Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Cultural prestige is at work here. We tend to feel that there is no need to give an account of ordinary things, because their ordinariness means that they are not worth our attention. We can focus on only one thing at a time, and so it makes sense to focus on the special things that stand out from the crowd. Therefore we pay attention to the Parthenon and the Sydney Opera House (Figure 19) but the homes of ordinary Greeks and ordinary Australians do not feature in the architectural history books, even though we would certainly learn a good deal more about how life is lived in these places if we were to study the dwellings. Where ancient Greece is concerned not much remains of the houses, and it is not possible to say with any great certainty how they were used, but there are now attempts to guess, whereas for most of the time that antiquity has been studied, it did not seem to be a question that was worth raising, given that there seemed to be so little evidence to go on. Looking at a home in a modern suburb of Sydney would not give the same aesthetic pleasure as would looking at the Opera House, but it would tell us something about the kind of life that is lived in the culture that produced the Opera House, and would make the fact that it was built seem all the more clearly remarkable — and remarkable it certainly is. There are numerous cultural and practical reasons why it is unlikely that the place would ever have been built. Internationally the Australians are more famous for their love of surfing and barbecues than for their love of opera, and yet a great international competition was held to find a design, and it was won by a Danish architect, Jorn Utson, with some evocative sketches. He did not know how to build the design that he proposed, and the design changed significantly in order to make it possible. It was always an expensive project, but because it was experimental and innovative, the costs escalated unpredictably, and new sources of funds had to be found (a lottery was set up to generate the money). The architect was shot at, and was dismissed, and someone else was brought in to finish the building off and find a way of making the astoundingly expensive volumes work for the staging of operas. Now that it has been built and has settled into the cultural landscape of our times, we treat it as if it were an almost natural wonder of the world, and it is used as a way of symbolizing the whole continent of Australasia in images that circulate around the globe. It is one of the most remarkable of modern buildings, yet it sits rather unconvincingly in histories of modern architecture, because it is difficult to tell a story about a line of development that runs through this project. It seems remarkable and unique, and does not obviously lead on to the next chapter in the story.

_{19. Opera House, Sydney, Australia (1957–73); architect: Jorn Utson (born 1918). The Danish architect, Jorn Utson, won the commission to build Sydney’s opera house in an international competition in 1957, on the basis of some vague but graceful sketches. The design changed as it developed with the engineers Ove Arup and Partners, as they worked with the architect to find a way to realize the ideas. The saga of the building’s construction is extraordinary, and well before it was fitted out internally it had become the most often used symbol of the Australian nation. The building’s lower levels are housed in an almost windowless mass, jutting out into Sydney harbour, looking like a land mass that makes a plinth on which to display to the photogenic tile-covered concrete shells that house the auditoria.}