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Utzon's Unfinished Masterpiece

The rediscovery of these two photos of mine taken with the small Panasonic DMC-FS7 in 2012 was quite a revelation. I will grant that these are not snapshots - I hope it is possible to see the difference. But my compositional emphasis on line and form certainly comes to the fore here. The camera performed extremely well for its limitations.

 

The Sydney Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon (1918-2008) after winning a competition staged by the NSW government in 1957. From then on however, the whole process was a nightmare for the architect as he was constantly harassed by political interests to have certain parts of the building redesigned to save costs. Utzon resigned in disgust on February 28, 1966, and never visited Australia again.

 

Essentially the exterior of the building complied with Utzon's radical design, but the interior was never completed as planned. A cheaper alternative meant poorer acoustics than would be expected in a landmark building such as this. In recent years considerable work has been done to right these wrongs, and the Opera House is now almost the masterpiece that Utzon intended.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B8rn_Utzon

 

FOOTNOTE: Quite hilariously an architecture group just rejected this photograph. Flickr really does have some idiot group admins doesn't it! Probably because I didn't include the whole building. But that's why this is a composed photograph. The point of the ship is to highlight the comparison with the "sails" of the building!

 

 

 

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Uploaded on February 18, 2023
Taken on February 19, 2012