Sydney Opera House (Documentary)

Australia's Sydney Opera House. One of the greatest design concepts ever conceived. A shape so complex that it nearly can't be built. A construction process on the very edge of impossible. But the history of this building is more than one of concrete and steel. It is the story of a broken dream, a fallen hero, and a final chapter that is about to be unfurled. Sydney, Australia. Bustling modern super city. Lifestyle capital of the world. Beaches, suntans, and a giant glittering harbour as the city's beating heart. But mention Sydney to anyone and it's not this they think of. It's this. A building that both defines and is defined by the city that surrounds it. It's awesome. It's gorgeous. A very good place for me. It's like some kind of alien basis or something. It is designed in such a way which reflects the mentality of the progress of Australian people who are of multilingual, multinational culture. The Sydney Opera House is simple in concept, yet infinitely complex in design. A performance space that marries the realms of form and function like no other structure ever built. Yet few people realize the drama that surrounds its creation. Designed nearly 50 years ago, it is a building that rewrote the record books. Changing not just the way we design buildings, but how we build them as well. It couldn't have been built at any other time. It actually extended the boundaries of imagination for architectural form. The shells alone will take 150,000 man hours to design. This is more than just an engineering riddle. It is an engineering nightmare. Yet from the most complex of problems will come the simplest of solutions. Having worked on that job, from then on I always knew that I could solve the most complex of engineering problems. You just know. A solution that will change forever the borders of impossible. Designed by Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, the human story of the Sydney Opera House is one of triumph, drama, and heartache. Of challenging the very laws of nature. If he came up with a better idea, he had no hesitation of scrapping all the previous work. He wanted perfection. You had to create something like a sculpture which could be seen from all sides. It sits in a harbor with buildings of a square character and you don't want to have the name Opera House written on it. You want to see this is an opera house like you see this is a church. But behind the story of the masterpiece is the story of the disaster. He wanted to do things one way, the government another. Budgets blowing out by 1500 percent. Timelines stretching from five years to 14. And a visionary architect who doesn't just leave the building, he leaves the country. Well I wonder if you ever lose a child, if that ever goes. I doubt it. This is Jørn Utzon. There's in fact nothing I would like more than to come back and finish the Opera House as it was conceived. And to this day the mastermind Jørn Utzon still hasn't seen the building finished. That building was his life's work and and to be deprived of finishing it was you know it broke his heart. 30 years after their ruin, Jørn Utzon's broken dreams are about to be rebuilt. There were some compromises and those I think the time has come to fix those. Future plans coming not just from the man himself but from his son as well. They asked my father would you please consider coming back and help us with this problem. Jørn Utzon, an accomplished architect in his own right, is helping to devise schemes that will see his father's creation flourish not just for the coming decades but for the coming centuries. But who was Jørn Utzon and what makes him so special? Architect Rick Laplastria is one of Utzon's employees and close friend during the construction of the Opera House. To him it's not just about design it's about perspective. You know Utzon had an incredibly good understanding of nature. He had a structural understanding of it. He also had the understanding of how we feel in its presence whether it's on flat plain of the sea or whether it's on the Windy Ridge or whether it's down in the dunes. He had an understanding of the feeling that that impacts upon the human personality. Consulting Sydney Harbour Marine Charts and without having ever set foot in Australia let alone the proposed construction site at Bennelong Point, Jørn Utzon develops his scheme. If you saw a list of all the stuff that's needed there you'd say how the hell can I solve this complex problem? But he said no he said we make a platform. The platform houses all the interstices of the the workings where the artists prepare. The top of the platform is where they perform to the public and the roof is the shelter. The benefit of this approach is that the building does more than just fit the landscape. It becomes the landscape. But I wanted to make the whole peninsula one piece of architecture down to the water. As part of an international competition from some of the biggest names in world design Jørn Utzon's plan is a revelation. I mean it's just such a simple building you could draw it on the on your thumbnail. It's that simple and yet it's so complex. Powers of reductive thinking, brilliant man. Bennelong Point is one of the most prominent headlines of Sydney harbour. Visible from not just multiple angles around the site but from above as well. Inspired by a similar landscape near his home in Denmark Utzon develops a concept dubbed the fifth facade. A way of looking at his design not just from the front back or sides but from everywhere. You know the word invention it means in the veneer to go to the heart heart of a problem. It doesn't mean that it's something new it's going to the core of a problem. Judges unanimously award Utzon first prize. At only 38 he is relatively young. The opera house will be his first major international project. Little does he know it will almost be his last. The radical shape of the Sydney opera house is unlike anything that has ever been built before. With today's technology it would still be a challenge but 50 years ago when it was first designed it borders on impossible. Each platform in engineering you always build on the past you know as people go through and they see certain things work then they know that the next step is a little beyond that perimeter where you've been before but to jump right out into space that can be scary at times. John Nutt's team of engineers are a group of remarkable maths and physics wizards charged with giving structure and strength to Utzon's amazing design. The whole thing in this building is that architecture, engineering, construction all merge into one so you never quite know you know where the boundaries of one are and that's the that's one of the aspects of great architecture. Unlike a regular building where strength can be found in simple straight lines vertical walls and geometric angles the sails of the Sydney opera house are a maze of curves and complex geometry. The ideal form for the opera house is some kind of shell structure but making one that's both 20 stories tall and strong enough to hold its own weight has simply never been done before. On this job there are a number of things that didn't work as far as the curvature is concerned for instance if you look at the ridge lines there's a ridge line and there's a and it's a very sharp one shells don't like that when you look at the shells they come down and they're sitting on points didn't like that if you look at the shells and he was doing his having very large curvatures where the weights were heaviest and it doesn't like that. Engineers are in catch 22 how to make the sails of the opera house light elegant and strong the answer lies not just in materials but in geometry. A shell structure is like an egg you know if you want to break an egg you tap it but you can actually squeeze an egg you know really quite hard behind things and because all the forces are in that double curved shape it doesn't it doesn't break. The curves of the early designs are incomplete leaving them vulnerable to collapse. Over a period of three years nearly every geometric trick in the book is tried tested and failed. Elaborate structural tests planned the shape has to allow weight and force to be distributed evenly across the building structure. The task is so big that some of the world's earliest computers are used to crunch the numbers for the first time ever in a construction project. For Utzon the pressure is immense although guideline plans for the base of the building have been started they can't be finalized without knowing what's going on top and if a solution to the sails isn't found then the Sydney Opera House arguably the most groundbreaking design scheme of the 20th century simply won't be built. In 1958 Utzon meets with key Opera House politician Joe Carle. Carle faces a political massacre at his next election and his opponents are certain to drop the entire Opera House scheme unless construction has already begun. Utzon is faced with a dire conundrum start building before the plans are ready or don't start building at all. Construction manager Malcolm Nicklin is in charge of the Opera House site as excavations begin. For a man whose life largely revolves around details starting work on the job prematurely is anything but an easy task. You can't start building a huge project like that until you've sat down and done some detailed designs. The unique roof of the Opera House requires a carefully planned base on which to sit but because engineers are still struggling with the design of the sails John Utzon can't finalize plans for the rest of the building below. All I saw were freehand sketches of the so-called sails. I thought my gosh how on earth do you design them and how do you build them? As far as I knew nothing like that had ever been built before so there was a learning curve to climb there were new technologies to be found and the time available just didn't seem to be enough to me. On the 2nd of March 1959 only two and a half years after the design was conceived a ceremony is held to mark the official start of construction. Left with no choice Utzon has selected what he thinks will be the lesser of two evils and started building before his plans are ready. The design was being developed as they were building now that's a disaster normally. I hope that doesn't happen to other people. Despite the lack of information early construction moves forward on stage one the podium of the Opera House. Ian McKenzie is the on-site engineer charged with turning the complex design and engineering drawings into construction plans and faced with scant information from day one his task is a huge one. It's like working from the from the outside in if you like you know you can say go to Australia, go to Sydney, go to a certain area in the city of Sydney and you can you know you're refining your detail all the time. In effect when I came out here all we had was the equivalent of go to Australia. Engineers are forced to use estimation and assumption rather than research and fact. There were probably half a dozen preliminary drawings and that was all. In fact we were sort of digging in the middle of the area that we knew had to be excavated for the basement but there wasn't any firm indication as to how much we had to extend the pit at all. By late 1962 stage one is well underway. Already the Sydney Opera House is behind schedule and well over budget. No viable solution to the design of the shells has yet been found and if one doesn't arrive soon then Utzon's dream and the building itself will rapidly turn into a nightmare. It was like the blind leading the blind I hesitate to say that but it was you know and a bit of fair bit of trial and error too. Really it started somewhere between one and two years earlier than it should have. Design engineers are finding it impossible to create delicate looking curves that will stand their own weight let alone the forces of nature. The design of the Sydney Opera House requires multiple sails of different looking shape and size but different looking doesn't necessarily have to mean different entirely. Ironically the solution to the riddle of the opera house sails lies not in complexity but in simplicity in the purest and strongest curve of them all the sphere. Spheres are inherently strong because of their even surfaces and curvature. This allows weight and stress to be passed around the shape evenly spreading loads and forces across the whole structure rather than specific points. Legend has it that the answer to the riddle of the sails comes from the simple story of a man peeling an orange in a work break. He realizes that by changing the angles and size of peels from the one orange shapes can be created that look dramatically different but aren't. Every different sail of the opera house can be made not just from the same concept but from the exact same sphere. Anybody can make a complicated thing look complicated the clever thing is to make a complicated thing look simple. The keys to understanding the most dynamic looking building ever made have just been found. The man with the orange of course is Jorn Utzon. Construction of the Sydney Opera House takes place in three stages. Stage one the base of the building or podium. Stage two the sails and stage three the interiors. The so-called spherical solution allows architects and engineers to complete the podium and begin preparations for stage two. For Utzon one of the greatest obstacles of his life has been overcome. If we could do build these enormous shells of small prefab elements and just have to assemble the whole thing on the side. The sails will be a milestone in his career. Little does he know he will never get to see them complete. Shiny tiles these people are having one enemy life it's the law of gravity. The podium of the Sydney Opera House is made largely of concrete molded in position using wooden formwork. But the size and the shape of the opera house sails makes applying this type of technique next to impossible. Like many things to do with the Sydney Opera House the solution to this problem is both incredibly simple yet incredibly complex to put in place. Because each sail is now the product of a sphere with exactly the same radius their form can be broken down into a series of geometrically identical segments or ribs. Ribs of different lengths can be joined creating shapes that look dramatically different but aren't. Only really when the design changed to a spherical form that it was realized that you could then get repetition. You didn't build it as a shell you built it as a series of ribs. Much like Lego the ribs themselves can then be made of smaller segments. The more segments the longer the rib. Ribs of different lengths making different shaped shells. The Sydney Opera House isn't just a marvel of design it is a marvel of construction as well. John Kooner is a construction engineer overseeing the erection of the opera house sails. Turning piles of concrete and steel into a solid integrated roof. If you're doing things in the vertical situation it would have been a lot easier to start there but life is not that easy you had to start where you started and that was I think a degree of difficulty that nobody anticipated. The challenge is to create a construction method that will allow both precision as well as mass repetition. To do this engineers precast the rib segments in giant moulds on site. Producing over 2,000 individual segments in a process known as continuous casting. Normal cranes and vertical erection methods will not work with a building like the opera house. A unique curved erection arch is designed to work on multiple angles and heights. Lifting each rib segment into place and following the growing shell in a continuous workflow. But as an entirely new process it's anything but easy. First experience we had was actually erecting this particular segment here and that was a segment that had to be erected on the side sail arch that was the first one that went in. That would take us probably took us two days to repair for it and then once you got it in and we sat back and said great it took us another three days before we got the next one in and after that we gradually worked and became more efficient. Six years into construction the unmistakable form of the Sydney Opera House is taking shape. The largest shell is finished to within an accuracy of less than 12 millimetres. But the many challenges of building this amazing structure are far from complete. John Cooner and his colleagues have refined their techniques from only placing one rib segment every three days to placing up to 14 in a single day. But despite their efficiency the curves and complexity of the opera house make it a dangerous place to work and disaster can strike when you least expect it. Normally you would strap this arch back to the ribs that have been erected behind and for some unknown reason all the supports have been taken off because there was no weight on them and the arch was just standing there. The massive erection arch is left dangerously unsupported. A gust of wind came and the arch half the arch flipped and it sheared the joint of the top. The entire top section of the erection arch plummets to the ground. Miraculously no one is killed. Something that we should have foreseen is one of those things that that happened. Fortunately nobody was hurt. The accident serves as a valuable reminder the remarkable shells of the Sydney Opera House sail dangerously close to the unknown. Woodson's vision for the exterior of the sails is to create something that will last under the harsh Australian environment but will also respond to the changing mood and light around it like a mountain capped in glistening snow. Ceramic tiles are chosen for both their durability and texture but to gain the right look they have to be arranged in complex diagonal patterns. To do this over 1 million ceramic tiles are laid on pre-moulded plates before being placed on the sails. Pattern, texture and colour combine. Many pieces, one effect. Bit by bit the sails of the Opera House grow. The skyline of Sydney is being changed forever. For Woodson the realisation of his dream is in sight but dark clouds are building. For three years Woodson has been developing complex plans for the Opera House interiors. Bold schemes using plywood as a key ingredient. But despite progress his plans are behind schedule and many believe that the job has simply become too big for one man. He found it very difficult to delegate. It was his project. It was like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel I think. Sydney architect Michael Tomaszewski is working for Woodson as negotiations with the state government of New South Wales. The body paying for the Opera House begin to sour. It was the most exciting building in the world at the time and to have the opportunity to work on the building and to work with Woodson was an amazing experience. Experience of a lifetime. Woodson's plans for the Opera House interiors involve complex shapes, materials and procedures all of which require extensive research and planning to develop. He always felt that you know a concept is not architecture it's just a concept and before it becomes architecture it's got to be really really worked out. Woodson is treading entirely new ground in the world of design but this quest for perfection is taking time and money and with the start date for construction for the interiors looming the government intervenes. The day came where Woodson said look we can keep on going for another week after that you know I have no more money we were all prepared to work for nothing but Woodson wouldn't have it. You can't you can't do without prototypes if you're doing something that has never been done before you know I mean you don't go and just build a Concorde airplane in a big shed somewhere right you set up all the pieces and you've got to have precedents and if you don't have precedents you have to make mock-ups and the government held money back from that. Woodson makes a desperate bluff with an informal resignation but his bluff is called sacking resignation call it what you will. On April 28, 1966 Woodson leaves Australia. To this day he has never returned. Jorn Woodson's departure from the Sydney Opera House design team leaves the future of the building in jeopardy. Groups of local architects and Woodson supporters protest and lobby in the hope that he can return. Woodson himself writes letters asking to be reinstated but it's not to be. Having worked on the project for about nine years at that time he was convinced that it was would be so hard for somebody else to take it over that the government wouldn't dare to sack him. To many not the least Woodson himself the situation is a disaster. It's impossible to make any conditions for my return I must negotiate and I'm very willing to do this. A team of local architects led by Peter Hall are charged with finishing the job but the task ahead of them is a huge one. As a matter of urgency they have to learn every detail and concept behind one of the most complex buildings ever designed and controversy and criticism hound their every move. If Matisse had a painting incomplete who would ever finish it? Picasso wouldn't have dared, huh? Let alone Brohart, right? It would have been a bloody disaster. Woodson's elaborate plans for the interiors of the building are scrapped and replaced. Purpose designed stage machinery demolished. If I've got a regret it's that the building wasn't left there then at that in that situation as 21 million dollars worth of sculpture and they'd taken the the 80 odd million that they still had to spend to get it complete found another site put up a totally functional building and had an opera house there so you had an opera house and a sculpture that would have been great. For Woodson it is his darkest hour. My interiors were created before the exteriors and they are one thing you can't separate them so you have you will destroy the harmony in the building the flow of the spaces completely and you're altering the program. But like all truly great monuments the structure itself rises above the time and the mere mortals that create it. Construction continues and over a period of seven years the opera house inches forward. Finally on October 20th 1973 after 14 years of construction and 100 million dollars the Sydney Opera House opens. The dramas and the difficulties seem to fade but as brilliant as it is the interiors of the building are not those of its creator. Woodson's vision and plans have been changed substantially and for many although construction may be finished on the building the masterpiece is not yet complete. Andrew Nicol is an acoustician specializing in designing large performance halls. According to him the opera theatre although being perfectly fine to look at is not so perfect to listen to. Compared to other international opera theatres it has a much what we call a drier acoustic less reverberant. Like an expert mechanic Andrew is able to analyze and fine-tune a building not just how it looks but how it sounds. Music needs to blend together to create what we as as human beings interpret as a beautiful sound when all the frequencies and all the notes come together and we recognize that as the sound we enjoy. The sound inside a building is an extremely complex interplay between the size and shape of the space as well as the materials used to make it. Like light sound waves can reflect bend and dampen depending on what they run into. The Sydney Opera House Opera Theatre as it stands is a compromise between what will work and what will fit in. You go there and it's as if you hear music in your car radio and if you haven't heard music anywhere else it's it's very good but if you compare it to other places it comes way down on the list of the good opera houses in the world. Jørn Utzon's original plans for the opera house interiors are vastly different to the ones we see today but the question is would they be better? His challenge was to create spaces that both looked and sounded perfect but could also be squeezed into the unusual shapes of his design. Rick Laplastria is working with Utzon as plans for his interiors begin to take shape. He was walking on this very headland one day and it was winter early morning light and he looked to see and he saw the broad band of light coming off and he said to himself if I transpose that situation and reverse it and the sun becomes the singer and the theatre ceilings become the undulating surface of the sea then surely the sound in the way that the light is coming to our eyes will go evenly to all the people. If sound follows a similar path as light then the audience will hear the music if the ceiling is shaped like the curves of ocean waves. And the report came back unfortunately in German and nobody read it almost a perfect acoustic resolution that was the one that should have been built. The halls of the opera house were to be the crown jewels of Utzon's designs crown jewels that would never see the light of day. He did both the theatres the opera theatre and the concert theatre one was to be in the colours of red and gold the colours of the sun and the opera theatre was to be in blue and silver the colours of the moon and us. Despite its flaws the opera house remains one of the world's great venues Thousands of people see performances here every day. Millions of tourists walk its forecourts every year. From the sheer numbers alone the pressure on the building is huge. Pressure which over time takes its toll on services interiors and furnishings. Joe Skrzynski is chairman of the opera house as the day-to-day wear and tear on the building begins to become an issue. I think the view we took would be that there's no difference to the great cathedrals of Europe. This building should be there for 500 years 600 700 years there's no reason why it shouldn't and during that time clearly if it remains a performing arts centre rather than just being locked up and becoming a museum then it'll have to be refurbished in a fairly significant way every 50 to 100 years. Renovate a building of this stature and of this complexity. The obvious place to start is with the person that knows it best. So we were turning our minds to a program for preventative maintenance conservation but also development of the building and when once you started thinking about that it was glaringly obvious that you Utsen was still alive and how are we planning all this without his involvement. Joe and his colleagues lay out a detailed plan yet it's their first challenge which is perhaps their greatest. In order to fix one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century they'll first have to fix relations with its architect. Well there's a degree of caution you know he'd he'd obviously had many hurts you know over the years and I think he needed to be convinced that we weren't just inviting him back in his twilight years to sprinkle holy water on whatever we wanted to do anyway. A delegate from a Sydney-based architectural firm is sent to Denmark to make contact. Our message to Jørn to say what we wanted him to do is to come back and to set out the principles of the design of the building so that anybody working on this building in the next 500 years would have that as their guide. After two days of talks the answer from Jørn Utsen is no. But on the third and final day Utsen comes back with a yes. The architect that went away has returned and the final chapter of this man-made marvel is about to be put in place. With the reinstatement of architect Jørn Utsen as head designer of the Sydney Opera House one of history's great design stories has come full circle. The chance for one of the 20th century's greatest architects to recapture the dream of his life's major work and the chance for one of the world's greatest buildings to be finished the way it was meant to be. We are of course tremendously grateful for the chance to be involved again with Opera House but I also know that one day we won't be anymore and my father won't be anymore but then after that there will be other people involved in that. Tragically Jørn Utsen is now too old to travel but his legacy will live on and ultimately grow. His newly refined design principles will allow the Sydney Opera House to adapt and evolve into the future while still maintaining the vital ideas that created it. If we just invite architects in to do all these changes whenever they have to occur and new ones then in 50 years time the Opera House will not look like the Opera House anymore. But in order for the Sydney Opera House to move forward into the future its plans must be dug up from the past. Stuart Bull is a young engineer charged with creating one of the most complex digital design models ever made. A complete 3D model of every tiny detail of the Sydney Opera House. It's a bit like an iceberg a lot more beneath our feet than what you actually see. Already six years into his work Stuart estimates he's still only 50 percent done. There's nothing that comes close in terms of what I've seen in my engineering life so far. With the help of Stuart's models small renovations have already been done on the western colonnade as well as what's now known as the Utsen room. But the big jobs redesigning the halls will be another problem entirely. The objective isn't to replicate Utsen's original designs but to expand on them to use today's technology and ideas to create concert halls for tomorrow. We looked at this we can enhance it but but it's just like putting lipstick on the face it's nothing it doesn't really change anything and then we came up with we have come up with a project that will drastically improve the venue as a world-class venue for opera but it involves a lot of work and it involves unfortunately also a lot of money. Unfortunately for the Sydney Opera House the very factors that make it unique also make it difficult to modify. If we want to increase the volume of the venue we cannot go up we cannot go out to sides we can only go down. Top secret plans are being developed but with no choice but to dig down major structural tie beams will have to be relocated potentially destabilizing the roof. It is now thought possible that you can cut those tie beams and replace them with downward beams that will do the job and that won't be a trivial engineering exercise I think would be a fascinating engineering exercise in its own right but it's doable. The cost is expected to run into hundreds of millions of dollars and the works may close the opera theatre for up to two years. But what price for an icon? Although its past is checkered with controversy and drama the structure itself outshines it all. If the few things that now appear to be the greatest crisis of all time that the place is not good enough if some of those can be changed now let's face it how long are we looking for 100 years 150 years there's a lot more histories to be written I think before that. The Opera House represents the ingenuity of mankind and the resilience of the human spirit to triumph over impossible odds. At that time you could stand in the pit where the stage platform had going to be you were looking right up at the underside of the shell and it was a most marvelous volume you had ever seen in your life and it was it was like a sculpture the best sculpture I've ever seen. Jørn Utzon may never have seen his Opera House complete yet his achievement remains. Who dared to go where no one has gone before to challenge the unknown and break new frontiers to dream of the impossible and win. He sees the building in his mind's eye and through the photographs that he sees in a way that satisfies him. I'm sure somewhere it would be great for him to put his hand on the shells and stand there and feel this building.