The Opera House

Sir: Philip Drew’s and Andrew Botros’s articles on Sydney’s Opera House (June 2019) reminded me about another part of the struggle to complete this remarkable building.

As the structure progressed the engineers of the air-conditioning and fire protection company I worked for noted that there had been no discussion about the air-conditioning and fire protection systems that would be needed for this unique building. It was obvious that the loads on the architectural team to complete the detailed design and manage the basic structure were keeping then totally occupied and left little time for some of the other aspects of this complex structure.

It was almost too late to design air-conditioning or fire protection systems, and have them drawn up and put out to tender, if the completion date was to be achieved. We approached the architectural team, who agreed and said, “What do you suggest?”

We suggested they approach the top four air-conditioning and fire protection companies in New South Wales to come up with their suggested package for these essential services. They agreed, and we became the successful tenderer. 

Tony Caldersmith
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Sir: Philip Drew’s paean to Utzon is troubling on so many levels!

The nub of my concern springs from a brief encounter with a tutor in my studio group when I was studying architecture. After a long “crit” session (when students talk about their inchoate designs) our tutor wondered why none of us talked about people in relation to our schemes. My unspoken response—I was a mere lad—was “Maybe because you blokes never talk about people in your lectures”.

Drew continues this architectural tradition of regarding the design of buildings as having no real human concern. So for him, “most important of all, study [the great building] in its surroundings”. No! Most important of all, know the purpose of the building in all its social aspects; study the way the building is regarded by the people who use it, pass by it, paid for it, approved it, and are sheltered, affronted, comforted or repelled by it.

The great irony of his reference to Utzon’s “Living Architecture” is that it seems to have little to do with life—that is, the social congress of humanity. Are buildings nothing but walk-in sculptures, with the only reference being aesthetic? It seems that architects are locked into the de-personalised, socially agnostic approach to buildings as manifestations of drawing-board art. Forget people, it would seem.

This comes to its horrifying full pitch in Utzon’s finding inspiration in Mesoamerican temples, placed in their “fusion of sculpture and architecture” on magnificent plinths. Forget the social purpose of these temples: that they were built for human butchery, the settings for the horror-spectacle of innumerable human sacrifices, where the blood of murdered captives, hearts torn out of their chests, flowed. This is what this great inhuman fusion was for. And Drew would represent it to us as “Living Architecture”?

I’d prefer to reflect on an architecture that took as its point of contact the purposes, needs and interests of the people using and moving around the building, not some abstraction based on ritualised slaughter. Architecture is not drawing-board art, but socially meaningful shelter in all its dimensions and not merely the aesthetic.

David Green
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