Besides being part of the Danish cultural canon, it is also on UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites. But time heals all wounds, and today Sydney Opera House is a remarkable and significant landmark for both Sydney and Australia. The opera house became a true scandal, and by its inauguration in 1973, the original budget had been exceeded by one thousand percent. This slowed things down even more architects weren’t exactly lining up to build a lesser version of a potential masterpiece. Jørn Utzon, on the other hand, pulled the plug and left Sydney in anger, never to return again. Utzon walked out prematurelyĪrup bowed to the decision. At the time, the construction had already been delayed by three years. So they halted payments to Utzon, who withdrew from the project in 1966. When the Opera House’s exterior was finally completed, and Utzon was to start on the interior, a new government party wanted to see the building completed quickly and inexpensively. Surprisingly, it was Utzon and not Arup who finally cracked the code when the peel from an orange served as inspiration for the construction. The work of building the structure with its hundreds of rooms at Sydney Harbour got underway, but resolving how to get the enormous white shells to float at heights of up to 60 meters took years, innumerable attempts and enormous sums of money to achieve. Danish Ove Arup was both intuitively and mathematically gifted and quickly recognized Utzon’s special talent. It came to mean a great deal that the younger Jørn Utzon had one of the greatest engineers of the time as a partner. Whether you perceive the building’s impressive shapes as the sails of a ship, seashells or waves, the building’s shapes are reminiscent of nature’s elements: the earth, the sky and the sea. Utzon’s structural ideas define gravity, and no one really knew if they would succeed at the challenge when the project got underway. The winning design was characterized by the Danish architect’s fascination of nature’s elements. Jørn Utzon had only built a few smaller buildings in Denmark when he won the competition to design Sydney’s new opera house in 1956, beating 232 other proposals. The Sydney Opera House is among the most famous buildings in the world and is viewed to this day as one of the most complex ever designed. Jørn Utzon had very little experience when work on one of the world’s most complex building projects got underway, but he had the support of another Danish genius.
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