“I have made a sculpture… you will never be finished with it… When you pass around it or see it against the sky . . . something new goes on all the time. Together with the sun, the light and the clouds – it makes a living thing.” – Jørn Utzon, 2002
When our editor discovered that I knew fuck all about the Opera House, two things happened:
A – He vehemently refused to buy the round of beers I was owed.
And B – He suggested I write this story…
Feeling like a schoolboy writing lines for being a smart arse, I started looking at the Opera House, it’s historical saga of politics; Millions of dollars and a Danish bloke called Jørn Utzon.
For those blissfully unaware, the abridged tale goes something like this:
The Sydney Town Hall was outgrowing it’s boots as Sydney’s best concert venue and a bunch of the city’s head musical types petitioned the government for a new venue… The thumbs up was given by the state government and an Opera House design competition was held, and out of 233 entries they picked Utzon’s and started building it in 1958.
Roughly halfway through its construction in 1965 the Government changed hands to Liberal and the new regime decided to tighten the reigns on the project, appointing a bloke called Davis Hughes as the minister in charge of public works.
Due to continually escalating costs, and a discontented public bleating about a bloody foreigner wasting their money, Hughes pulled all funding from the project to the point where Utzon could not pay his staff and was forced to resign. At this halfway point the cost sat at 28 million… the original quote was for 7 million.
A disgraced and dejected Utzon packed up his office and returned to Denmark, while Hughes re-initiated the project under the watchful eye of Aussie architect Peter Hall. Hughes oversaw the project and ensured the second half of it would not waste any more of the taxpayer’s money. It was finished in 1973 at a total cost of 108 million bucks.
Now, it has to be remembered that it wasn’t merely Utzon who set the prices here; there was a whole league of number crunchers and labourers alike who were responsible for that estimate. And in an effort to also defend Hughes, I began reading his side of the story… but the more I read into that bureaucratic bastard – the less I liked him.
Firstly the man was a fraud. To get into politics he’d claimed to have a university degree, but he was discovered by his opponents to have no qualifications whatsoever! As a result he was punted disgracefully from his position as leader of the Country Party. Then, as only a politician could, he lurked and weaselled his way back in to politics and ended up as the bloke in charge of public works for the liberals.
Records tell that Hughes flat-out didn’t like Utzon, and did his best to label him as ‘a useless dreamer’ and an ‘impractical project leader.’ Hughes owed Utzon around $100,000 by the time he was forced to quit, yet after he had resigned as the project leader; Hughes callously offered him a middle-tier designer’s role in the project.
Insulted and unemployed, Utzon left the xenophobic public, the political clusterfuck and his Opera House behind to return home.
Unfortunately I deal with architects in my line of work and they are a famously impractical lot, style over function to the very end; but a rare genius was Utzon. He had the balls to take a ridiculous modernist shape inspired by sails on the harbour and make it into a physical entity now treasured by millions – yet he wasn’t invited to the opening.
So we got a building and an icon that has attracted millions. But Utzon, the foreigner, was so heavily bad-mouthed by the politicians and the press of the day that his reputation was all but destroyed. Other countries refused to award him work, regardless of his brilliance, as they feared that projects would run over-budget by millions! If only they’d seen through the politics, imagine what could have been created.
If you read into Hughes’ thoughts on his role, or the political opinion on his doings, he strongly took the standard political defence: “I was just doing my job.” That job was to put a financial cap on Utzon’s Opera House, and to be fair, that’s exactly what he did.
What Hughes had missed in his blind quest for self importance, was that the very design and ambition of building the Opera House was a fantasy and an artwork in itself, something that stretched beyond numbers and budgets. But, Davis Hughes was a professional Liberal, a numbers man, a hard-nosed civil servant to the very end; still door knocking for the right wingers well into his eighties.
I think we’ve come a long way in the last 30 years, but fight it all we want – creatives and bureaucrats will always clash, and though I don’t like it, it’s fair to say that each side secretly needs the other. The world would be dull without creatives and dull without the ‘crats… ‘crats and the creatives… what a lovely name for a band.
Anyway, while I don’t think we should slap the blame of this unashamed tragedy on a single person, or a government party, I do think it’s worth a thought… what mastery could have been accomplished had we let Utzon finish his concrete canvas? Imagine what incredible buildings could have been constructed…
Imagine if the lust for bureaucratic popularity didn’t creep under the skin of men, and make them impede beautiful things.
Jack.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As this weekend marks the one year anniversary of Jorn Utzon’s death, we are going to drink champagne around the back of the Opera House… followed by a quick pee around the back of Town Hall.