Jorn Utzon (1918 to 2008)

Folks in New England don't think of it often -- it is, after all, on the other side of the planet, and even farther away than that in terms of style and sensibility - -but one of the world's iconic works of 20th Century architecture is the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The sail-like forms of the building, silhouetted against Sydney Harbour, instantly signify its host city, even to people who have never been within two oceans of Australia.

Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect who was the out-of-nowhere winner in 1957 of the competition to design the Opera House, died on November 29. In the 36 years since the building's completion and Utzon's death, he never visited the Sydney Opera House -- not once.

Sixteen years between the end of the competition and the completion of the building -- that about says it all. The world will little note, nor long remember, the intra-Australian political nonsense, rife will allegations of nonfeasance and malfeasance about cost overruns, that led Utzon to resign the commission and leave Australia in 1966, leaving to others the task of designing most of the building's interior.

Utzon eventually won the global recognition he deserved for his world-changing design. In 2003, he received his profession's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, placing him in league with Frank Gehry (whose own iconic building, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, owes much to Utzon), Herzog and de Meuron (the Swiss guys who designed the bird's nest-like Olympic Stadium in Beijing), Tadao Ando (Japan's greatest architect) and Glenn Murcutt (Australia's greatest, known mostly for residences and certainly not for anything on the scale of Utzon's masterpiece). At this same juncture, 30 years after the Opera House's completion, Utzon was commissioned to design fixes to the mediocre interior completion of his original design.

It is all fodder for an Ayn Rand novel -- but, if written with anything like grace and subtlety this time, it would be a tale with a real moral: People and their willingness to exercise courage and integrity matter, when it comes to creating public architecture of any greatness.

Utzon would never have received the competition but for the intervention of competition juror Eero Saarinen, who championed this entry relentlessly and allegedly told his fellow jurors that he was not willing to support any other entry. Legends abound, about Saarinen plucking Utzon's drawings from the pile of rejected entries -- that sort of thing. Obviously, this was a key intervention on the part of the architect whose own work represents a catalog of great American icons: The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, the bird-like TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York, the sweeping curves of Dulles Airport in Virginia.

It ain't always thus, as anyone who has followed the tragicomedy of the World Trade Center site in New York well knows. It now appears that the only design of any real consequence to emerge from this greatest of architectural challenge-opportunities is the curvaceous and light-filled transit hub designed by Santiago Calatrava. Coincidentally, it is Calatrava, whose biomorphic designs are ever-striving for precisely the same effect that Utzon achieved in Sydney, who owes as much as any contemporary designer to the precedent set by the Opera House.

And as for the Australian politicians whose peevish infighting nearly killed this masterpiece: Well, their precedent has also been the recipient of much homage, as every mediocre and shoddily built piece of our dessicated public sphere grimly attests.

Humpty Dumpty Falls as Globalization Marches On

The fairy tale that has unfolded for 55 summers in the shadow of Mount Washington is over. StoryLand, the Glen, N.H. tourist attraction that Bob and Ruth Morrell built as a thriving family business, is now just another piece of a foreign portfolio.

Fabulously low-tech and notably devoid of mass media icons – no Disney characters here – StoryLand has always been fundamentally frozen in the year of its founding. Bob and Ruth Morrell started the place in 1954 with Humpty Dumpty, the Old Woman in the Shoe, the Three Little Pigs, Heidi's Grandfather, and the Red Schoolhouse. They are all still there.

Now, however, Humpty Dumpty is at least distantly related to Ontex Hygienic Disposables, the U.K’s Gala online casinos, and the Berlin-based publisher of a book entitled Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices and Prospects. All are related to Candover Investments plc, the British takeover firm that in 2007 bought out an international chain of amusement parks, based in Madrid and called Parques Reunidos.

Meanwhile, like so many family businesses, StoryLand ran out of family. Bob and Ruth passed away in the 1990s and their son and successor, Stoney Morrell, died in 2006. Thus, according to the StoryLand web site, Stoney’s sister Nancy “guided the park into a storybook marriage into the Kennywood Entertainment Company family of theme parks in 2007.”

The Pittsburgh-based Kennywood theme park chain must have seemed like a logical choice because its two founding families had been in charge for a whole century. But, just as Kennywood was closing on its purchase of StoryLand, it was also selling out to Parques Reunidos, which had just been taken over by Candover. Though not strictly speaking a fairy tale, the familiar cartoon drawing of a big fish swallowing a somewhat smaller fish which is busy eating a medium-sized fish which in turn is gulping down a small fish seems particularly applicable here.

It is not to trash the Morrell family to suggest that the StoryLand story should have been different.

The economic advantages of local ownership, to any given local community, are beyond dispute. A distant owner, whether it is in Pittsburgh or Pamplona, will strive to extract wealth. Local owners do otherwise, not just to line their own pockets (with funds likely to be reinvested in the community) but, data suggests, to the direct benefit of their employees and their neighbors with whom they do business. For details, see Michael Shuman’s book The Small-Mart Revolution.

Yet the Morrell family is blameless because, in essence, it had no alternatives. Rather than focusing on providing lavish subsidies, in exchange for no promises, to faraway firms that might come to northern New England, it is time to develop innovative financing and entity-creation schemes so that we can invest our energies and our resources in our neighbors. Imagine a worker-owned, or a community-owned, StoryLand! Imagine if it were some kind of cooperative!

By all appearances, at least from the visiting politicians pictured in the history section of the StoryLand web site, Bob and Ruth Morrill were old-fashioned New England Republicans. Their ingrained conservatism has its embodiment in what would, in other contexts, be deemed a theme park. At StoryLand, the glitz is missing and the licensed characters, be they SpongeBob or Ariel the Mermaid, are nowhere to be found. “Throwback,” an oft-used term in relation to StoryLand, doesn’t quite capture the essence of the place, which is grounded in a kind of simplicity and humility – an understanding that, while StoryLand is a nice place to take the kids, it is not the real reason to travel to a place as remarkable as the White Mountains.

Contrast that with Disney World, plunked in the midst of a barren nowhereville. The faux victorian Main Street USA is designed to capture the feel of a real place so that people who live in fake places (the real real places having long since been bulldozed) can wallow in the yearning to escape their banal and charmless everyday surroundings. Even worse is the pretend ruins of a southeast Asian palace, where tigers prowl amid artfully distressed structures – a patronizing and sanitizing celebration of third world poverty and decrepitude.

The point here is that the cooperative principles stand in stark contrast to that kind of exploitative approach to travel and tourism – as did the Morrell Family. If only they could have found each other before it was too late.

Shame on you Key West, and NYT, and Geico, and Anheuser-Busch

From the November 17, 2008 New York Times, dateline Key West, one of my favorite spots:

The rescue boats put in Sunday at dawn. The radio was calling for six-foot seas.

“A lot of people say, ‘Yeah, I like it rough,’ ” said the racing promoter, John Carbonell. “But I raced myself for 10 years, and you say: ‘Good Lord, what am I doing out here? Get me back. I’ll go to church every Sunday.’ ” . . .

55 teams qualified to enter the Super Boat International World Championship here. Their sport, once dominated by tycoons who raced far out to sea beyond view, was refashioned in the 1990s to draw spectators and advertisers. Courses were designed to run laps passing 100 feet from the shore.

The modern racing vessels were named for their sponsors, Cintron and Lucas Oil and the like. The smallest measured 25 feet with a single 525-horsepower engine; the largest 50 feet with twin engines capable of accelerating from a standstill to 190 m.p.h. in three-quarters of a mile. They had no brakes. They burned a gallon of ultrahigh-octane fuel per engine per minute. They were piloted by teams of two, a driver to steer and a throttle man to accelerate.
“It’s all a guy can do to hold on to the steering wheel at that speed,” Carbonell said. . . .

At the world championship, which began Nov. 2 in the Florida Keys, . . . [f]ew stood a chance against the new turbine boats, capable of speeds exceeding 200 m.p.h. but prone to immolation.
“If they make a mistake at that speed,” said Reggie Fountain, a retired racer, “they’re dead.”
Of the turbines, the most dominant was Miss Geico, sponsored by the insurance company. The Geico team traveled on a fleet of semis with a ground crew, a helicopter, inflatable mascots, a merchandise shop, golf carts, motorcycles and tents. The driver and the throttle man, Marc Granet and Scott Begovich, in their early 40s, had been plucked from the pleasure-boat racing circuit in Florida. . . .

With the money Geico was spending, Granet and Begovich were expected to win. Their greatest rival was Mike Seebold, 49, from Frontenac, Mo. His team was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch. Seebold drove a 50-foot Mercury named Bud Light with dual 1,200-horsepower petroleum engines. He had to rely on a steady hand to keep pace with the turbines.

His strategy had worked at the 2007 world championship. The Geico boat broke down in all three races, as Seebold won.

“We went home with our heads hung, and they went home the king,” Granet said, “and we’ve had to live with that all year.”

But through the summer 2008 season, the Miss Geico turbine had beaten the Bud Light petroleum engine in most races. For Seebold, the pressure was manifest. In July, the directors of Anheuser-Busch accepted a $52 billion offer for the company from InBev, a Belgian-based brewing concern. The new owners indicated they did not plan to continue the racing sponsorship. Seebold’s team needed to win a new patron. . . .

In the first two days of racing, Bud Light and Miss Geico each took a checkered flag. With the final race approaching, the stage was set for a showdown. . . .

Offshore buoys set a course of 83 miles — 12 2/3 laps around three turns. The first turn, known as the Wall, marked the treacherous passage between choppy and smooth waters.
“It’s probably the most violent race I’ve ever raced in,” said Bob Vesper, the driver for Team Warpaint from Hammonton, N.J. “It’s like a washing machine.”

In the harbor, cranes lifted the vessels into the water. Atop Miss Geico, Granet cracked the seals of glow sticks attached to the hatch to provide a guiding light to rescue divers. Wearing an F-16 pilot’s helmet, he dropped past a St. Christopher medallion into a seat molded to the contours of his frame. Begovich slid down to his left, facing 14 gauges and four override buttons.

In the sky, helicopter pilots scanned the waters for endangered turtles and manatees. Along the shore, girls covered their ears. The boats roared into the straits, roiling the clear turquoise waters with rooster tail plumes. In staggered starts, Seebold led the petroleum boats with Bud Light, counting on a fire among the approaching turbines.

But no fire came. Granet led the turbines with Miss Geico. Through six laps, he passed the petroleum boats one by one, steadily advancing on Seebold. Coming out of the second turn, he closed the distance to about 300 yards. At the harbor turn, he overtook Seebold.

When the race was done, Seebold knew his beer company sponsorship was gone for good.
“For it to be over just like this, it’s a little hard to swallow,” he said in a hotel parking lot after the awards ceremony. “Life goes on. You’ve just got to find something American in this American country, which is hard to find.”

Editorial comment: It is time for major daily newspapers, and big corporations that seek to build goodwill through sponsorships of sporting events, to revise their concept of what "something American" is, or ought to be.

As retired Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich (a Vietnam vet who lost his son in the Iraq war) has observed in his recent book, The Limits of Power, "[w]hether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life. The resulting sense of entitlement has great implications for freign policy. Simply put, as the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. . . . Here is the central paradox of our time: While the defense of American freedom seems to demand that U.S. troops fight in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, the exercise of that freedom at home undermines the nation's capacity to fight. A grand bazaar provides an inadequate basis upon which to erect a vast empire."

Indeed! Especially when the idle, thrill-seeking rich in that vast empire are burning a gallon of gas a minute!