When Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 and packed his bags for Europe, never again to set eyes on the Sydney Opera House, it was left to a bright young Australian architect, Peter Hall, to finish the job. Hall was brought on by the NSW Government Architect when the Opera House was a half-finished structure, principally a series of concrete shells missing their glorious interiors. It proved both an opportunity and a poisoned chalice.
Over the next seven years Hall walked a tightrope, balancing Utzon’s vision with a Liberal state government determined to rein in overruns and delays. At the same time he was juggling a brief that was changing to accommodate the wishes of the arts companies for whom this grand cathedral would be home. It would take a huge toll. Hall was ostracised by his colleagues and vilified for the inevitable compromises it took to realise Utzon’s daring vision for Bennelong Point.
Retired Sydney architect Andrew Andersons recalls a party he hosted shortly before the Opera House opened in October 1973 to which Hall, regarded as something of a strikebreaker, had been invited. “Some people saw Peter at the other end of the room and walked out and left. Can you imagine that?” Andersons recalls. “People had this idea that Peter was somehow a traitor by taking on the job. And, yet, I was actually at Yale University when Peter passed through on his way to Denmark in 1966 to try to persuade Utzon to come back.”
Those judging Hall misunderstood the immense technical and political complexities he and his team confronted when they took over, says Anne Watson, who believes a reappraisal of Hall’s reputation is long overdue. “It’s possible to embrace Utzon’s great vision, acknowledge the construction hurdles and myriad complexities, and acknowledge Hall’s hard-fought endeavours to complete the building,” says Watson, a former Powerhouse Museum curator and author of the 2017 book The Poisoned Chalice: Peter Hall and the Sydney Opera House. “Without both men, there would be no Sydney Opera House as we know it.”
“He felt, out of all the people in the field, he could do it.”
Peter Hall’s son, Willy
Peter Hall was 34 years old and new to private practice when first approached by NSW Government Architect Ted Farmer to take over from Utzon, who quit over a dispute with the Askin government over payments. Hall’s prodigious talent had been telegraphed two years earlier when he’d been awarded Australia’s prestigious Sulman Medal for the Goldstein Hall residential college at the University of NSW. Initially, Hall rejected Farmer’s offer, having signed the petition and joined the public protests calling for Utzon’s reinstatement. Approached a second time, he phoned Utzon, whom he’d once visited in Denmark, who confirmed he would not be back: “It’s better I go,” Utzon had told Hall.
Hall’s son, Willy, who as a child would play in the demountable offices on the Opera House site, recalls his mother telling him his father had paced their North Sydney home for two weeks when the job was offered. “He kept saying over and over again, ‘If someone doesn’t do it, the whole thing will not be finished,’ ” recalls Willy, now aged 60 and a builder. “He felt, out of all the people in the field, he could do it. Was that a little arrogant? Probably, but given his ability as a scholar and aesthete, I think he did realise he could take it on. But it was a terrible dilemma, and a lot of pressure on him at a young age, with two young children underfoot.”
Ove Arup (at left) with Jørn Utzon after Utzon’s arrival in Sydney from Denmark.Credit: Max Dupain
Reading Hall’s personal papers and diaries for the first time in 2007, Anne Watson found a highly committed, ambitious and capable architect, respectful of Utzon’s vision yet unaware in early 1966 of the challenge that lay in wait.
Hall and his partners – Lionel Todd and David Littlemore, who formed the consortium Hall, Todd and Littlemore – were fortunate to retain the expertise of Ove Arup, the English-born consulting structural engineer selected by Utzon to build his vision. The seminal roles played by Arup and Jack Zunz, his senior partner at the London-based Ove Arup & Partners, have been largely overshadowed by the legend of Utzon’s genius.
Arup had written to Utzon the day after Utzon won the international design competition in 1957, offering his expertise in concrete design. Utzon and the Danish-educated engineer found in each other a like-minded creative collaborator, with Arup spellbound by Utzon’s architectural audacity and personality.
“I think it was a meeting of minds that was meant to be,” says Peter Bailey, an Arup principal who worked on the Opera House’s 1988 Bicentennial Forecourt upgrades. “Ove found in Utzon a soul mate who was imaginative, spatially creative and wanted to push boundaries. He was in his early 60s at the time and someone with a huge reputation himself. It was just a dream job, a dream commission. But like all dreams, it had its challenges.”
Foremost of these was to turn Utzon’s free-form shells into a modular, buildable structure. A gigantic computer was harnessed to experiment with complex geometric shapes of ellipsoids and paraboloids for the roof structure, before Utzon famously settled on the curved triangular segments of a sphere. That breakthrough was to unlock a whole construction approach, with the ribs of the main sails fabricated onsite by Hornibrook in segments before being glued and stressed together with steel tendons in a method now commonplace in modern bridge building.
It took seven years and 350,000 man-hours to make the shells stand. “It was stretching architecture to the limit, it was stretching complex geometric design and fabrication to the limit,” Bailey says. “Everything was right on the edge, needing cutting-edge technology, and that’s why I think amazing things happened.”
But there were tensions between Utzon and Arup’s Sydney office over delays to the troubled design of the north-facing glass walls and the theatre ceiling, to the point that Arup complained that Utzon had shut down all communications with the engineering team. By then 71, and nearing retirement, Arup flew to Sydney to convince Utzon to stay on but not remain solely in charge. The engineer complained he’d come under fire from friends and colleagues for sticking with the project. “It is a personal disaster for me,” Arup told The Bulletin in 1966 in defence of the company’s decision to stay loyal to the project and the NSW government, a client that had treated the company fairly, after Utzon’s departure. “Why should I resign to force Utzon’s return on his terms if I think that would be wrong? It is the Opera House that is important, not people.”
According to Bailey, “Ove was deeply affected when Utzon left the job – deeply, deeply affected. He was shattered. Everybody looks back on that project with fondness but there were scars for everybody along the way.”
“Everyone ran out of time because the government wanted the building.”
Peter Hall in a 1987 interview
In design principles drawn up by Utzon after his 1999 re-engagement, Utzon remarked that it was lucky Ove Arup had stayed on, otherwise the project would not have been finished, and that the team of Hall, Todd and Littlemore had made the building function “so well”. While there’s been debate over the extent to which Utzon’s interior designs had been resolved by the time of his departure, in May 1966 Arup and Hall found much of the work still to be finalised: the foyers, the performance halls, back-of-house facilities and offices, and the glazing of the northern foyer windows that had precipitated the split between Utzon and the Askin government.
Ove Arup, Jack Zunz and Michael Lewis on site in October 1964.Credit: Max Dupain
Hall said he’d been persuaded “fairly reluctantly” to take up the role, thinking all the “design work was done, and that it was a question of being built”. As it turned out, Hall had few of Utzon’s drawings and documents with which to work. The project brief was changed radically. “And then, of course, everyone ran out of time because the government wanted the building,” Hall recounted in a 1987 radio interview that features in the Opera House’s oral history. “It was a political embarrassment if there wasn’t progress and so the job turned into a construction management contract in which the design really didn’t stop until the last screw was screwed tight.”
By the time of Hall’s arrival, the concept of a multipurpose hall fit for orchestral concerts, opera and ballet, central to the competition design specifications, had been proven unworkable in North America. Subsequent radical auditorium design changes recommended by Hall and supported by government triggered a political storm, not least because the art form so central to the title of the Opera House itself was to take up residence in the smaller of the two halls, the larger one being reserved for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, then run by the ABC.
“What was finally built in 1973 bore in broad terms a resemblance to the 1957 competition entry but in many details was different, and I think in a lot of ways better,” Hall said in 1987.
For Peter Hall, the Opera House cast “a shadow that also affected his personal life and his health”.
Anne Watson
Andersons, who as Assistant Government Architect engaged Hall on the 1988 Opera House Forecourt project, regards the building as a classic meeting of two minds: the inexperienced, single-minded visionary that was Utzon; and Hall, the delegator and pragmatic adherent to functional modernism. “The Opera House was great because of Utzon but I also believe the final outcome owes an enormous amount to Peter Hall, who was reviled for most of his life, which contributed to his alcoholism and early death. It’s a real tragedy. Architecture is about design and it’s about function and in the process compromises have to be made, and that’s possibly what Utzon was reluctant to do.”
Returning to private practice in 1972, Hall designed many well-regarded projects, including Sydney University’s swimming pool and recreation centre, and the award-winning Blue Circle Southern Cement Plant at Berrima, in the NSW Southern Highlands. He was not offered the prime contracts he might have expected though, Watson says, and in any event, no other project would ever remotely approach the challenge of the Opera House. “It was a shadow that also affected his personal life and his health,” Watson says. “Ultimately, financial problems, a stagnating career and the depredations of alcohol contributed to his death from a stroke on May 19, 1995, at the age of 64.”
In 2006, the NSW Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects posthumously awarded Hall its 25-year award for enduring architecture in recognition of his contribution to the Opera House, particularly a Concert Hall that stands with “Utzon’s great vision and magnificent exterior, together forming one of the world’s great working buildings”.
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As part of the October 50th anniversary celebrations, the Opera House intends to unveil bronze plaques on the Upper Podium honouring Utzon, Arup and Hall, as well as the many other architects, engineers, builders and tradespeople involved in the building’s design, construction and evolution.
Willy Hall continues to call on the Opera House to rename one of its smaller theatre venues, The Playhouse, after his father, in the manner of the Utzon Room, a chamber concerts and function space created and named after Jørn Utzon in 2004. Hall’s son has no doubt the rancour around the Opera House project was a contributing factor in his parents’ break-up in the late 1960s and a cause of his father’s subsequent breakdown. “To this day, some people still say that Peter Hall wrecked the Opera House, and I say to them the Opera House is one of the most iconic buildings in the world,” Willy Hall says. “It’s a very finely tuned machine that works night and day and has done so for 50 years. I’m extremely proud of my father’s contribution – and so should we all be.”
Arup’s company remains inextricably linked with the Opera House, out of which came its reputation for technical design excellence and innovation. The firm has gone on to work on other cultural projects in Sydney, including the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern and the acoustic design of its Tank Gallery; Piers 2/3 at Walsh Bay; and the exoskeleton of Parramatta Powerhouse. “Our histories are completely intertwined and to this day we haven’t stopped working on the Opera House,” Bailey says. “Sixty-six years we have been working on that magnificent building.”
Linda Morris is a senior arts writer with The Sydney Morning Herald.
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