Yeomans, John.

The other Taj Mahal: what happened to the Sydney Opera House.

Harlow, Longmans, 1968.

ix, 222 pages 24 plates, illustrations, plans, portraits 23 cm

The Other Taj Mahal is the full and frank story of the most controversial building of our times - the strange and wonderful white monster called the Sydney Opera House. There can be few newspaper and magazine readers who have not seen photographs of those sail-like roofs caught some echo of the bitter quarrels which the building generated among the men who designed and built it. Today, more than eleven years after Jørn Utzon of Denmark won an international competition for the design, the construction is still continuing - and so are the arguments among music lovers and architects around the world. Is the Opera House a huge joke? The biggest white elephant in history? Or the greatest architectural achievement of this century? In this book John Yeomans (the Australian writer who took such a candid look at his own country in The Scarce Australians) not only explains how the Opera House works but gives the little-understood details of the conflicts about its design and construction. He also introduces the men who faced the job of turning a handful of architect's sketches into a vast, unique building. As Yeomans himself puts it: "Any truthful report must deal partly in uncertainties, jealousies, stupidities, vanities and obstinacies. Why should I have chosen to write a book on such a maddeningly complicated subject? Primarily because the ridiculously melodramatic history of this beautiful building has always fascinated me ... and I find it vaguely comforting to be reminded that despite all the witlessness and cruelty of Homo sapiens, he is still capable of conceiving, planning and constructing a marvellous thing like the State Opera House, Sydney." (Inside cover).

0582104955
9780582104952

Sydney Opera House.

Localisation: Bibliothèque main 11070
Cote: W7770; ID:87-B14000
Statut: Disponible