A few things I’m not keen on…

The glass on the harbour end. It sort of bulges out past the “line” of the shells and the termination of the glass bulge is abrupt. Both aspects are ugly, IMHO. You can see it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1_The_Opera_House_in_Sydney.jpg I believe this was done in order to maximise the headroom for people gathering inside around the glassed area.

The plastic marquee that seems to be a permanent feature outside on the harbour end.

The circulation around the shells. I’d like to be able to walk right around the building on the top of the podium. But these walkways are closed off with grubby looking temporary fencing that has been there as long as I’ve visited the building.

But… If Melbourne had been the city with the iconic opera house, then would it now be the international city rather than Sydney? Or, is there just something spectacular about the setting on Sydney Harbour that you couldn’t reproduce if the building was located at, say, St Kilda?

I took me a while to realise how magnificent the Sydney Opera House was. What did it for me was seeing some of the other entrants into the 1955 design competition – most of them were variants of a box and looked very very 1950s in style.

I really like that there’s no “back entrance” to the Opera House. The service entries are hidden under the front steps so the whole structure looks splendid from whatever direction you look at it.

And something else that’s always impressed me: the lush early ’70s decor hasn’t been changed. Swaths of rich purple carpet cover one of the foyers, with no attempt to “update” it to reflect current tastes (which must have been tempting in the ’90s). Neither has anyone attempted to “soften” the raw concrete interiors with paint. I love how respected the building is.

Oh, the big steps going up, apparently inspired by Mayan pyramids. The Opera House doesn’t just sit on Bennelong Point; it creates its own landscape, a downtown mountain range.

And re its iconic status, I’ve always felt that the Sydney Opera House works as an icon of the city because it wasn’t built as an icon, but as an opera house. The iconic status came after the function of the performance venue.

His fame, however, is also a reminder of how architecture has lost its way. The pinnacle of the art now is widely assumed to be the achievement of something Utzon-like; i.e. the creation of some huge, dazzlingly original structure the like of which has never been seen before. The whole ‘starchitect’ cult, in other words – devoted to the creation of buildings that are spectacles first, and human habitats second.

So goodbye Utzon, you earned a bit of a fuss about your departure. It would be good, though, to have a little fuss every now and then about the departure of someone who ‘just’ designed elegant, timeless, comfortable, pleasant, well-detailed buildings, viewed with more affection than astonishment by the people who live or work in them. For every Utzon we need 50 architects with those ambitions, rather than his.