Chapter 2 - 1956, The Year Of The Competition
On the 15th February 1956, Premier Joe Cahill released a competition programme and guidelines for 'a national opera house at Bennelong Point.'
As the overall brief for the project, the programme would inevitably change in the years to come and each change would ultimately define the opera house of today.
Upon registering for the competition and paying the fee of 10 Australian pounds, competitors received the printed brief the Brown Book.
The competition wouldn't close until December, with judging to begin a few weeks later in January 1957. Jørn Utzon's design was numbered 218 one of the last of over 220 entries received from 28 countries.
In early March 1956, within weeks of the competition opening, two separate events took place that would profoundly affect the two men behind the earliest conception of Sydney Opera House.
For Joe Cahill, the news was good. His government had again triumphed at the State elections. Labor had now been in power for 15 years and Cahill had been premier for four.
Around the same time, the recently knighted Sir Eugene Goossens having just finished visiting opera houses in Vienna and Hamburg was returning to Australia to present his findings to the Opera House Executive Committee.
However, landing in Sydney on March 9th, Goossens was detained at the airport and eventually arrested, charged with concealment of illegal materials. Goosens pled guilty to the charges and by the end of March he left Australia for Rome, travelling under the name Mr E Gray.
Many were greatly disappointed by Goossens' departure, but his absence did not affect the growing momentum of the Opera House. Directed by a government newly returned to power it was now emerging as a civic project of great cultural significance.
Some weeks later, Jørn Utzon celebrated his 38th birthday in Denmark, and set to work on his Opera House designs for the competition. Utzon had been in partnership with Eric Andersson since 1952 and they initially collaborated on the project. Later, Utzon emerged as primary author of the design, and it was submitted in his name only.
Competition entries were to be judged by a panel of four architects. Harry Ashworth, the organising judge, was joined by Mr Cobden Parkes, the government architect, and Sir Leslie Martin, head of architecture at Cambridge University. The fourth judge was the eminent American architect Eero Saarinen, who already knew Utzon quite well.
Judging began on a Monday December 7th. Saarinen arrived four days later by which time his colleagues had between them narrowed down the field of over 200 competitors.
There is no precise record of how the winning design was finally chosen, and accounts vary as to the extent to which Eero Saarinen was insistent on the winner. A popular story is that Saarinen was underwhelmed by the already shortlisted entrants, and pulled Utzon's entry out of a pile of rejected schemes, exclaiming that it was easily the winning design. The anecdote is likely to have at least been close to the truth.
Saarinen's enthusiasm for Utzon's design was directly related to a commission he'd been working on for what would become his most famous building, the TWA Passenger Terminal at what is now known as John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York.
In 1954, at the beginning of the commercial jet era, Port of New York Authorities had given Trans World Airlines permission to develop a passenger terminal at what was then Idlewild Airport. TWA commissioned Saarinen and Associates to design the terminal in 1956.
By the time of judging, Saarinen would have begun thinking about the form of his celebrated shell structure, which would be strikingly resonant with Utzon's original submission drawings.
Another eminent American architect, Cesar Pelli, at the time a young associate working on the TWA building, later recalled he had no doubt that the similar aesthetics between the two designs resonated strongly with Saarinen.
Although none of the judges would have supported a design they were not enthusiastic about, Saarinen's influence as the most prestigious of the four architects would have been significant.
Sir Leslie Martin, designer of London's Royal Festival Hall, was also particularly enthusiastic about Utzon's design, with Ashworth and Parkes content to follow the recommendations of the more experienced men.
Their Assessor's Report read: "We have returned again and again to the study of these drawings and are convinced that they present a concept of an Opera House which is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world... Because of its very originality, it is clearly a controversial design. We are however, absolutely convinced of its merits."
On the afternoon of Tuesday 29th of January, 1957, Premier Cahill announced the winning design at The National Art Gallery as "218" and at the request of Stan Havilland had to reach back into the envelope to read out the name of the winning competitor, Jørn Utzon, a 38 year old Dane, from Hellebk in Denmark.
