A Chorus of Contempt at The Sydney Opera House
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he's just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a triumph. The young architect couldn’t have imagined what a bitter victory it would turn out to be...
The Guggenheim in Bilbao; the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; the Shard in London. These days, everyone seems to want an iconic building. But Sydney Opera House was the first, the greatest – and the most painful. It's now fifty years since the Opera House was opened. This is its origin story.
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Transcript
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| 1:10.0 | Pushkin |
| 1:17.6 | In a clearing, in a forest, a day's walk north of Copenhagen stood a little house, |
| 1:24.4 | a fairytale setting worthy of Hans Christian Andersen perhaps. But this is no fairytale, |
| 1:30.6 | and it wasn't a fairytale house. It was low, flat, and minimalist. Denmark's first open plan house. |
| 1:39.2 | It had been built in 1952, without proper floor plans. The house's young architect was building |
| 1:46.2 | his own home and hid insisted instead on personally directing the work as it progressed. |
| 1:52.1 | But it was brilliant. Denmark's most celebrated architect visited the construction site |
| 1:58.6 | and muttered under his breath, hell, he's better than I am. Maybe so. It was hard to be sure. |
| 2:07.1 | The young architect, Jorn Utson, had won plenty of competitions, but with his career interrupted |
| 2:13.5 | by the war, that house was almost the only thing he'd actually built. |
| 2:18.5 | Late in January 1957, the phone in the Utson home rang. Jorn and his wife were taking a |
... |
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