arkitrave :: log

I have been reading about Jorn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House. This icon of modern architecture took 15 years to build and came in ~1400% over initial budget. In the end, the architect was despised, resigned and left the country, and the project was finished by a lesser firm which got the glory. Until this past year, when Utzen was finally awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture.

I think this idea relates to all of the design fields…If not for this atrociously overbudget, fiasco of a project, we would not as an architecture field know anything about how to create the kind of shell structures the Utzon conceived of (the engineering for the shells took 375,000 man-hours). I think, to some extent, all great design advances must have a visionary creator and a client who is willing (or forced) to accept the vision and fund it, even if it is not the most advantageous financially.

The first websites were not cheap; the first CSS layouts took much more time than they were probably worth. Today, it is not a Herculean effort to produce a simple, 10 page CSS site, however, and we owe it to the first pioneers in the field who risked their careers and client relationships to press forward and advance design.

The rewards are worth it - Sydney (albeit after an extra $96 million Australian) is now recognized and identified the world over by this one building, and finally has chosen to give some credit to the creator of the vision, whose name wasn’t even on the plaque or spoken of when the hall opened in 1973.

Payoffs take time. It took many years for Sydney, and even more for Utzon, to reap the rewards of their vision.

Somehow we have to reconcile the everyday needs of paying the bills and producing good work, and pressing to challenge and push ahead the world of design when there are not clients clamboring to fund this progress. We really have to develop ideas and concepts apart from paying work that we can begin to apply when we are hired for specific jobs - there’s just not the opportunity within a project budget to conceptualize very much.