Monumental Aspirations: Understanding the Sydney Opera House in the Public Realm

This thesis interprets the significance of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House through the framework of the public realm, as understood after the Second World War. In the 1950s, the Opera House was considered a monument for its potential to enrich civic life. This was perceived through the theories of New Monumentality and CIAM, which built upon Sigfried Giedion’s premise of the monument as a symbol – a form that had no apparent significance yet would seize directly upon the senses. Drawing on the Romantic idea of the imagination, Giedion celebrated the power of the symbol to rouse the emotions of the people, with hopes of stimulating their engagement in public life. These endeavours reflected democratic ideals of the post-war period, with a conception of the public realm as a space for both individuality and commonality. The impact of this was felt in architectural circles in 1951, when the eighth CIAM Congress titled ‘The Heart of the City’ adopted the Greek concept of the polis in its planning of new civic centres. Parallels are drawn between the ideas of this congress and those of Hannah Arendt, a contemporary of Utzon and Giedion, who saw the public realm as the space for distinctiveness to appear within the existing conditions of a shared world. By situating the Sydney Opera House within this broader historical narrative, one can comprehend its power as a monument to capture the concerns of its time, while meeting needs that have persisted from antiquity until this present moment.