Competition in context: Innovation, modern architecture and the Sydney Opera House

Prof. Phillip Goad, University of Melbourne (UoM)
Jørn Utzon’s 1956 competition design for the Sydney Opera House and its development to 1962 has been widely and intensively studied. The design’s much vaunted Promethean process of iteration and refinement has led to labels of innovation and the hailing of the Sydney Opera House as a major work of mid-twentieth century architecture. But little examined is the international and local context of discourse and production for that ‘innovation’. This paper places Utzon’s design within its diverse contexts: of competitions in Australia and internationally after 1945; contemporary performing arts complexes; experimentation in concrete shell structures as new forms of monumental and spatial expression; and the arguably new conceptual settings for modern architecture of landscape and cross-cultural allusion.

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Philip Goad is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Chair of Architecture, and Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) at the University of Melbourne. He is also Chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria.

He is co-author and co-editor of Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008), The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (2012), Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (2019), and Australia Modern: architecture, design and landscape architecture 1925-1975 (2019).

In 2019–20 he was Gough Whitlam Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA) and Life Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects (LFRAIA). In 2005, he gave expert advice to the NSW Government in building its case for the UNESCO World Heritage Listing of the Sydney Opera House.