ABSTRACT
During 2013, while construction works were being carried out at the Sydney Opera House, posters on site hoardings carried enthused messages and photographs from hundreds of people celebrating the Opera House and its architect Jrn Utzon. Critic Camille Paglia has put forward a theory of beauty based on the concept, deriving from Jung and Nietzsche, of the creative energy of Western cultures clear, youthful, shining Apollonian eye dominating the darker chthonian forces of Dionysian nature, of the bright sky rather than the heavy earth, an idea of a triumphant Apollonian ego which is finite, articulated, and visible. The Sydney Opera House offers people a reverie on architecture through experience of its material surfaces. Weston considers the roof covering of a million white ceramic tiles as stunning, one of the most radiant and alive surfaces in architecture. The sculptural roof forms of the Sydney Opera House are derived from the surfaces of a single sphere.
