Passage Two

It is pretty hopeless as a venue for opera, it took years to build, its architect was forced to resign and it was never properly finished inside. None of this matters. The Sydney Opera House, by the reclusive Danish architect Jorn Utzon, is the mother and father of all modern landmark buildings. It has come to define not only a city, but an entire nation and continent. Beyond that, it is a global expression of cultural modernity. Everyone in the world with media access knows what the Sydney Opera House looks like. First designed in 1956 and finally declared completed in 1973, the opera house was the single best known modern building in the world until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s equally extraordinary Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997. But it will outlive the Guggenheim as an international architectural icon--because it did all the difficult work tint. In the pantheon(万神殿) of classic modern buildings, Utzon’s creation has the status of myth. The myth states that the unknown architect, then in his thirties, submitted rough sketches to the competition judges, that he ignored most of the rules, that his as only selected after being plucked at the last moment from the rejected pile by one of the judges, and that the design was unbuildable. But Sydney is remarkable for another reason: it is a complete one-off. It does not fit into any stylistic or chronological category. None of Utzon’s other buildings--churches, government departments, house. looks anything like it, and architects today who try to copy his concept always end up looking very second-rate indeed. It is "modern", certainly, but it is an expressive modernism that was quite at odds with the rectilinear(直线的) "international style" of its time. It has more in common with the work of the American genius Frank Uloyd Wright, for whom Utzon worked briefly. Of course its location is an enormous help, sitting as it does on a promontory with water on three sides and the famous Sydney Harbor Bridge as a picture-postcard backdrop. But Utzon ly exploited the site as nobody else could. Utzon left Australia in high indignation in 1966, never to return, before he could finish designing the interiors. As with Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral, Utzon was humiliated and removed from overseeing the final stages of his work. But for all his manifold difficulties, which other contemporary architect can claim an equivalent achievement The Sydney Opera House showed us that anything is possible, and it demonstrated that sheer, seductive beauty for its own sake is nothing to be ashamed of.

Sydney Opera House will outlive the Guggenheim as an international architectural icon ______.