Chapter 7: The Three Stages
Utzon's visit to Sydney in March 1958 was his second of three that year. Days after presenting the Red Book, he and Ove Arup met with Premier Cahill who requested that the work of building the House begin in February the following year.
Seemingly, even at this late stage, there was still a question as to whether the project would really go ahead. In requesting the start of the process of construction, Cahill aimed to eliminate any such doubts.
Ove Arup saw the urgency to break ground and begin the building process quickly as near-sighted political expediency that could only damage the design process and lead to mistakes in the future.
But Cahill was aware that his leadership of the Labor Government was drawing to a close. He was acting to secure the certainty of the building for which he could rightly claim so much authorship.
In response to Cahill, Arup suggested that the construction process be broken down into three stages. This would allow the project to begin with the demolition of the tram sheds and construction of the podium, also known as the substructure, while the architects and engineers continued to resolve the multitude of complex aesthetic and engineering problems concerning the roofs and interiors.
This wonderfully simple division into three stages represents a much deeper nexus in the story of the opera house. It highlights the kinds of conflicts and compromises, between politics and the design and engineering of a masterpiece, that would ultimately shape the building.
Stage One would capture the construction of the podium, and represented the most straightforward of the stages.
Stage 2 would involve the building of the roof, which in 1958 was still understood to be a series of concrete shells, but which by 1962 had evolved into the beautiful vaulted arches we see today. The arches were an outcome of the Spherical Solution which Utzon arrived at in response to the great difficulty encountered in creating the shells.
Stage 3 would be the crafting of the interiors and the glass walls which would seal the House, along with every other detail not covered off in the previous stages. Many have observed that perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story of the opera house lies in the fact that Utzon withdrew before being able to see the magnificent interiors he had designed realised. Stage 3 naturally presented itself as the most architecturally oriented stage of the building, and Utzon's absence from it remains deeply poignant to this day.
Back in 1958, there was unanimous approval for Arup's division of the project which would allow for the building process to start immediately. Bills of quantity could be drawn up, tenders put out for construction and work could begin to Cahill's schedule, in February 1959.
Utzon was required to produce another set of drawings, known as the October Scheme, which filled in a series of details about the podium missing from the Red Book. As the title suggests, these were supplied in October 1958, in preparation for the tender process for building the substructure which began in November.
