A Chorus of Contempt at The Sydney Opera House

09/15/23 • 40 min

5 Listeners

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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For a full list of sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - A Chorus of Contempt at The Sydney Opera House

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.369

Pushkin. In a clearing in a forest a day'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 nineteen fifty two without proper floor plans. The house's young architect was building his own home, and he had insisted instead on personally direc