99% Invisible - 553- Cautionary Tales of the Sydney Opera House

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream it up, but the saga of making this world heritage landmark a reality is a tale for the ages: a cautionary tale. And for Cautionary Tales, I turn to the brilliant Tim Harford. I’ve been dying to hear the story of the Sydney Opera House told in this way, and Tim and his team just nailed it,  and I know you are going to love it as much as I do. Enjoy. 

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream it up. But the saga of making this future world heritage landmark a reality is a tale for the ages, a cautionary tale. And for cautionary tales, I had turned to the brilliant Tim Hartford. I've been dying to hear the story of the Sydney Opera House told in this way, and Tim's walk north of Copenhagen stood a little house.

A fairy tale setting worthy of Hans Christian Andersen perhaps, but this is no fairy tale, and it wasn't a fairy tale house, it was low, flat and minimalist. Denmark's first open plan house. It had been built in 1952, without proper floor plans. The house's young architect was building his own home and hid insisted instead on personally directing the work as it progressed. But it was brilliant. Denmark's most celebrated architect visited the construction site and muttered under his breath, hell, he's better than I am. Maybe so. It was hard to be sure. The young architect, Yorne Utsen, had won plenty of competitions, but with his career interrupted

by the war, that house was almost the only thing he had actually built. Late in January 1957, the phone in the Utsun home rang. Yorne and his wife were taking a winter walk in the woods. Their ten-year-old daughter, Lynn, was at home babysitting her new born brother. She answered the phone. Hello. The village operator was on the other end.

She knew the family. Lynn, is your father home? No. Is your mother home? No, they're out walking. Quick, go find your father. He's one of prize. It's someone from the newspaper in Sydney, Australia.

Go turn to come quick. Lin drops the phone, leaves her sleeping brother and grabs her bike. She races out into the Danish winter, yelling for her parents. He must have been alarmed to see their little blonde baby sitting daughter cycling towards them, screaming at the top of her voice. Sydney, Sydney. She skids to a halt. You want a prize?

You want something in Sydney? Someone's on the phone and they want to talk to you. It must have felt like a phone call from the moon. The unknown young Dane, Yorne Utson, had won an international competition to design the Sydney Opera House. But Utson couldn't have imagined what a bitter victory it would prove to be. I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to Corsion Retails. Music Eugene Goussens was a distinguished violinist and conductor. In the 1940s he moved from

Britain to the faraway city of Sydney, where he was struck by three things. The beauty of the harbour, the apparent indifference of the locals to that beauty, and the lack of a really good venue for classical music. Goosons dreamed up an idea, build a huge opera house on Benelong Point, a finger of rock poking out into Sydney's glorious harbour in which blue water is surrounded on all sides by the city, and spanned by the vast arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Goosens was charismatic and local politicians were keen to show that they could deliver cultural amenities for Sydney voters. They formed a committee which announced an open competition to design the new opera

house. Anyone, even an unknown young architect from Denmark, could try to win. As Goosen's grand project gathered momentum, he flew back to London to be knighted by the queen. And on his return, tipped off by a journalist, customs officers asked to search his luggage. They found it to be packed with naughty photographs and even naughtier rubber masks. In 1950s Australia, it was a scandal. Sir Eugene fled back to London, a broken man. Alas, Sir Eugene's fate, great talent, self-inflicted wounds and a tragic end to a great career

is just the overture to the story of the Sydney Opera House, in which the same dramatic beats would play out on a much bigger stage. Not that anyone should have expected the Sydney Opera House to be an easy project. So Eugene had wanted big concert halls, but Ben Along Point was a cramped site. The premiere of the state wanted a grand legacy, a building for the ages, but no politician wanted to raise taxes to pay for it. And Opera House's have actually rather ungainly structures, they're bulging towers for stage machinery, they're usually hidden behind grand facades. But Sydney's

opera house couldn't hide, it would be visible across the water, from north, east and west, even from above, from the monumental Sydney Harbour Bridge. In announcing their competition then, the committee laid down the challenge to architects from around the world. Design an opera house for us. It needs to be huge, fit onto a tiny site, look amazing from any angle, and be cheap. Knock yourselves out. In January 1957, the time came to choose a winner. The judging panel spent four days sifting through more than 200 entries and drawing up a shortlist.

They were waiting for the arrival of the final judge, an architectural rock star, the great Finnish American architect, Eero Saranon, but he was running late. That was understandable. Saranon was a busy man, designer of landmarks such as the celebrated TWA terminal at New York's International Airport. And if buildings like that helped New York to feel like the center of the world, then Sydney, at the world's edge, wanted some of that stardust.

When the other judges showed Erosarinen the 10 leading entries, everyone could tell that he wasn't impressed. The ideas were awkward compromises, predictably boxed in by their attempts to satisfy the contradictory requirements of the competition. Sounan shook his head and went for a stroll to Ben Along Point. He sat and sketched for a while. Correst on three sides by the lapping waters of Sydney Harbor, it really was a magnificent spot.

He returned to the judging room and started flipping through the rejects. There was one which stood out as completely different, even though it was really little more than a sketch. There was a monumental base, reminiscent of an Aztec pyramid or a Chinese imperial palace. Floating above it were light, shell-like roof structures, overlapping like the sails of some grand ship.

It was like no building Sarenan had ever seen. He laid it out, stepped back to ponder it, stepped forward to peer at the details. Then he turned to the other judges. Gentlemen, here is your opera house. Twelve days later, the state premier Joseph K. Hill stands in front of the cameras with a sealed envelope. He's a former trade union organizer, not your stereotypical opera-gour, but now that the disgraced Sir Eugene Goosens has fled the country, K-Hill has surprised some people by stepping up

as the opera-house's biggest champion. Like any good politician, he's going to milk this dramatic moment. The winning design, he announces, is scheme number 218. And who designed that? K-hill doesn't have the name to hand. An official hurries forward, rummages in the envelope, pulls out a second document. I.S. A Scheme number, 218, submitted by… Um…

Yorn Utsun of Hellebeck, Denmark. Yorn Utsun? Who? A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald places a long distance call to directory assistance in Hellebeck. They try Utsun's directory assistance in Hellerbake. They try Utsun's office number. He's not there. Then they try his home number.

The operator comes back on the line. Apparently, he's gone out for a walk, but his daughter has gone to find him. Is it okay to hold? For the first interview with the unknown winner of the Sydney Opera House competition, sure, he'll hold all of Australia wants to know about the mysterious Yorn Utsum. When the winning sketch was published, public opinion was divided. Letters published in the Sydney Morning Herald describe the designers a wonderful piece of sculpture, a haystack covered by several tapalins, a ray of hope, a sink with plates stacked in readiness for washing, some large

lovely ship of the imagination, a hideous parachute which we cannot fold up and put away. But when your Nutson arrived in Sydney, some of those doubts began to melt away. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, that sexy Danish accent, movie star looks. He's our Gary Cooper, declared one local lady. Sydney was a bustling place, but it usually felt far from the world spotlight. Now, it felt as though Hollywood had come to call, the city fell in love with the man.

Professional architects were more cautious. The sketches were impressive, sure, but Hudson hadn't submitted all the plans and drawings the competition rules specified. One Australian art critic described his entry as nothing more than a magnificent doodle. What's more, Hudson's doodle building overstepped the site's boundaries. Then there was the question of whether its glorious sale-like roof structures could actually stand up.

None of this worried Eero Sarenan, the rock star architect, who'd pushed his fellow judges into choosing Utson's entry. Nothing to it said Sarenan about those roof structures. Three inches thick at the top and say, 12 inches thick at the base. But concrete shell architecture was still an emerging field. Many experts weren't so sure. Yes, egg shell structures could be surprisingly strong, but cut the egg in half and much of that strength is gone.

And Buttson's opera house roof, it was a series of quarter shells. Until this point Buttson had taken no engineering advice. And he wouldn't have long to figure out a solution because the project's champion, State Premier Joseph K. Hill, was a man in a hurry. He was a heavy smoker with a history of health problems. He knew he was also at risk of losing the next election. He wanted a monument to his place in history. So he instructed the Opera House team. Go down to Benelong Point and make such progress that no one who succeeds me can stop this going through the completion.

As a result, the building started before Buttson could figure out the structural basics. Joseph K. Hill laid the foundation stone on the 2nd of March 1959. Within a year, he was dead, killed by his third heart attack. But just as he'd intended, so much work had already been done that stopping the project was unthinkable. By now, an engineer had been found. His name was Over-Arupp, the Anglo-Danish boss of Over Arup and Partners, a respected engineering firm. The two Danes, Utsun and Arup, had been working together to try to figure out a solution to the structural problem. And it was at this point that Arup informed Utsun of the bad news. His beautiful, free-standing roof shells simply couldn't be built.

There's no such thing as too many daines, so let's meet a third. Bent Flubia. He's the world's leading expert on large projects, and on why these mega projects are so often delivered late and way over budget. And he's fascinated by the Sydney Opera House because it's the ultimate case study, the definitive fiasco of how not to run a mega project. Flubio says that the original scene of many mega projects is this. People start building before they figure out what they're really trying to do. The ideal mega project starts with a question, why are we doing this? Then there's a long, careful planning process.

Every detail is finalised, then the expensive construction phase can be kept as short as possible, with no costly changes. The opera house violated these principles in the most flagrant way imaginable. Nobody ever really answered the question. Why? So Eugene Gussens had wanted to accommodate a lot of opera garrers and use the beautiful location of Ben Long Point. The state's premier, Joseph K. Hill, had wanted a lasting monument on the cheap, without

spending tax pay or money. Yorne Utson wanted to build something beautiful and new. But what if you couldn't make it both beautiful and cheap? What if you couldn't make it big while also squeezing it onto Ben Long Point? The trade-offs were swept under the carpet, the difficult decisions postponed or ignored. Then of course, the building was rushed, with workers digging foundations before Utsun and Arup had figured out how to build the thing. Utsun was in an impossible position.

And Utsun wasn't blaneless either. Remember how he'd never drawn proper plans for his beautiful home in the Danish forest, but instead had been on site throughout, personally directing the builders. Careful planning was all very well, but he loved to experiment, to feel his way through a project. It worked for his beautiful home, but could it also work for a colossal structurally innovative mega-project. Utsun worked like an artist, not a project manager. He wanted to make the final decision on every detail, no matter how small. At one point, he declared about a particular design change.

I don't care what it costs. I don't care what scandal it causes. I don't care how long it takes. That's what I want. That attitude explains why Utsun's opera house is the most beautiful building in the world. It also made him the mother of all bottlenecks, especially as Utsun had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time. After his second visit to Sydney, Utsun decided to

return to Denmark via China, Japan and Nepal. When he finally resurfaced, Arup Jovially wrote, It was nice to hear from you. I really thought you were lost in the wilds of Asia. Utsun had hoped to pick up inspiration on his travels that he could use for the opera house, and he did. But decisions on the project ground to a halt without him. And the problem of the roof was no joke. Sons' original magnificent doodle used a variety of different curves. That caused two headaches. The first was the expense. It made every section of the roof a unique construction. The second was more serious. Arupp had to spend a fortune on ground

breaking computer simulations to figure out whether they would collapse under their own weight. Eventually Arupp concluded that they would. It was Utson who solved the problem. In a flash of inspiration, he realized that each part of each vaulted roof, large or small, could be proportioned as though it was sliced out of the same single, enormous sphere. doesn't sound like much, but the structural properties of these spherical curves were well understood. And because the curves would all be identical,

they could be built at much lower cost. Butson was delighted. It was the cheapest way of making it you could dream of. All the work during these three years has been the background for arriving at this magnificent solution. If they hadn't yet started construction, this would have been a triumphant moment. Unfortunately, construction had begun two and a half years earlier. The new design would require heavier supports than the ones they had just built, and the ones they had just built were almost indestructible.

The local contractor recommended dynamiting them, one by one, during the rush hour, so that the noise would be camouflaged by the traffic. That worked for a while until a lump of concrete was blown high over the harbor and landed on a passing ferry. Another opera house bungle yelled the local newspapers. Utson had decided to move his office to Sydney to oversee proceedings. That was a good idea, thought Arup's team, until Utsun told them he'd be travelling again, and out of contact between Christmas and March. Arup begged him not to do this.

There were so many decisions to be made, and Utsun was the only person who could make them. But Utsun agreed only to a long meeting near London's Heathrow Airport, the day after Christmas, to pin down a long list of details. Utsun was persuaded to hurry the very last mile of his journey. While flying from Tahiti to Sydney, the DC-7 airliner's radio crackled into life with an invitation. Her majesty, the Queen, was on the Royal Yacht in Sydney Harbour, and Mr. Wutzen was invited to lunch. After touchdown, he dashed to the Royal Reception. Arupp's man on the ground wasn't impressed. Lo and behold, God appears from heaven.

Utson had descended from Tahiti, popped in for lunch with the Queen, and then grumbled the Arupp engineer. And the afternoon he comes onto the site and starts complaining about some things he wasn't informed about. I mean there was no one we could contact. Four months later, July 1963, the Opera House was scheduled to have been finished. Yet the site on Ben Along Point was still just a huge flat sprawl of concrete.

The basic outline of the broad, low podium was visible with the structure of the two sunken theatres scooped out of it. There was no sign of walls, let alone the roof. In his history of the project, the saga of Sydney Opera House, architectural writer Peter Murray, combs through the letters between Uva, Arup and Yorne, Utsun, and finds two men whose relationship is slowly falling apart. Utsun worried that Arup was trying to take control and steal the credit. Arup was eyeing the exits.

Here's Arup. I do not know whether you have thought of getting other engineers to help you. I would welcome the idea of someone else solving the problems and experiencing your method of working. Butsen responded, dear uva, please dissist from your criticism. Management is in a way the easiest part of the job, something which most people can learn. Well, perhaps. Nobody doubted Utsun's genius as an architect, but as deadline after deadline was being broken, this was no time to be taking management for granted. The mega-project expert, Bent Flubia, argues that the longer the construction phase of

a project lasts, the more time there is for something to derail everything. He's right. In May 1965, two years after the opera house was supposed to have been finished, there was a state election in New South Wales. The backdrop for this election was an expensive and manifestly unfinished building. The roofshelves had at last been built, finished building. The roofshelves had at last been built, soaring above the podium and the waters of the harbour, but they were bare concrete. The epic job of tiling them had hardly begun. The site was open to the elements, since the spectacular glass curtain wall facing out over the harbour was still just a structural problem on Utsun's drawing board. And so, the populist opposition party campaigned on a promise to clean up the mess

at the opera house. Although the project was funded mostly by proceeds from the state lottery, rather than taxes, it was hugely over budget. And conservative rural voters had started to wonder why that lottery money couldn't be spent on something else, such as more, roads, schools and hospitals. When the opposition won, the job of Minister for Public Works went to a politician named Davis Hughes. Hughes was a controversial choice, and not

only because he'd recently become notorious for falsely claiming to have a bachelor's degree in job applications. When he was put in charge of this vast construction project, his wife laughingly remarked that he couldn't drive a nail in straight. In the first six months of his tenure, Hughes struggled to get a grip, to his frustration, spending on the opera house ballooned more than ever. By the start of 1966, nine years after Utsun had become famous around the world for winning the design competition, Hughes was ready for a showdown. He began withholding payments to Utsun, demanding more oversight

and more control. Without the money, Utsun couldn't pay his staff. He was already in financial trouble because both Denmark and Australia were arguing that he should be paying his taxes to them. Was Davis Hughes deliberately undermining Utson, or was he imposing some much-needed discipline? Whatever the aim, the result was predictable. However, Arup could see what was coming. He wrote to Utson urging him not to resign, telling him that resigning would solve nothing. But Arab's letter didn't arrive in time to warn

Utsun to be careful what he said. After a tense meeting with Hughes, Utsun sent a letter explaining that, by cutting off the money, you have forced me to leave the job. Hudson later said that he was just pausing work for lack of funds, and that quitting was never his intention. But Davis Hughes didn't see any ambiguity. He promptly announced to the State Assembly that Yorne Utson had resigned. Utson's departure was announced on the 1st of March 1966, almost exactly seven years after construction had begun.

Despite all the project's troubles, it was a bombshell. By now, the curved shells were almost fully tiled. The shimmering effect looked spectacular. Protesters gathered at the half-finished structure on Benelong Point, waving signs, saved the opera house, and we need Utsun. The Royal Australian Institute of Architects told Davis Hughes, get him back. No prominent architect would touch the Opera House project after Utsun's acrimonious departure. It was a matter of professional solidarity.

The engineer, Over Adop, did not resign. Utsun saw this as a betrayal. He stopped returning Arab's calls. Adop hand-wrote an emotional letter to Utsun, urging him to come back and offering to broker a compromise with Davis Hughes. Couldn't over and yawn at least meet for a chat? He signed off. Even if you don't trust me, it couldn't do any harm, could it? The situation can't get

any worse, so why not try? Butsen replied the same day. If you think I should be in charge of the project, then act accordingly, he wrote, it tell the minister that Utsun should be in charge of the project, then act accordingly," he wrote, it tells the minister that Utsun must be in charge. Utsun returned to Denmark, still thinking about all the remaining challenges on the project, such as how to fit more seats into the hall. He expected that Davis Hughes would come crawling back, in part, because he couldn't imagine anyone else being capable of finishing the job.

I am still available. It is not I, but the Sydney Opera House that creates all of the enormous difficulties. But Davis Hughes wasn't the type to back down. If no prominent architect would take the job, he it just have to get one nobody had heard of. He called in a young local government architect named Peter Hall, and handed him the task of finishing the opera house. Hall did so, taking seven more years, and three times as much money as had already been spent. The Opera House cost 15 times the original budget, admittedly the original budget was always a fiction, and it was completed a decade behind schedule.

Your Notson wasn't the type to back down either. Years later, over Arab asked a mutual friend to try to arrange a reconciliation. Maybe he and Utsun could meet and talk things over. They drove to Utsun's hometown, and Arab sat in a hotel lobby, nursing a coffee and waiting. The friend returned. coffee and waiting. The friend returned. Utsun didn't want to see Arup. There would be no reconciliation. The Opera House was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on the 20th of October 1973. Yorne Utson declined his invitation to attend, which was perhaps just as well. The Queen's speech written by local politicians didn't mention Utson's name.

The plaque she unveiled celebrated young Peter Hall and Davis Hughes. young Peter Hall and Davis Hughes. In his book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flubier describes what happened when Star architect Frank Geary was asked to come to Bill Bough to work on a building. Unlike the young unknown Utsun, Geary was 62 years old, battle hardened by some painful political fights over his buildings, and famous. Bill Barrow's officials showed him a beautiful old warehouse, and they asked him if he would consider renovating it to become a new Guggenheim museum. Why?

Ask Geary. What are you trying to achieve? In Sydney, nobody had really formulated those questions, let alone answered them. But in Bilbao, they knew what they wanted. They wanted to get by design, what Sydney had got by accident. An icon. Bilbao was the Detroit of southern Europe, a once great city ravaged by deindustrialization.

The local government wanted the new museum to spark an urban renaissance, to put Bilbao on the map just as Sydney Opera House had put Sydney on the map. "'Fine,' said Geary. "'In that case, forget the renovation project. "'You're going to have to do what Sydney did and build something breathtaking and new. "'You're going to have to put it on the waterfront and, in fact, added Geary. "'I've seen just the spot.

When Geary's Guggenheim Bilbao was finally opened, it was a huge success, on time and under budget. According to Flubier's data on mega-projects, that sort of thing doesn't happen a lot. But the fact that it happened at all is because Geary started with a clearly agreed plan, and nobody rushed to start digging. These days, everybody seems to want one of those iconic buildings. Frank Geary made it look easy after all, but the Sydney Opera House was the first and the greatest and the most painful. In spite of everything, the Opera House is a masterpiece. I've been lucky enough to see it, to stroll around the Sydney Harbour, admiring all the angles, to stroll around the Sydney Harbour admiring all the angles, to walk up the grand steps of the podium on Benelong Point.

I've even performed on the stage. It's breathtaking. All of it. No camera can do it justice. In the entire 20th century, only the Empire State Building comes close to serving as an icon of a city. The Sydney Opera House is like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. It's repaid its debt to the citizens of the city many times over. So you might think, who cares that it was late, who cares what it cost, it was all worth it in the end. But Bent Flubier disagrees. The process of building the

Opera House was a fiasco, and that fiasco had a cost that you can't measure in delays or in dollars. The cost starts with Yorne Utson's reputation. Utson was told that because he had resigned, he'd never get a government project in Denmark. He taught for a while in Hawaii and anonymously designed some buildings for a friend's architecture practice. He did win a commission to design something big in Q8, but Saddam Hussein's army set fire to that in 1991. In a Copenhagen suburb, he built a humble church.

It's unprepossessing on the outside, but on the inside there's a gorgeous ceiling that looks like folds of cloth, parting to reveal the light of heaven. Apparently, it had something similar in mind for the interior of the opera house, but nobody wanted to give him another chance to display his genius on the stage it deserved. The price of the Sydney Opera House? It was all those other buildings that Yorne Utsen was never allowed to design. Eventually, the architecture profession woke up and began showering prizes on him, often acknowledging regretfully that Utson

hadn't built much besides the opera house, but it was too late to change that. When he won architecture's Nobel Prize, the Pritzker, he was 85 years old. The Opera House itself had started to become embarrassed by the controversy, and that graceless plaque that didn't even mention Utson's name. In the 1990s, they attempted a reproachement, naming a room in his honour, and asking him to help design

a new wing. Still, he didn't come. He sent his son to give a speech, explaining that his elderly father... "...lives and breathes the opera house, and as its creator, he just has to close his eyes to see it. One person who sneered at the peacemaking was Davis Hughes, an old man like Utzen himself. He phoned the chairman of the Opera House management team and ran for 45 minutes about the very idea of asking Uttsun his opinion on anything.

I did Utsun a favour, he said, I put him out of his misery like you put down a dog. Late in Utsun's life, a British architect named John Party, went to visit him in New Yorker, where he'd spent most of his later years. It was a kind of pilgrimage to meet one of the true greats of architecture. Utsun had designed the home, of course, and party described it as... Glare-free hush that seemed to transport me to another world. They talked about this and that. The old man expressed the occasional pain at the Opera House of Fair, but this was all a long time ago. He said, Utsun had never been back to Sydney. He designed the

most beautiful building of the 20th century, and had never seen it. Sensing that Utsun had left some part of his heart in Sydney, party offered to help the old man travel back. Utsun's wife pulled party aside. That wasn't possible, she said. It would kill him. Did she mean the arduous journey? Or did she mean the memories? Important sources for this episode were The House by Helen Pitt and The Saga of Sydney Opera House by Peter Murray. If you're interested in Bent Flubier and Mega Project, I have a three-part series on the V2 Rocket Program.

It's available to subscribers on Pushkin Plus. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com Corsionry Tales is written by me Tim Halford with Andrew Wright It's produced by Alice Finds with support from Edith Husslo The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise Sarah Nicks edited the scripts Corsionry Tales features the voice talents of Rufus Wright, Melanie Gushridge, Ben Crow, Stella Halford and Gemma Saunders.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytel Malard, John Schnarrs, Carly McGleory and Eric Sandler. Corsinary Tales has a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Erie. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at's nothing I can do for you. I can't help you. You need to have your head examined. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. We'll have a new 99PI from us next week.