"To express the platform and avoid destroying it is a very important thing, when you start building on top of it. Like many of Utzon's designs, including his own home Can Lis, the Sydney Opera House makes ingenious use of platforms, an architectural design element he learned from the Mayans in Mexico. "On top of the platform the spectators receive the completed work of art and beneath the platform every preparation for it takes place," Utzon has said. On an expedition to Mexico, the young architect had been intrigued by the Mayan use of platforms. The media described Jørn Utzon's plan as "three shell-like concrete vaults covered with white tiles." Utzon saw the project a little more complicated than that. " We can already see this principle at work in the tower-crane assembly of the segmental pre-cast concrete ribs of the shell roofs of the Sydney Opera House, wherein coffered, tile-faced units of up to ten tons in weight were hauled into position and sequentially secured to each other, some two hundred feet in the air." Combining "prefabricated components in a structural assembly in such a way as to achieve a unified form that while incremental is at once flexible, economic and organic," writes Frampton. Professor Kenneth Frampton suggests this building block approach of construction comes from the stepped methods found in Chinese architecture instead of the Western tradition of using trusses. Utzon called this process of construction "additive architecture," where prefabricated elements were joined onsite to create a whole. The exterior construction materials included preccast rib segments "rising to a ridge beam" and a concrete pedestal "clad in earth-toned, reconstituted granite panels." The design was for shells to be clad with glazed off-white tiles. Interestingly, the Sydney Opera House drawings are public records held in the archives of the New South Wales government.
Out of some 230 entries from over thirty countries, Utzon's concept was selected. Jørn Utzon had just entered an anonymous competition for an opera house to be built in Australia on a point of land jutting into Sydney harbor.
Keystone/Getty Images (cropped)ĭesigns for most major public sector architectural projects are often determined by a competition - similar to a casting call, a tryout, or a job interview.
Sydney Opera House Under Construction in August 1966.
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