The Opera House was a career dream and a personal disaster for the Australian architect, but now he – and engineer Ove Arup – will receive recognition.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.When Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 and packed his bags for Europe, never again to set eyes on the Sydney Opera House, it was left to a bright young Australian architect, Peter Hall, to finish the job. Hall was brought on by the NSW Government Architect when the Opera House was a half-finished structure, principally a series of concrete shells missing their glorious interiors.
Those judging Hall misunderstood the immense technical and political complexities he and his team confronted when they took over, says Anne Watson, who believes a reappraisal of Hall’s reputation is long overdue. “It’s possible to embrace Utzon’s great vision, acknowledge the construction hurdles and myriad complexities, and acknowledge Hall’s hard-fought endeavours to complete the building,” says Watson, a former Powerhouse Museum curator and author of the 2017 book.
Hall and his partners – Lionel Todd and David Littlemore, who formed the consortium Hall, Todd and Littlemore – were fortunate to retain the expertise of Ove Arup, the English-born consulting structural engineer selected by Utzon to build his vision. The seminal roles played by Arup and Jack Zunz, his senior partner at the London-based Ove Arup & Partners, have been largely overshadowed by the legend of Utzon’s genius.
Foremost of these was to turn Utzon’s free-form shells into a modular, buildable structure. A gigantic computer was harnessed to experiment with complex geometric shapes of ellipsoids and paraboloids for the roof structure, before Utzon famously settled on the curved triangular segments of a sphere.
In design principles drawn up by Utzon after his 1999 re-engagement, Utzon remarked that it was lucky Ove Arup had stayed on, otherwise the project would not have been finished, and that the team of Hall, Todd and Littlemore had made the building function “so well”.
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