The Fifth Facade

"The drawings submitted for this scheme are simple to the point of being diagrammatic," observed the jury in 1957. "Nevertheless, we are convinced that they present a concept of an opera house that is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world."

The goal of the international competition was a design for a cultural center for the rugged city of Sydney, Australia. Winning architect was Denmark's Joern Utzon, now 47, who until then had built only a few housing projects. The drawings seemed a fantasy. In construction, they have proved even more exciting--and difficult to realize.

Cultural Bonanza. Sitting in Sydney's harbor, Utzon's incomplete colossus is composed of three structures with cantile vered rooftops. Since they are seen from passing ships, Utzon conceived of the roofs as "the fifth fa?ade." Into them, he has poured all his inventiveness. The roof lines billow like the spinnakers of a squadron of racing yachts.

Below its roofs, Sydney's opera house shelters spaces to inspire a cultural bonanza. Its two large halls will seat 2,800 and 1,100 respectively. The complex also contains a 300-seat chamber-music room, a 400-seat subterranean experimental theater, and a restaurant that can serve 250 people. There are 19 rehearsal rooms, including one large enough to hold an entire 120-man symphony orchestra. "Big shapes hold no fear for me," says Utzon, whose father was a naval architect.

Criticism centers on the soaring roofs, which conceal the acoustical ceilings. The late Frank Lloyd Wright saw the roofs as so many "circus tents." Critic Lewis Mumford assailed the silhouette as serving "no other purpose than that of demonstrating the esthetic audacity of the designer." Utzon claims that the sails are a necessary departure from functionalism: "One could not have a flat roof filled with ventilation pipes." "I have made a sculpture," he says. "People will sail around it--so they will see it as a round thing, not as a house in a street."

Computer Sculpture. Utzon soon discovered that architecture conceived as sculpture often becomes an engineering nightmare. The sails are all designed as gores taken from a master sphere. V-shaped ribs are cast from master molds on the site. Eventually these neo-Gothic ribs will be sheathed in white tiles, leaving the skeleton visible from beneath. It took three years to adapt Utzon's spherical geometry to actual construction, using computers to ensure that 170-ft. ribs weighing 80 tons would fit to a fraction of an inch.

Construction is already in its seventh year, with an estimated four more years to go. The cost has risen to $54 million. At best, Utzon's opera house will be dedicated seven years late and cost eight times the original estimate. But Utzon is not disturbed. Says he: "Cities have ugly buildings thrown up quickly to bring in a financial return. This opera house should take up to 20 years to build. We're doing it in ten by introducing mass-production methods." After all, he says, "no one counted the cost of building St. Paul's."

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