The man who wasn’t there

My posts about the Opera House have taken on a life of their own.  These things happen.  I shouldn't have been surprised that what is arguably the world's greatest building of the 20th century, wouldn't allow me to get away with simplistic fragments of it's story.

So it is that friends have pointed me at a new article by Sylvia Lawson in INSIDE STORY, from which I draw my title.  The author has been for many years one of the key players in uncovering the complexity of just how such a grand enterprise of public architecture is realised.  In this article though, it is not so much her own contributions that figure, but a critical summary of parts of a truly grand media production, The Opera House Project from Australia's ABC.

I wish I had known that this monumental multitrack film production was publicly accessible since late last year.  Definitive in its access to archival material, and remarkable in its production values, The Opera House Project is compulsory viewing for anyone interested in high culture and the role of the democratic state as its patron – much the less for any young architect with stars in their eyes, trying to come to terms with the bizarre flowering of public architecture around the world at this time.

To be honest, I am so humbled by the sheer density of both Lawson's article, and that of the linked online television resource materials, that I feel I have very little to say.  Other than to point you at each of them.

Read Lawson's The man who wasn't there in INSIDE STORY here.
To go to The Opera House Project, click here. But make sure you have plenty of time; you won't be able to tear yourself away.