I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
Friday, April 29, 2016
Sails
This is the usual view of the Opera House, with those curved concrete structures dominating everything else. They're usually described as “shells,” but the architect, Jørn Utzon, was inspired by the memory of sails on the water when he was a boy in Denmark, and I like thinking of them as sails over the harbor.
When Utzon's design won the competition in 1957 -- the story is that Eero Saarinen picked it out of the pile of rejects and insisted that it win -- no one, including the architect, had any idea how to actually build the thing. It took until 1963 to figure out that the sails had to be sections of a sphere, rather than the original parabolas, and sizing and placing them required the use of computers, a radical notion in the early Sixties. In 1966, after changes in government and ongoing battles over cost overruns and fees, Utzon resigned and returned to Denmark. He never saw the finished building, and when it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1973, his name wasn't even mentioned at the ceremony. But it did win him the Pritzker Prize for architecture, and he lived to see it declared a World Heritage Site in 2007.
Labels:
architecture,
Australia,
harbor,
Opera House,
shadows,
Sydney,
water
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Blog Archive
-
▼
2016
(393)
-
▼
April
(103)
- Kookaburra
- Wallabies
- Dingoes
- Time for some cuteness
- Faster than a speeding bullet, more dangerous than...
- Answers to questions you never actually asked
- Geometries
- The other icon on the harbor
- It's the small touches as well
- Inside looking out
- Details
- Behind the sails
- Sails
- Catching up at last
- End of the road
- City of Sails
- Auckland
- Kiwiana
- Sean the Barber and other sights in Otorohanga
- Urban poetry
- Stalactites
- A claustrophobe walks into a cave...
- Glow little glowworm, glimmer glimmer
- For example
- Regarding that cultural melding
- Brimstone, anyone?
- Call Rotorua, that's the name
- More picture postcards from Queenstown
- Queenstown
- Mitre Peak
- Two more
- Speaking of Middle Earth
- Obligatory perspective shot
- At the end of the rainbow
- Milford Sound
- Mirror Lake
- More autumn colors
- The seasons are also upside-down
- Mountain drama, continued
- Mountain drama
- Moonrise
- Meanwhile back at Mount Cook
- Whoa, dude, what happened to you?
- The old city
- Re:START Mall
- Damages
- Christchurch
- Mount Cook
- Koala break
- Random things I saw in Sydney
- By way of contrast
- The QVB
- Stories in stone
- Sandstone
- Harbor view
- Botany Bay
- Okay, okay, one Opera House
- Astronomy Tuesday
- Sydney
- Goodbye to the Outback
- The Olgas
- Sunrise at Uluru
- One more
- Erosion
- Because it is there
- Cave art
- Complications
- Uluru
- Red dunes
- On the road again (again)
- Saturday reflections
- Billy tea
- Ghost gum
- Have I mentioned the flies?
- Just one more
- Hopping
- Michael
- Slightly bigger babies
- Speaking of kangaroos
- A few words about the Outback
- Lethal weapons
- A town EXACTLY like Alice
- Okay, two more pictures
- Colors of the reef
- The Great Barrier Reef
- Rain forest
- Barron Gorge
- Hot sauce
- Birdworld
- Kuranda
- Potentially lethal bird blogging
- Cairns
- And we have a winner
- Random things I saw in Melbourne
- Pathfinder
- Only God can make a tree
- Royal Botanical Gardens
- Urban poetry
- More Hosier Lane
- Hosier Lane
-
▼
April
(103)
No comments:
Post a Comment