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| GO TO: |
| SAW 1 -- SYDNEY SAW 2 - UTZON SAW 3 - HARBOURINGS SAW 4 - ART, PLACE & LANDSCAPE Custom Walks |
| WHEN |
| every wednesday and saturday at 10.30am with occasional walks scattered throughout the month. see dates for upcoming walks or download our winter timetable |
| MEET |
| all walks start at the museum of sydney (MoS), corner bridge & phillip street's, sydney - one block south of circular quay station. allow at least 2 hours for each walk. |
| COST |
| $35 / $25 concession + hht members [includes entry to museum of sydney] |
| CUSTOM WALKS |
| we are happy to arrange walks around your particular interests and time frame. at SAW we are all architects. click here for more information on group walks. |
| i
like fighting gravity. magic is essential in architecture |
| god
help us all! i suppose this reckless design was chosen because it exhibits
neither rhyme nor reason for it's purpose. this circus tent is not architecture
but absurd effloresence |
| an
inorganic fantasy that confirms the folly of competitions [frank lloyd wright | again! | see SAW2] |
| nothing
more than a magnificent doodle [robert hughes | on utzon's competition drawings for the sydney opera house | see SAW2] |
| the
danish gary cooper, only better looking! [australian womens weekly describing the striking 38 year-old, 6b-wielding, opera house architect jørn utzon on his arrival to sydney | see SAW2] |
| looking
at a gothic church, you never get tired, you will never be finished with
it - when you pass around it or see it against the sky. it is as if something
new goes on all the time and it is so important - the interplay is so
important that together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes
a living thing [joern utzon | in zodiac 14 | see SAW2] |
| and
then came jørn utzon - a man of great dignity and deep intelligence.
he seemed able to reduce the most complicated issues to simple terms -
an essential drawing of the opera house could be on your thumbnail. his
appreciation of natural phenomena was acute. he was able to transpose
these qualities into architecture without direct imitation. he grew up
in the reflected light of the shipyard in aalborg, with his naval architect
father, so his understanding of complex curved forms was complete. he
taught me to read the sections of a yacht hull by shifting stance off
its centre line - and he talked of harmony. but above all he understood
the power of the ancient "sites", whose original use have been
lost and exist now, entirely unto themselves as places of great beauty.
places of les murray's "perpetual dimension". jørn utzon
has made one for us in sydney. [richard leplastrier | 2004 spirit of nature | award acceptance speech] |
| human
beings experience their surroundings in different degrees. if you have
an extreme sensitivity to the impact of light and shapes, and the colour
and space that surrounds you, then you have the inherent qualities of
an architect or artist [jørn utzon] |
| the
concept requires the structure + architecture to be one [jørn utzon | sydney opera house architect | see SAW2] |
| the
sun did not know how beautiful it's light was, until it was reflected
off this building [louis kahn | referring to the ceramic skin of the sydney opera house] |
| "Sometimes I have thought I could wear some lipstick and a wig and go back to Australia as a woman. I would really like to see it but I would say it is very different from what I designed. I have seen many pictures and it's a completely different building. It is impossible to finish the design. This cannot be done. They would have to tear down a hell of a lot of things and close the Opera House down for some years. This would not be fair to the people of Sydney." |
| Sydney's
White Elephant? the sydney morning herald (smh), june 1962 Opera House Estimate Ludicrous the daily mirror, august 1962 Utzon Given Deadline the sun, july 1964 State Govt. Gravely Concerned smh, september 1965 Angry Clash On Fee smh, march 1966 Opera House Would Never Be Finished: Hughes smh, march 1966 Secret Talk With Utzon Collapses the daily telegraph, march 1966 Exit Mr Utzon smh, april 1966 [newspaper archives of the day testifying to the hysteria whipped up by liberal leader askin and his chief utzon head-kicker, the irascible country party member for armidale (later sir) davis hughes] |
| well things have changed. the time of utzon would be, is over. utzon today
would have been jailed or tarred and feathered even more than he was.
ah and thrown out. i mean, unless you perform on time, on cost, within
the politics and the social aspirations of the community, you’re
dead [philip cox | see in the mind of the architect for full abc transcript] |
| the thing we wanted to build was utzon's opera house, not some botch up of it. and that opera house costs that amount of money - approximately - and would from the beginning have cost that amount of money, only nobody knew it then... if these facts had been known to begin with, the opera house would probably never have been built. And the fact that it wasn't known, and that clients and public were completely misled by the first so-called estimate, was one of the unusual circumstances that made this miracle possible. [ove arup | from peter hall's generously titled 'great planning disasters'] |
nature
is the great book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read. |
| architecture
is not an art independent from reality. real architecture, real painting,
real poetry, real music is never detached from physicality. architecture
is at the edge, between art and anthropology, between society and science,
technology and history. sometimes memory, too, plays a part. architecture
is about illusion and symbolism, semantics, and the art of telling stories [renzo piano | see SAW1] |
| i'm
not interested in an australian architecture at all... i am far more interested
in an architecture that responds to place, culture, technology and climatic
conditions... and i care about all those things very deeply. there is
also cultural context and availability of materials. once we better understand
these issues we might produce something that responds to the place for
very tangible, clear reasons. this doesn't make it an australian architecture [glenn murcutt | steel profile | june 2002] |
| glenn
murcutt's a top bloke (but a crazy driver) [troppo's phil harris + adrian welke] |
| for
this is how we experience this sydney place; from oblique angles and in–between spaces; from the edges of sydney’s ever–shifting shapes, shadows and moods. its palimpsest layers, fragments of the unbuilt and the unbuildable; its sensuous materiality of rich textures highlighted by the shifting patterns of sydney light and shade; its strange wounded beauty of rawness, toughness and even carelessness about its fragile nature and the scars and stains of weathering past lives and tempests. [dr peter emmett | sydney - metropolis, suburb, harbour] |
| a
pastry usually tastes better if it looks nice. a cream pastry, now that
looks nice - in fact, there is nothing I mind as long as it looks nice. [arne jacobsen] |
| [sydney's]
harbour is nothing more than an operatic diva, reflecting back images
of our banal desire. |
| well
I think that the only art that politics knows is the art of compromise,
right, and in space terms and light terms and form terms, i think with
the architect there should be no compromise, but it’s a fine line
between being confident in expressing oneself beautifully through form
and life of a city and so forth, and arrogance. i think one has to have
the confidence to do it properly, but one should never be arrogant and
lose sight of the whole sort of human drama because that’s at
the heart of it all. if one doesn’t appreciate - and appreciate
means to make better over time - the human drama, the dance of life,
then i think all is lost |
