For three months now, my mind has been surreptitiously revisiting Sydney, Australia. My final design studio project, a design competition for a Visitors’ Center in Sydney, has again propelled me to venture to this wonderful and exciting city. As I thumb through the maps and books about Sydney, I cannot help but recall the time I spent two months during Summer 1994 at the office of Haysom-Spender Architects in Brisbane, Australia, as a recipient of the School of Architecture’s Intern/Travel Scholarship. On my way to Brisbane, I had a memorable encounter with the city of Sydney. 

The site for the Visitors’ Center is at Dawes Point, at the bottom of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, near Circular Quay. Here, one has a striking view of the Coathanger--the Sydney Harbour Bridge--that looms high above the ground. Here, one can admire its enormous veins of steel that span across the harbor and the pairs of gigantic concrete pylons that firmly anchor the bridge to the ground. A complete turn to the right reveals another majestic sight. A short distance away, at the edge of Bennelong Point, stands the world-renown Sydney Opera House. Its shimmering sail-like roofs seem to beckon one to traverse the short distance and admire at close-hand its own prowess. What a sight! And what a site! 

The Opera House was designed by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon in an international competition in 1957. His entry was initially overlooked but, through twist of fate, his design was resuscitated from a batch of discarded entries and was eventually proclaimed as the winning design. Today, it is hard to imagine anything more powerful and fitting as Utzon’s Opera House to become Sydney’s architectural icon in much the same way as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. 

As an architectural gem, the Sydney Opera House brought about not only challenges in construction means and technology but also rendered a new language in the pursuit of 20th century architecture. 

The style of the Sydney Opera House has been placed under the Neo-Expressionist movement of the fifties. The architecture does not strive for an honest relationship between the facade and embellishments with the spatial functions of the building. Like the many buildings that were designed under the banner of Neo-Expressionism, such as Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York city or Gottfried Bohm’s Pilgrimage church in Germany, they all solicit some form of emotional response. For the Opera House, emotional reactions have been consistently concentrated towards its roof form--Utzon’s fifth facade. 

People have compared the Opera House in varied and often curios metaphors. For most, the roofs are referred to as billowing sails that seem poised to set sail from the harbor and into the open sea. Some have referred to them as turtles frolicking under the sun, or as Blanche d’Alpuget, in Oswald Ziegler’s Sydney Has an Opera House, puts it, “an albino tropical plant root bound from too small a pot.” Strange as it may be, this observation hit closest to what Utzon had in mind. In a recent interview on Specifier, the 76-year old architect revealed that the forms were actually derived from palm leaves!

It is interesting to note how the roof of the Opera House evolved from Utzon’s original scheme. His sketches show that the sails swayed at a lower angle and closer to the ground. At the time, the roof no doubt posed structural uncertainties and cost. In the process of building a dream to reality, the roof form was eventually determined from shapes that are cut out from a sphere. With this method, a limited variation of precast concrete shells was all that were needed to assemble the various sails.

The roof form or sails have a strong relationship to the site. Standing at the tip of Macquarie’s Point, another inlet near Bennelong Point along the harbor, the Opera House’s sails strike a dramatic contrast with the coat-hanger shape of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. From this vantage, one can capture a living moment of one of the most picture-perfect postcards in the world. The two forms visually merge, both exude an affirmation of each infallible presence, and form a larger composition beyond the physical boundaries of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. 

It took 16 years to complete the Opera House at a staggering cost of A$102 million. During its conception, the Opera House also endured incisive controversies, resulting in the grievous resignation of Jorn Utzon as the leading architect for the project. 

The Opera House also received criticisms from the international architectural community, including, interestingly enough, Frank Lloyd Wright, who argued that the building’s exterior does not express the functional spaces inside. The Opera House is now 23 years old. But its grandiosity and forward-looking character have never failed to awe the visitors that flock at its heels. For students like me who are involved in the DuPont-sponsored Sydney Visitors’ Center design competition, the Sydney Opera House is a rest stop, a vantage point, a recluse and a source of inspiration for the task on hand.