Excited By Sydney Opera House

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30782, 21 June 1965, Page 1

Excited By Sydney Opera House

The new Sydney Opera House is the most exciting thing, architecturally, that Professor W. H. Pierson, a distinguished American authority on art and architecture, has seen in Australia and New Zealand. “The Sydney opera house is not only conceptionally and structurally unique, but it has some of the quality of imaginative daring which must have been evident when Chartres Cathedral or St. Peter’s home, were built,” said Professor Pierson on his arrival in Christchurch at the week-end.

Professor Pierson will give two public lectures at the University of Canterbury on “major achievements in American architecture” on June 28 and 29, and will also give several specialised lectures in the university’s history department, and at the School of Art. “Great Monument”

Professor Pierson said that he thought the Sydney Opera House would go down as “one of the great monuments of twentieth • century architecture.

“So far, most criticism of the building has been over its cost,” said Professor Pierson. “I suppose that in a pragmatic society this is inevitable—but I think it is healthy for a society to build something as fine as possible, some times, without worrying about the cost.

“Nobody asked how much Chartres Cathedral or St. Peter’s cost. If they had, we wouldn't have had them,” said Professor Pierson. Professor Pierson said the architecture of Australian and New Zealand cities fascinated him, as a specialist in architectural history. He was busy taking photographs in Christchurch yesterday afternoon, with Professor H. J. Simpson, professor of fine arts at Canterbury University, as a guide. British Sources

Australian and New Zealand architecture showed that both countries had been col-

onial societies, conscious of Britain as their source of settlement, and trying to be something they were not—“but in a kind of joyous and uninhibited way.” Professor Pierson said. Such architecture, bearing on the colonial era. had all but disappeared from the United States, he said. And such buildings in Christchurch, for instance, as the Provincial Council Chambers, should be preserved at all costs.

With the change in the United States from an agrarian to a complex industrial society after the Civil War. architecture had advanced spectacularly, the “skyscrapers” of New York being the perfect example, Professor Pierson said. Taking Initiative

Sydney, with its new opera house, was now taking the first step into this more “in ternational” architecture, hav ing taken the initiative of engaging an overseas architect —in this instance the Scandinavian, Utson—as had the United States in the economic and technological expansion in the late nineteenth century. But Professor Pierson said he had enjoyed immensely seeing the “fresh and uninhibited” architecture in Australia and New Zealand surviving from Victorian colonial days. He had taken about 70 colour photographs in Christchurch—where he was particularly interested in the “urban sprawl" of houses. “Cliff-Dwellers” “You don’t have these ‘cliff-dwellers’ living way high up in huge apartment buildings here —thank God,” Professor Pierson said. Many of his Christchurch photographs had been of houses in garden and landscape settings. Professor Pierson, who is here on a Carnegie travel grant, was executive secretary of the Carnegie Corporation’s art slide project which resulted in a unique collection of particularly high quality covering the whole range of the creative arts in the United States.