Sculpture is not normally the stuff from which acrimonious public […]

The Opera House is most often regarded as a high point of European modernism. Yet beyond this, something deep, harking back to antiquity, has always haunted Utzon’s conception of the building as a spiritual venue. Beneath those blindingly white sails resides the ghost of sacred geometry summoned from Mayan and Greek prototypes

even years ago I wrote an article in Quadrant on the slow but steady erosion of the suburban church as a centre of community activity and faith. Since then the decline has gathered speed. Fancy a used pew or perhaps a pulpit? You’ll find them for sale on eBay

The aspiration of government planners and their architects for the bleak, shoddy towers they erected in post-war Britain was to refashion those at the bottom into pleasant and compliant drones. Those ambitions would collapse, literally in the case of London's Ronan Point housing estate, even as they prompted the dystopian urban novel, 'A Clockwork Orange' not least of all

On January 25, 2019, the Swedish sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg warned […]

Utzon's drive to unify architecture with landscape saw him produce what amounts to strong sculpture, the result of which is a unity we call 'a monument'. Thus was he able not merely to reject the overwhelming dullness and banality of global industrial architecture, but to vanquish it

Much has been written of the Sydney Opera House, its design, feuds and political storms that surrounded its construction, but no account can match that of Jack Zunz. There almost from the very start, it was he who made Utzon's soaring concept into a workable reality and his book sets the record straight

Not since the altar-smashing Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, or indeed the secularisers of the French Revolution, has there been destruction of ecclesiastical fittings and objets d’art on such a scale as we are witnessing today in Australia.

Architects no longer draw but do everything on laptops. They no longer know the sensual touch of a graphite extension of their fingers on white paper. The mechanical buildings that result amply demonstrate the qualitative difference in values between them and Hardy