30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey

Author:Peter Carey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

What was this about?Why, open the book and you can find work by Arup, the engineer who would finally work on Utzon's opera house. Thus proving? Thus proving that Arup knew Martin, that it was Martin who brought in Arup at the end, that Martin was the quiet puppet master of the show.

Utzon, according to Peter Myers, always understood that Leslie Martin was the most important judge. Utzon would have read Leslie Martin's book. He would have been aware of Leslie Martin's design for the Royal Festival Hall in London. And now Myers alerted us to the strong similarities between these two large performance spaces, both addressing water, both sitting on a kind of platform.

He reminded us that the brief for the Sydney Opera House required two halls, one seating 3,500 and the other 1,200. He showed an image of the Royal Festival Hall and then, presto, he was a magician. He doubled the image, so there were two identical halls side by side, and what did you have?

The Sydney Opera House on the River Thames? Not quite, but imagine a man of genius beginning this way, just as Picasso might take Veliizquez perhaps, and by a series of daring steps arrive at something new. The double image of the festival hall looked like two captives, blocks of stone from which the masterwork would soon be carved.

This is how culture works, asserted Myers. The Sydney Opera House is Joern Utzon recasting the Royal Festival Hall in such a way that Martin will understand. So the opera house is an esoteric letter from the architect to the most powerful member of the jury.

There is not the slightest doubt, said Peter Myers, that Martin would immediately decode this compliment, this fabulously sophisticated, dazzlingly successful attempt to take his own work and turn it into something even more wonderful. Amongst the proofs that he continued to pull out of his sleeve was Utzon's perspective drawing of the opera house.

The Conditions of Competition (item no. 7) required perspective drawing of such elevation as the competitor may select as his main elevation and/or approach to the building. Utzon chose, instead, to insist on what he had done, to emphasise the doubling, and he audaciously rendered, not the two halls in perspective, but the space between them.

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