Chapter 20: Stage 3 Hall, Todd, Littlemore and Farmer
"The best thing would in my opinion be to stop all building when the shells are finished, and let Peter Hall or other persons build an unpretending new concert hall on another site far apart from Bennelong Point. It would leave the Utzon structure unspoiled and be much cheaper. It would also leave all possibilities open for the future..." - 1966, Eiler Rasmussen, Utzon's former teacher.
"Very interesting, but politically impossible" - Davis Hughes.
Before Utzon had left Australia, Davis Hughes and the government architect Ted Farmer began organising the team to take over from him.
Farmer planned to select a partner from two separate firms. David Littlemore would manage construction and, on Davis Hughes' recommendation, Lionel Todd would oversee the contract documentation of the project.
He offered the crucial role of design architect to both Col Madigan and Ken Woolley both turned him down. Farmer then turned his attention to Peter Hall, who had recently assisted him in designing the Goldstein College Dining Hall and had won the prestigious Sulman award.
Prior to taking on the role of design architect to complete Stage 3, Peter Hall had led a charmed life. As a scholarship student at Sydney's prestigious Cranbrook and went on to read a combined architecture and arts degree at Sydney University. At the end of his studies he was awarded a generous travel scholarship which afforded him twelve months in Europe during which time he visited Utzon in Hellebk.
On returning to Australia, Hall went to work for Ted Farmer at the Department of Public Works, resigning in early 1966 to pursue his own practice at which stage Farmer approached him with the offer of the opera house project.
Hall was willing to accept the role on the condition that there was no possibility of Utzon returning. Even so, his appointment was too much for many of his fellow architects who insisted that no one but Utzon should complete Sydney Opera House.
Despite this pressure, after confirming directly with Utzon that he would not be continuing, Hall accepted the position. Eight days later, Utzon and his family left Australia for good.
Quote from Peter Hall to The Daily Mirror, 20th April 1966: "I'm overwhelmed but I think I can finish the Opera House."
Hall, Todd and Littlemore now faced an enormous task. They had to complete the entirety of Stage 3, including the interiors of both halls, as well as the glass walls, and all the incompleted supplementary spaces.
Some weeks after their appointment in late April, the three architects reviewed the work left to them in Utzon's wake and were unanimously shocked by what they found.
There were sketches and designs, rather than the appropriate documentation they were expecting to find. There were no groups of working drawings, nor were there the crucial drawings illustrating Utzon's most recent thinking. They were all missing, along with around 5,000 sketches and drawings, having been placed in storage by Utzon's office assistant, Bill Wheatland, where there they would remain largely unseen until 1972.
Quote from Prip-Buus' letter to his parents, 3 April 1966: ... They have only been given prints of old drawings relating to what has been built and nothing on all the new parts...
Understandably, when Peter Hall had accepted the job he was under the impression that he would be following Utzon's plans. So it came as a massive shock for him to now discover that the scope of the work required would be on a much larger scale.
Hall spent the following months overseas visiting Utzon's consultants, including Ove Arup and Jack Zunz and acousticians Cremer and Gabler, and also Willem Jordan with whom he collaborated on the halls. He also visited various concert halls in Japan, Europe and America.
Back in Sydney in 1966, Hall and his partners worked through the requirements to establish a new brief for Stage 3. It would need to incorporate the revised requirements of the principal users of Sydney Opera House, particularly the Australian Broadcasting Commission which, the government insisted, should be convinced that changing its venue from Sydney Town Hall would be worthwhile. The ABC required both a sufficient concert hall in which the Sydney Symphony Orchestra could perform in front of 2,800 people and an appropriate recording environment.
Quote from acoustic consultant Cremer in a letter to Hall, 30th August 1966: "It is a pity that the ABC had not stated these requirements before the competition in 1957. This would have avoided the principal difficulties of the project which arise from the planning of two multipurpose halls of different capacity."
By December 1966, Hall, Todd and Littlemore submitted their proposals for Stage 3. They recommended the main hall be designed purely for concerts and not as it had always been in the original brief a dual-purpose venue. When Hughes accepted their approach, Ove Arup wrote to Minister Hughes, dismayed that the decision was only now being made, when the previous requirements had created so many profound problems for Utzon, and been the cause his deepest problems when dealing with his inexperienced client, their committees and panels of assessors.
Ove Arup to Davis Hughes, 28 March 1967: "I understand that your Government has now finally decided to abandon the idea of using the Major Hall for opera. It is a very dramatic almost one might say, tragic decision because it makes a nonsense of the whole form of the shells, which were meant to house the stage tower."
The significance of the change was profound not just because it alleviated the complexity of having to create a dual-purpose hall with different reverberation times for opera and concerts, but because it also meant that the stage machinery already installed beneath the shell structure would have to be demolished.
The decision had further implications, defining at the time a hierarchy for the performing arts in which opera and theatre were subordinate to concert production. Opera productions were consigned to the minor hall, and theatre to the smaller spaces within the podium, beneath the main hall.
In February 1967, Stage 2 was officially completed at a total cost of $13,165,955. In a letter that month to The Australian newspaper, Jørn Utzon appealed to Davis Hughes to let him finish his work on the opera house. Premier Askin rejected the offer as 'impractical'.
Weeks later, using material provided by Bill Wheatland, one of Utzon's strongest supporters Elias-Duek Cohen published Utzon and the Sydney Opera House, in which he defended the architect and his work and argued that Utzon had been unfairly treated by the government. But it was all too late.
It was approaching two years since Hall, Todd and Littlemore had submitted their recommendations for Stage 3 to Davis Hughes, when the architects advised the Minister in September 1968 that Sydney Opera House would cost a further $85 million and would be completed by the end of 1972.
Despite stringent and detailed project management, the final cost in 1972 was $102 million dollars, a very distant figure to the original estimate of 3.5 million Australian pounds envisaged in 1957.
In March 1969, the Sydney Opera House (Amendment) Bill was passed. The Bill stated that to date $32,000,000 had already been spent and that a total of $85,000,000 would be allocated to complete the project. In contrast to the tone of his dealings with Utzon when he was Minister for Public Works, Norman Ryan now used the opportunity of the financial debate to strongly defend Utzon.
Norman Ryan, March 1969: "I believe the sacking of Utzon was the greatest tragedy that happened in the history of the Opera House... We know that, from the outside, the building is an architectural masterpiece. The building will be false if the present plans are implemented. It will be architecturally false: it will not be the building it should have been."
Whether this was remorse or political jockeying is hard to say, but for all the previous complaints about soaring costs that Ryan had levelled against Utzon, the cost of Stage 3 alone would now dwarf the expenditure of the previous two stages.
Nevertheless, at the time of its opening the concert hall was celebrated for its world class acoustics, and in 2004 continued to attain high ranking in Leo Beranek's index of 58 Concert Halls across the world.
Despite being maligned by contemporaries for taking on Stage 3 in Utzon's absence, Peter Hall, alongside Lionel Todd and David Littlemore had achieved considerable success overseeing the construction of the two halls, interior spaces and glass walls. Finally, between 1968 and 1973 Sydney Opera House emerged as a finished building.
The accomplishment came, however, at great personal cost to Hall who, despite recognition for his achievements a full quarter century after he completed Stage 3, never recovered from the antipathy shown towards him by so many of his peers in the architectural, design and cultural communities. The project of achieving Sydney Opera House had exacted a terrible cost from so many, and Peter Hall was not left unscathed.
