of the building offered a different view from almost every angle. Sometimes the smaller upper stories looked like a collection of disks mounted on each other in an offset manner. From another viewpoint, one of the stories was revealed as an ovoid pinched at one end. The pinched ovoid resembled a smooth escapement lever interacting with the round, toothless “gears” of the other stories. Together they looked like some huge, frozen clockwork mechanism.
The most arresting aspect of the Johnson Wax Building was the “Great Workroom,” an open administrative hub whose roof was held up by spindly columns made of reinforced concrete that were barely nine inches (ca. 23 cm) at their base but that gradually expanded as they reached the ceiling, where they supported eighteen-foot-wide (ca. 5.5 m) “lily pads” at their apexes, which were also made of reinforced concrete. Unfortunately, the columns violated local building codes. The columns and attached lily pads were considered to be too narrow at their base to support the amount of load they were expected to carry. The building inspectors were doubly alarmed to learn that the columns also contained a hollow that acted as a drain spout for water from the roof—hardly a confidence-inspiring feature from a structural engineering standpoint.
When Wright saw that no amount of arguing or cajoling would assuage the building inspectors' fears, he arranged for a public test of a column to demonstrate its load capacity. A column and its lily pad were set up at the site, lightly braced by wooden beams to prevent sideway slippage. Load after load of large sandbags were then placed on the structure. When the required weight of twelve tons had been placed on the lily pad, Wright urged that more weight be added, and, as a further act of bravado, the architect walked under the structure. The sand bags ran out after thirty tons had been placed on the pad, yet Wright insisted that the loading continue, so loose sand and pig iron were dumped instead. At sixty tons, small cracks appeared, and Wright stopped the loading process. When a crane pulled away one of the bracing timbers, the lily pad and its load snapped off the column and fell to the ground. The impact of 120,000 pounds falling to the ground from a height of almost twenty feet caused a water main buried ten feet below to break. By this time, the building inspectors had already left, but not before approving Wright's dendriform (tree-shaped) columns. The demonstration did more than validate Wright's design: it was perhaps one of the clearest examples of the awesome compressive strength of concrete.6 Yes, the concrete was reinforced by steel, but the lengths of rebar by themselves would have bent and failed long before the minimum safety load had been reached, let alone the sixty tons the column eventually supported before any cracking appeared.
As usual, Wright also insisted on providing his own visually stunning, but notoriously uncomfortable, furniture for the Johnson Wax headquarters. This time, the architect's style was a bit extreme, for he designed the office chairs with just three legs—supposedly to improve the workers' posture. Hib Johnson expressed doubts and asked Wright to sit in one of the chairs. Wright did, and both chair and architect toppled sideways to the floor. Wright quickly agreed to redesign the chairs and add a fourth leg. It must have been a supremely satisfying moment for Johnson.
Despite the delays and cost overruns, Wright had promised Johnson a building to which his workers would look forward to coming each day, and he delivered. A study conducted later showed a 25 percent improvement in employee efficiency at the new headquarters. The Great Workroom where the dendriform columns were installed was almost magical in appearance.
The light entering the workroom between the lily pads via the Plexiglas® tubes, supplemented by the strip of clerestory windows just beneath them, imparted both airiness and a nonclaustrophobic sense of submergence, as if looking up from the bottom of a lake to the water's surface above.
The Johnson Wax Building is consistently ranked among the architect's greatest works. Hib Johnson was so taken by it that he commissioned Wright to build the company's research tower a few years later. Like the other building, it sported sleek surfaces and smoothly rounded corners where intersecting angles would normally be found.
WRIGHT'S LAST GREAT WORK
By the 1940s, Wright and his family and apprentices had moved to Arizona, where they set up Taliesin West outside Scottsdale. Wright had come down with a severe case of pneumonia in Wisconsin, and moving to a drier climate seemed the prudent course. As had been the case at Taliesin, the unpaid apprentices performed most of the construction of Taliesin West, though they did receive food and water for the work, although the former was decidedly less exalted fare than what the Wrights dined on.
After the success of Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Building, Wright expected more commissions. Unfortunately, Wright was often his own worst enemy, and his own words ended up turning on him. Although a proud pacifist, he had trouble understanding the moral depth of critical political issues. As Hitler's Germany was invading its neighboring countries, Wright could only see Britain's efforts to stop the Nazi juggernaut as somehow connected to an attempt to hold onto her empire.7 He also defended Japan while it was trying to gobble up China. Despite Wright's enormous, and perhaps unequalled, aesthetic sense, he sorely lacked political sense and common sense. Wright's pronouncements alienated many potential clients, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States in support of her ally. The war years were lean years for Wright.
Still, there was a patch of green in this literal and figurative desert. In 1943, the board of directors of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was then operating out of a rented building in New York City, requested Wright to design a new museum for them on a roughly one-acre patch of land it owned on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Solomon Guggenheim had made a considerable fortune in gold mining and had retired in 1919 to pursue his chief passion, collecting impressionist and postimpressionist art. After 1927, Guggenheim was assisted in this endeavor by Hilla Rebay (born Hildegard Anna Augusta Elizabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen), a German baroness and art connoisseur who had recently moved to the United States. Rebay had studied art in Berlin and was considered one of the top authorities on the impressionist and cubist painters.8 It was Rebay who convinced Solomon Guggenheim that only Wright possessed the requisite artistic vision for handling such a project.
Wright immediately began work on the museum. Twenty years earlier, he had been approached by wealthy Chicago businessman Gordon Strong about designing a building atop Sugarloaf Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Strong believed that the spectacular views from the mountain would make it a popular tourist destination for motorists from nearby Baltimore and Washington DC. Wright accepted the commission and drew up plans for a monumental concrete ziggurat ringed by a roadway on which “people sitting comfortably in their own car” could watch “the whole landscape revolving about them, as exposed to view as though they were in an aeroplane.”9 Strong rejected the designs, perhaps because Wright's vision would have cost a fortune to build. (The volume of concrete needed would have been enough to construct a medium-size dam.) Like most ziggurats, the one proposed for Sugarloaf Mountain had a large base that narrowed as the building rose. However, the work Wright had done since the 1920s convinced him that the tensile strength of reinforced concrete allowed the construction of a ziggurat with dimensional expansion as it rose from its base; in effect, an upside-down version of a conventional ziggurat. Also unlike the Sugarloaf ziggurat, which was mostly a solid structure with public buildings at its apex, the Guggenheim Museum would be a hollow structure, with an open central court surrounded by sloping galleries. An elevator would take visitors to the top story, where they would disembark and slowly walk down and around the court, viewing works of art as they descended to the ground floor. Wright completed his design for the museum two years later, and, along with Guggenheim and Rebay, unveiled a model of the proposed museum at a press conference in July 1945. That was the easy part. Little did Wright know that hundreds of design changes and fourteen years of bureaucratic wrangling lay ahead of him; or that both he and Guggenheim would not live to see the building—one of the great achievements in twentieth-century architecture—open its doors to the public.
The struggle to build the Guggenheim Museum would require a book of its own to adequately describe. After World War II ended, Guggenheim got cold feet. Suspecting that the real estate market would collapse in New York, he put off building the museum. New York's building commissioners were hardly cooperative. Among the many design alterations they insisted on was a major change to the ziggurat's dimensions, because its upper stories projected out over the Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Pedestrian peace of mind was restored when Wright finally agreed to reduce the ziggurat's expansion. Still, this one alteration required also changing many other details, some major, some minor. The great central skylight, a complicated affair, was made smaller, as was the amount of display space available on the upper stories. Then there were the hundred little details that always need to be addressed when the master blueprint is modified: the position of the elevator, the courses of the plumping and electrical conduits, and so on. Far more time was spent redesigning the Guggenheim than designing it.
In 1949, while still waiting to see what would happen to the real estate market, Solomon Guggenheim died, which put the project on hold for a while. Hilla Rebay, Wright's chief ally at the Guggenheim, found that many of her duties at the museum were reassigned to others. The bureaucratic wrangling with city officials continued but abated somewhat when Robert Moses, New York's public works czar, who ruled his fiefdom with an iron fist, told the head of the city's Board of Standards and Appeals, “Damn it, get a permit for Frank. I don't care how many laws you have to break. I want the Guggenheim built!”10
As the building was nearing completion, a petition signed by many prominent artists was submitted to the museum, declaring that Wright's design would not do justice to their works. Among their understandable complaints was that visitors walking down the sloped galleries would be tempted by gravity to keep moving and not give their works the attention they deserved. Other sore points were that the round walls of galleries presented mounting problems for the paintings, and that the gradual slope would make the works appear slightly askew (apparently, obsessive-compulsive patrons would feel compelled to adjust them—a hopeless task with inclined floors and ceilings). However, their principal worry was that the building's daring design would distract visitors from the art on display. Fortunately, the museum directors, while making soothing noises about artists' concerns, pretty much ignored their complaints. The directors properly regarded Wright's masterpiece as the museum's premier artwork.
Frank Lloyd Wright was luckier than Solomon Guggenheim in that he was able to see the museum in its finished form. The scaffolding finally came down in July 1958, and Wright decided to tour the building. Followed by a few reporters, the architect used his cane to point out various features of the museum. Afterward, Wright consented to be interviewed by journalist Mike Wallace on his evening television show, where he confirmed his belief that he was undoubtedly the greatest architect who ever lived. (Modesty was never Wright's strong suit.)
A few months later, on April 9, 1959, Wright was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix to have an intestinal blockage removed. It was not considered a very dangerous operation, and Wright seemed to have recovered amazingly well for a man of his age. Then, suddenly and quietly, he died. Thanks to the architect's decades-long insistence that he had been born in 1869 (it was actually 1867), the newspaper obituaries dutifully listed his age as eighty-nine, not ninety-one.
Despite all his considerable personal failings, Wright was one of history's great architects. After his death, only one building would be universally hailed as the equal of Wright's best work. It would be designed at one end of the globe and built on the other. The difficulties constructing it would dwarf the problems that plagued the Guggenheim project, and its cost overruns would make the egregiously low estimates that Wright always gave for his buildings seem like minor rounding errors in comparison. Skyscrapers aside, it would be the last great signature building of the twentieth century and would quickly become emblematic of the country in which it was built.
THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE
The story of the Sydney Opera House began in 1947, when Eugene Aynsley Goossens was appointed conductor of the Sydney Philharmonic Orchestra and director of the New South Wales Conservatory of Music. Goossens was considered one of the greatest English conductors, second only to Sir Thomas Beecham, who had mentored him. Prior to coming to Australia, Goossens had established a formidable reputation conducting orchestras in the United States. From 1923 to 1931, Goossens conducted the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in New York and taught music at the nearby Eastman School of Music. In 1931, he succeeded Fritz Reiner as the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Among Goossens's many accomplishments at Cincinnati were his recording of the first complete version of Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony and his prodding of Aaron Copeland to write a patriotic fanfare during the Second World War, the result being the composer's famous “Fanfare for the Common Man.” When Goossens accepted the Sydney appointment, nine American composers, including Copeland, Ernest Bloch, Roy Harris, and Walter Piston, collaborated on an orchestral piece dedicated to the conductor: Variations on a Theme by Eugene Goossens, for which Goossens was allowed to compose the finale. Needless to say, Australians were excited to have such an illustrious conductor coming to their shores.
It is difficult to describe how remote and provincial Australia was in the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s. Prop-driven airliners required several fuel stops to reach the island continent, and total travel time by air was usually a strenuous two days. Ocean liners offered the only comfortable means of reaching the country, if we assume that time was not an important factor. On arrival, the traveler faced another problem: aside from the country's natural wonders—many of which involved long rail journeys in passenger cars without air conditioning—there was little to see or do. In short, it was like Kansas with kangaroos. Most Australians will admit that their nation was a pretty boring place during the postwar period, but Eugene Goossens was determined to change all that. He immediately began lobbying for a large, world-class entertainment center that could host both symphony concerts and operas, both of which were then being held in the Sydney Town Hall, a venue hardly acclaimed for its acoustics or comfort.
The New South Wales Labour government gave verbal support for the proposed entertainment center, but it was not until 1954, when NSW premier Joseph Cahill decided to get behind the project, that things began to move. Cahill—who curiously insisted that his last name be pronounced “carl”—recognized that an ambitious cultural center would bring international recognition to the sleepy nation's arts scene. Although Cahill knew that his name would not grace the center, he probably thought that such a building would be a wonderful legacy and certainly better than the usual tribute given an ex-premier: the naming of a street in his honor.
The Opera House Committee was formed to oversee the project. To raise the $7 million the project was expected to cost, it launched a fundraising campaign to collect private donations. This included selling advance season tickets for the first year's performances and, typical of pre-Enlightenment Australia, the auctioning of kisses, the brave recipients of which were mostly female classical musicians.11 Only a few hundred thousand dollars were brought in during the drive, so Cahill initiated a lottery to raise the rest of the money.
The site chosen for the complex was the end of Bennelong Point, a spit of land projecting out into Sydney Harbour. At that time, a rather ugly tram depot occupied the site. The tram depot was surrounded by high crenellated walls and a tower that formerly belonged to Fort Macquarie, which had stood guard over Sydney Bay since it was built by convict labor in 1821. The fort's interior had been demolished in 1901 to house the tram depot, but the imposing stone exterior was left in place to scare away any would-be attackers. It was probably the city's most ill-kept secret.12 By the 1950s, the tram depot was also scheduled for demolition, freeing up a spectacular piece of real estate; indeed, a better location for such an ambitious project could not be imagined. The proposed opera house would stand alone, unobstructed and undiminished by any nearby buildings. Although the center would hold a theater, symphony and opera halls, smaller auditoriums, and a restaurant, the committee members decided to call the complex the Sydney Opera House. They felt that “opera house” sounded grander than “multi-venue entertainment center.” Unfortunately, such a name hardly suited the cultural inclinations of the populace at that time. Although Australia produced formidable singers, like the sopranos Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland, its residents showed little interest in opera. Australians did enjoy orchestral music, but many of them considered the other art form as a kind of regal caterwauling. (Again, the analogy to Kansas comes to mind.) Apparently, both Goossens and Cahill believed that “if you build it, they will come.”13
Everyone agreed that obtaining a design worthy of the site's location would entail holding an international competition. In September 1955, Cahill announced with great fanfare that the government of New South Wales would solicit designs from architects around the world for an opera house consisting of two halls, one with seating for between 3,000 and 3,500 people, and a smaller one that would seat 1,200. It would also include a restaurant and two public rooms suitable for large meetings. A panel of prominent architects would judge the designs, which had to be submitted no later than December 3, 1956. The architect whose design was chosen would receive $10,000. Of course, since the winning architect was also expected to oversee the project, his fees would be many times that amount.
Sadly, the prime mover behind the project, Eugene Goossens, would soon be out of the picture. The story behind his departure is not a pretty one.
In England a few years earlier, Goossens had met artist and self-described “witch” Rosaleen Norton. Rosaleen's “art” combined bizarre elements of satanism and eroticism; in short, paintings that only someone like occultist Aleister Crowley could love.14 The married Goossens soon began a secret affair with Norton. Unfortunately, a reporter from the Sydney Sun had infiltrated the witch's coven, and an informant (the reporter?) tipped off the Australian authorities. When Goossens returned to Sydney, the customs officials were waiting for him. As a distinguished and respected celebrity, Goossens was normally waved through customs, but not this time. He was detained, and his luggage was thoroughly searched. Confronted with photos of Norton's curious ceremonies and Goossens's passionate letters to her, Goossens had no alternative but to plead guilty to pornography charges.15 This was followed by an exposé of the affair in the Sydney Sun. Goossens returned to Britain in disgrace, his career destroyed. Goossens had been so admired, and the affair was considered so tawdry, that many people could not bring themselves to write or speak of the scandal. A contemporary chronicler of the Opera House's construction, John Yeomans, wrote simply that Goossens “was met by detectives at Sydney Airport and on 22 March he was fined $200 in a special Sydney court for a Customs offense. His resignation from his Sydney musical posts was announced on 11 April and he left for Europe soon afterwards.”16 Goossens, one of the great lights of twentieth-century music, died a broken man in his native England in 1962.
In total, 223 designs for the Sydney Opera House were submitted. Most came from Australia, Europe, the United States, and Japan, but a few came from such countries as Iran, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Of the four judges, two came from Australia, and one each were from Great Britain and the United States. The most famous member of the panel was the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen. Legend has it that it was Saarinen who rescued the winning design from the trash heap. In truth, he had arrived several days late and mistakenly assumed that the entry had been dismissed. In fact, the other three judges had liked the design in question and had set it aside for the short list, which Saarinen had apparently confused with the rejection list. Still, Saarinen was the design's strongest advocate.17
After several weeks of deliberation, the judges reached their decision for the winner (first premium) and two runners-up (second and third premiums). Of course, Mr. Cahill—known as “Old Smoothy” by reporters—called for a press conference to announce the results. Standing next to the chairman of the Opera House Committee, Stanley Haviland, Cahill made a few remarks before Haviland passed him the envelope. Determined to use the event to create as much suspense and publicity as possible, Old Smoothy decided to play the tease. Holding the envelope in his hand, he made a little speech about the importance of the project. He paused, looked at the envelope, then said, “Now before announcing the name of the person who submitted the winning design, I shall run the risk of trying your patience by making one or two general remarks.”18 Cahill's general remarks went on for five minutes. He then took a deep breath, looked at the envelope and said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen…” He paused again to enjoy the crowd's anxious tension. “And now,” he continued, “before I announce the prize I should like to take your minds back to a meeting two years ago when it was decided this project should be put in hand…”19 This went on for another few minutes before Cahill, perhaps sensing a tomato might be thrown at him or, worse, that he would be strangled en masse by the reporters, eagerly abetted by the newsreel photographers (whose film was running as low as everyone's patience), finally decided to bring his concluding remarks to an end and open the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper and announced, “The design awarded the first premium is Scheme No. 218. The design awarded the second premium is Scheme No. 28. The design awarded the third premium is Scheme No. 62. I'm afraid I haven't got the names of the winners.” Haviland stepped forward, plucked a second piece of paper from the envelope and gave it to the premier. Cahill read out: “Scheme No. 218 was submitted by Jørn Utzon—I'm told the correct pronunciation is Yawn Ootzon—of Hellebaek, Denmark, thirty-eight years of age.”20 As Cahill went on to read the names of the runners-up, the reporters, some of whom were knowledgeable men who wrote for the architectural press, wracked their brains trying to recall who Jørn Utzon was. They knew many of the entrants, as well as the winners of the second and third premiums—both respected firms practicing in the United States and Britain—but who was this Danish fellow? And for that matter, where the hell was Hellebaek? Was it a suburb of Copenhagen?
After the press conference, one enterprising Australian reporter consulted an atlas (which must have been fun, since many authoritative atlases at the time did not list the tiny settlement) and then placed an international call—not an easy or inexpensive undertaking in the presatellite 1950s—to a Danish information operator in an attempt to obtain the phone number for a Mr. Utzon in Hellebaek. After getting the number, the reporter reached the Utzon residence, where he detected the sounds of a boisterous party in the background. Utzon's family had learned of his win over the radio while he was walking in some nearby woods. His young daughter ran to give him the news and then coolly informed him that he no longer had an excuse not to buy her a horse. Utzon returned to the house to celebrate the event with a bottle of champagne that he was sharing with his wife and friends. Between the poor connection, the background noise of the party, and Utzon's accented English, the reporter had difficulty understanding the architect. When asked how he would spend the $10,000, Utzon said that he would use the money to come to Australia with his family. Despite the communications problems, the architect's joy was unmistakable. It was a moment to savor, for it would be downhill after that.
The controversy in Australia over the judges' decision began long before Utzon arrived to take up his post. Unlike the other proposals, Utzon had submitted only sketches of the building. Although architectural sketches are more detailed than what a layperson might consider “sketches,” Utzon's submission was still less comprehensive than what most other entrants had sent to the competition, a fact that troubled the judges as well. Indeed, Utzon had not even submitted a perspective drawing. An Australian professor of architecture, A. N. Baldwinson, was quickly recruited to draw a color picture of the Opera House in time for the press announcement of the winner. The picture of the completed Opera House had a startling effect on all who saw it. As with all great works of art, it entranced many and repelled a few. Art critic Robert Hughes calls it “the shock of the new.”21 Like Frank Lloyd Wright's finest buildings, the proposed Opera House was not “ahead of its time” but beyond time. The building consisted of a series of vaulted shells, with the largest ones towering over smaller ones, and each of the latter set at a lower angle. The shells suggest different things to different people. Some have compared them to the white canvas of the sailboats in Sydney Habour, others to the budding of a lotus flower, and a few have suggested a series of stop-action frames of some colossal marine bivalve filtering seawater for food, or waves cascading on a beach. Some people have noted Oriental influences, while others suggest parallels to Islamic or Mayan art. Many of the architects and engineers who gazed on the building's enormous shells recognized that it would involve the most complicated large-scale application of reinforced concrete ever attempted for an occupied building. Some weren't sure it could be done. It was probably then that some of them guessed that the $7 million budget, as generous as it was for its time, would not be enough for such an ambitious venture.
As members of the press delved into Utzon's past experience as an architect, they were amazed to discover that the largest project he had designed and supervised was a small housing development in Denmark. If the complexity of engineering endeavors were to be rated on a scale of 1 to 10, a modest housing development would probably be a 2, while the Opera House was undoubtedly a 10. Was this chap up to such a task?
Utzon probably felt some misgivings himself, for he quickly began scouting for a first-rate engineering firm to assist him with the project. He decided on Ove Arup & Partners in London. Born to a Danish family in England, Arup had spent much time in Denmark and spoke fluent English and Danish. All the people he selected to work on other aspects of the building, such as the acoustics and mechanical and electrical installation, were also Danes. To some Australians, this group would come to be viewed as a closed clique resistant to outside influence or even inquiry.
Two chief challenges facing Utzon and Arup were coming up with detailed blueprints to supplement the slim sketches submitted for the competition and figuring out how to construct the great concrete shells. Utzon initially proposed the erection of forms into which the concrete would be poured. This was how almost all large concrete buildings had been constructed since Roman times. However, the complexity of arranging the rebar within the curving form presented problems, as did finding a way to effectively anchor the shells once the forms were removed, for what would hold them up? This led to another messy discovery: if not properly anchored, the failure of one shell might cause the others to collapse like a row of dominos. After all, the shells would literally react like sails under strong wind loads, submitting them to stresses that could cause flexing and dangerous destabilization over time. Besides these two main issues, there were other problems to solve. Still not worked out was the difficulty in arranging enough seating to comply with the original specifications while conforming to the unrealistic large space between rows (three feet) required by the draft proposal. Also challenging was coming up with a way to rapidly and quietly change stage sets between acts, an especially tricky thing to do with such extravagant operas as Verdi's Aïda or Wagner's Ring Cycle. Another tough requirement would be providing the requisite number of dressing rooms for so many performers in the limited remaining space. Finally, ensuring perfect acoustics within the halls would be a major headache, since the reverberation cycles had to be precisely arranged. Most of these issues had already been solved in classically designed opera houses, like those in San Francisco, Vienna, and Milan, but not for something as radically different as the proposed Sydney Opera House.
The tram depot was pulled down while Utzon, Arup, and their associates tried to work out the problems and come up with construction blueprints. When two years had passed with no work yet begun on a project that was slated to take four years to complete, the premier started to worry. Criticism of the Opera House was rising along with its costs. In late 1958, Cahill finally ordered that construction begin as soon as possible, a move that would later have serious consequences. Cahill probably did not know that many of the design details of the very complex building had yet to be finalized, or, more importantly, that no one in Arup's firm or on Utzon's team had yet figured out a way to build the imposing structure. Beginning construction of the building's podium without first knowing how the superstructure of shells would fit upon it was practically giving a notarized guarantee that future obstacles would arise (as they did). Cahill has been unfairly criticized for demanding that work begin prematurely on the Opera House, but he was a consummate politician who knew that once a major undertaking has begun, it becomes much more difficult to call it off. Cahill's move may have saved the project from early termination or, at the very least, prevented the Opera House Committee from falling back on a design submitted by the second or third-place finalists, neither of which were as thrilling to behold. Australia owes much to Joseph Cahill for his unwavering support of Utzon's design.
Work officially commenced on March 2, 1959. Eight months later, Joseph Cahill died of a heart attack. (Although Cahill did not live to see the Opera House built, he achieved at least one distinction before he died: Australia's first freeway, the Cahill Expressway, was erected and dedicated in his honor the year before his death. Unlike the Opera House, the Cahill Expressway is a rather ugly affair not much beloved by the people of Sydney.)
Several years passed while work on the podium advanced at a snail's pace, which was probably a good thing, since less of it would have to be destroyed or revamped once the engineering problems on the shells had been fixed. Sometime toward the end of 1961, Utzon came up with an idea about how to build the shells. Instead of pouring the concrete into vast molds, portions of the shells could be prefabricated onsite and then mounted on a series of long reinforced concrete ribs. This would securely anchor the shells and at the same time be less expensive than conducting a series of massive pour operations. One obvious problem was that such an approach would also involve a major design change. The parabolic shell of Utzon's original design had to be ditched in favor of one that used two sectionalized portions of a sphere's skin that met together to provide mutual support. It would give the Opera House slightly more severe lines, but the new form was the artistic equal of Utzon's earlier conception. Utzon and the engineers worked on the new design for several months before approaching the Opera House Committee in March 1962 with the unpleasant news that the building could not be built according to the original plans. Utzon and Arup would try to accommodate the new design with the already-built podium columns, but there was no certainty that it would work. The committee accepted the new design, for they knew that there was really no alternative plan that could address all the formidable engineering issues.
Now that the project's major construction obstacle had been solved, work began in earnest. Of course, many issues still remained to be solved. One was the noise around Bennelong Point. The horn blasts of ferries and ships in the harbor sometimes reached 102 decibels, a level of noise akin to a rock group in full cry (although no rock group then could attain such a volume). The blast of such noise could cause the shells to act as a reverse horn, their large openings concentrating the sound as it moved back through an increasingly smaller channel. How could an audience hear the softest pianississimo (ppp) orchestral passages with such a racket outside? However, this would soon be the least of Utzon's problems.
The conservative Australian Liberal Party, which was then allied with the Country Party (representing mostly rural constituents and now called the National Party), saw the difficulties and rising costs in building the Sydney Opera House as a way to take power in New South Wales. For some years the Liberal Party had done well in the national elections, but New South Wales had stubbornly remained in the Labour camp.22 They pounced on the Opera House project with all the relish of a dog given a soup bone.
Candidates running on the Liberal and Country ticket made continual attacks on the building, especially on the delays and cost overruns. If elected to office, they promised to finally “put some business common sense into what was happening at Bennelong Point.”23 They also implied that Utzon was profiteering, since his fee was calculated as a fixed percentage of the construction costs; they overlooked the fact that this was a standard practice in determining an architect's fees, and that solving complex problems also entailed more work. Australian architect Walter Bunning, whose very successful firm had submitted a design for the Opera House that had lost out to Utzon's, was happy to assist them. Bunning wrote many articles criticizing Utzon and Arup's work, and there seemed to be no aspect of the structure that he did not find wanting.
The tactic worked. Under the leadership of Robert Askin (“With Askin You'll Get Action”), the Liberal/Country Party coalition came to power in New South Wales in 1965. Once in power, Askin took control of the project from the Opera House Committee and gave it to the Ministry of Public Works, which was now headed by his appointee, Davis Hughes. Hughes called Utzon into his office for a meeting. Hughes, who was not known for his love of the arts, started the discussions by complaining about the project's cost overruns and then said that $30,000 could buy “a lot of culture” in his home district of Armidale. Perhaps Hughes had confused the most important cultural center ever built in the planet's southern hemisphere with a North Tablelands community center.24 When Utzon tried to explain the complexity of the problems that he and his partners were dealing with, Hughes seemed to ignore him and railed on again about the costs. In retrospect, it now seems certain that Askin and Hughes had already made plans to give the Danish architect and his immediate staff the boot.
In politics, you do not fire popular people—and Utzon did enjoy support among many Australians—but instead make it so difficult for them that they have no choice but to resign. Hughes began tightening the screws almost immediately after his meeting with the architect. By this time, the chief engineering hurtle, the construction of the shells, was nearing completion. Sydneysiders enjoyed seeing the Opera House's beautiful form finally take shape, and perhaps Hughes suspected that opposition to the project might soon subside. He refused to pay the $102,000 owed to Utzon's staff. When Utzon complained, Hughes said that he would investigate the matter. After weeks passed with no payment forthcoming, Utzon pressed him again about his staff's salaries, and the minister told him that he was still investigating the matter. Knowing that it would be impossible to work without his staff, Utzon resigned. Hughes may have wanted to also dismiss Ove Arup & Partners as well, but calmer heads probably advised the minister that changing the engineering firm in the middle of such a complicated project would have disastrous consequences. That evening, Hughes announced the architect's resignation to the press. Hughes expressed “regret” about the resignation and assured the Australian people that it was “the government's intention to complete the Opera House” and that “the spirit of the original conception” would be fulfilled.25 The Liberal/ Country coalition had delivered on its promise to finally do something about the Opera House. One Australian observed: “Brave words. All that was needed to float the Ark was another Noah.”26
While the move undoubtedly pleased many grumblers, the reaction of many Australians was outrage. Demonstrations were held protesting Hughes's acceptance of Utzon's resignation and calling upon the minister to reinstate the architect. A petition containing the names of many prominent Australians was submitted to Askin asking that Utzon be reinstated. Respected architects from around the world also joined in signing a petition of protest. Hughes claimed that Utzon's “resignation was neither sought nor expected by the government.”27 Yes, of course.
Feeling the heat, Hughes agreed to one last meeting with the architect to see if a compromise could be reached. Hughes told Utzon he would be allowed to remain on the project in an advisory capacity, but that he would have no final say in any of the decisions reached by the new team of Australian architects that would replace him. As an ex-businessman, Hughes probably thought it was a fair deal, since the architect would continue to receive a paycheck. But to an artist like Utzon, the offer was an insult. He refused the suggested arrangement and quietly left the country with his family. Utzon never returned to Australia. Although he genuinely liked its people and climate, he could never endure having to look at the altered version of his magnificent creation.
The substitution of an architect does not remove the complexity of the structure he was building. Ironically, far more money would be spent on the Sydney Opera House once it passed into Australian hands to finish (the final bill was $107 million), and it would take eight more years to complete. Queen Elizabeth presided over its official opening in 1973, and it has since become not only emblematic of Sydney and New South Wales but of all Australia. Although its final form may not be exactly what Utzon originally envisioned, it does come quite close, and there is little one can criticize about its beauty, accommodations for audiences and visitors, or its acoustics. The tiled concrete shells reflect the ambient light with startling intensity, whether it be the bright rays of noon or the various reds of sunset. The Sydney Opera House is easily the busiest performing arts center in the world, hosting orchestral concerts, rock performances, and stage dramas attended by well over one million people each year. The formerly operaphobic Australians now flock to performances of Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, and Lortzing. Well over one hundred million tourists have visited the Opera House since it opened almost four decades ago. In 2002, when the NSW government decided to renovate the structure, Utzon was invited back to oversee the overhauling of its interiors to better conform to his original vision. Utzon decided to remain in Europe, working on the design changes, while his son Jan oversaw the renovation work in Australia. Utzon died of a heart attack six years later, on November 19, 2008, in Copenhagen. He was ninety. If the old saying that buildings are an architect's best headstone, Jørn Utzon could not have asked for a more beautiful monument than the Sydney Opera House. Requiescat in pace, architectus.