nomination by the Government of Australia - Sydney Opera House

50 Part 3. Justifi cation for inscription
3.42
The Getty Center is an important cultural building that
provides a remarkable visual focus for the surrounding
city, in a similar way to the Sydney Opera House. It sits
atop a hillside, merging landscape and architecture in
what amounts to a small township that attempted to
highlight nature and culture (The Getty web site 2005).
Unlike the Sydney Opera House, which provides a
grand celebratory public space for the people of the
city, the Getty Center remains separate and aloof from
the city below.
The Sydney Opera House stands alongside Renzo
Piano and Richard Rogers’ Centre Georges Pompidou
in Paris as an outstanding architectural form and a
building that transformed the city in which it is located.
The Centre Georges Pompidou defi ed traditional
building forms while still demonstrating architectural
integrity and social and urban design innovation.
Discarding the rule books for its building type, the
radical external expression of structure, services and
circulation make the Pompidou an engineering tour
de force. The building returns to the modern ideal
of ‘form follows function’ in the most literal manner,
while the Sydney Opera House explores a new form
of expression for its functions resulting in a great
sculptural work. Both the Sydney Opera House and
the Centre Georges Pompidou are ground breaking
examples of 20th century architecture.
Figure 3.42 Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s the Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1974–1976
3.C (ii) Masterpieces of structural engineering
and technology that stretched the boundaries
of the possible
Tombesi has compared the Sydney Opera House
to a number of exceptional buildings dating from
early times to the present that all share the same
outstanding characteristics of architectural, engineering
and construction innovation (Tombesi 2005). Two
buildings with similar types of materials and structure
that are particularly noteworthy include Pier Luigi Nervi’s
Exhibition Buildings at Turin (Italy 1948–1949) and Eero
Saarinen’s TWA Terminal Building at Kennedy Airport in
New York (United States 1956–1962) (Tombesi 2005).
These buildings, along with the Sydney Opera House,
pushed the boundaries of the reinforced shell typology
to new limits, realising the vision of the ‘fi rst generation’
architects for reinforced concrete.
Nervi’s Exhibition Buildings are internationally recognised
as ‘masterpieces of logical structure and sculptural
precision’ (Richards 1977: 228). Nervi stated that the
thin prefabricated concrete roofs of the buildings at Turin
‘would have been impossible without a simultaneous
invention of the structural method’ (Joedicke 1989: vii).
He set out to interpret and command the ‘mysterious
laws of nature’ and thereby to express their ‘majestic
eternity’ (Jencks 1973: 73). The work of Nervi is visually
characterised by the tapering or modelling of concrete
beams and columns to refl ect the complex structural
forces within. Nervi’s designs were driven by structural
integrity and his engineering combined clear logic with
remarkable aesthetic sensitivity. Like Nervi, Utzon was