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Recently a composite photo of the Sydney Opera House transplanted to the shores of Anglin Bay was circulated, in response to Leonore Foster's exhortation to "think of the Sydney Opera House in that location." While the composite photo is fun, I think it should be not regarded as a guide to what is possible in Kingston.
I grew up in Sydney, and can remember seeing the first drawings of the proposed building in the newspaper in 1957. The architect who had renovated our house played a small role in the project by producing some of the early perspective drawings used in presenting the concept of the building to the public. Later, in 1966-69, we were living in Sydney while the building was under construction.
My main concern is that the composite photo does not give a correct impression of the size of the Opera House. It is an immense complex comprised of three buildings. The top of the highest shell is about 200 feet, or about 20 stories, or about 50% higher than the Leeuwarden building. The flight of stairs leading to the front of the building is about 350 feet wide, one of the widest anywhere in the world. The Opera House complex simply would not fit into the space available at Anglin Bay, and it is highly misleading to suggest that a comparison between the Opera House and the proposed Anglin Bay building would be useful. Even the sites are quite different. The Opera House is on a sharply defined point of land, while Anglin Bay is, well, a bay.
I think that the image Foster wanted to evoke was a glittering building of highly imaginative design that would be the envy of all of Canada, if not the whole world. But this is misleading too. Right at the beginning, the choice of design for the Opera House was made by an international committee of architects, not a group of local people with their minds focussed on the needs of our local businesses, and with little interest in anything said to them on any other aspect of the project. I have not heard any suggestion that an architect should be appointed early in planning, let alone an international competition with a jury of distinguished architects. Somehow, Foster seems to think a wonderful building will appear as if by magic. Further, I don't think that Foster, or the Mayor, or the Task Force, would put up with the 15 years it took to achieve the astonishing building that was finally built in Sydney, or the 20 years of bitter controversy that went on during and after construction, or the cost escalation by a factor of about 15 ($7 million was the first estimate, $102 million the final cost).
You may think me a spoilsport for seeming to throw cold water on an attempt to visualize a big building in Anglin Bay. Not at all - it is always a good idea to try out an idea. But apart from this there are some other very valuable lessons to be learned from the Sydney experience. My sources of information are the Opera House website, plus a book called "The Other Taj Mahal" by John Yeomans, published in 1968, about 4 years before the Opera House was finished.
(1) The Opera House project was initiated by a politician who got a big idea, and wanted to see a major project built, and built quickly. (Sound familiar?) His haste to get results was the cause of many difficulties. The base of the building was begun long before the design of the roof was completed. As a result, some of the base structure had to be dismantled (using explosives!) when the roof design was changed, with a large increase in weight. The politician died not long after the beginning of construction and never saw the consequences of his haste.
(2) In the original Opera House competition, the list of requirements and purposes was vague, impractical, and internally inconsistent. (Has there ever been a clear statement of the requirements and purposes of the Anglin Bay building? They can't even find a word for the building, only a miserable acronym.) As construction proceeded, the requirements for the Opera House buildings were changed, and as a result, a lot more of what had already been built had to be demolished and rebuilt.
(3) The public fund raising efforts were a total failure. At one event, the committee was selling kisses in return for contributions, without a great deal of success. There was no commercial sponsorship of the building. Instead of tax money being used, a special lottery was initiated, which in the end financed the whole project and was then terminated. During construction, the state government covered the cash flow, with the help of the continuous stream of lottery profits. There is no such source of funding available to the City of Kingston.
(4) The Opera House project had many difficulties which were only dimly understood or defined at the beginning. The roof structure couldn't be built as originally drawn, the stage arrangements were extremely difficult to organize, the enormous windows at the ends of the arches took years to design and build, and so on. Yet the project began, and the problems were solved (or mostly solved) in the end. There are also problems at Anglin Bay, which we are told can be solved once the project gets started, and it is useful to think about that: if they solved problems on the run in Sydney, why not in Kingston? But in Sydney, the problems were engineering problems largely caused by haste, lack of detailed planning, and the innovative nature of the building, but not its interaction with its neighbours. The most serious Anglin Bay problems are related to transportation, lack of parking, the road layout, the nearby residential areas and buildings, etc. Problems of interaction between the building and its surroundings involve the people who live nearby, and some of them cannot be solved in a finite time or at a reasonable cost, except by imposing on the people involved. There may be some engineering problems related to footings on filled land, and pollution, but these can be solved given time and money, as in Sydney.
(5) Transportation to the Opera House is mostly by public transport. Car access is very restricted, and there is limited onsite parking, about 1100 spaces costing roughly $8.00 an hour. Off-site parking is not particularly close, so only a small fraction of the visitors each day go by car. Bus, ferry and train services are available nearby. Most people walk the last two hundred metres to the building, and this has been made easy and pleasant (the weather helps). The total capacity of the five theatres in the Opera House is 5486 if every possible seat is filled, which is a bit less than the planned maximum capacity of the Anglin Bay building. But because Sydney is about 40 times bigger than Kingston, comparisons between the two situations are not very meaningful, except to note that transportation planning is of central importance in both cases.
So there are some interesting comparisons to be made, and perhaps lessons to be learned from the Sydney Opera House. Dreaming about a beautiful building on the waterfront is one thing, but reality in Kingston is more like the steel-sided green shed housing the supermarket at the Shopping Centre, the ugly drugstore building under construction across Princess Street on land that used to be grass and trees, high rise buildings on Block D, or the grotesque and formless concrete mass of the OHIP building. The great white gymnasium building across the river from Anglin Bay is serviceable, and is a fair indication of what a modern sports complex has to look like, but it is not ideal for a waterfront location.
Julian Brown
5 September 2004