In the year it is 60 years ago, to work on the iconic sydney opera house in Sydney began.
An opera house, which has since become one of the world’s biggest tourist attractions, where visitors each year flocking to the area to experience the masterpiece and take photographs of the special building.
the Danish Jørn Utzon designed the landmark trademark, as of today, both in the Danish cultural canon and a Unesco world heritage site.
Jørn Utzon won the international design competition launched by the State of New South Wales’ prime minister Joseph Cahill and had thus the honor of designing the opera house.
But Utzon was up against many competitors. Received 233 designbud from 32 countries, as the competition ran in the end of the 1950s.
The only criteria was that the building should contain a large hall with capacity for 3000 people, as well as a smaller hall with capacity for 1200 people. The halls should also be used for different types of performances in opera, choral and orchestral concerts, large meetings, lectures and ballet.
The many designs that, according to Budget Direct was right in the turn after the dane’s masterpiece, looked like far from Jørn Utzon’s more soft and vivid design.
Several of the pictures, which Ekstra Bladet has had access to, similar to the examples of factories or apartment complexes.
Second place went to the Philadelphia Collaborative Group, if the design was a round building with a high scaled windows and a bronzehest-sculpture in the front.
Jørn Utzon won the 5000 australian dollars (AUD) (equivalent today to 352.638 kroner, ed.), while his design ended up to cost 102 million australian dollars to build – the equivalent today to around 1.5 billion EUR (7.2 billion kroner, ed.).
– There is no doubt that the Sydney Opera house is his masterpiece. It is one of the great, iconic buildings from the 20. century, an image of great beauty that has become known all over the world. A symbol not only of a city, but for a whole country and continent.
that was the gist of the reasons, when Jørn Utzon, in 2003, won architecture’s highest distinguished award, the Prizker Architecture Prize, for the work.
Jørn Utzon left the project and Australia in 1966 because of disagreements.
He never returned to see the finished result, and he was never invited or mentioned by name to the opening ceremony in 1973.
Formynderrådet for the opera house took contact with Jørn Utzon in the late 1990s and made him hovedkonsulent in relation to future additions and renovations of the building.
When Jørn Utzon died in 2008 held a state ceremony of remembrance in the concert hall. The architect’s daughter and son, Lin and Jan, attended.