Peter Hall

"I'm overwhelmed – but I think I can finish the Opera House."
Peter Hall, 20 April 1966.

Before taking on the role of design architect to complete Stage Three, Peter Hall was one of Australia's brightest young architects.

He had been a scholarship student at Sydney's prestigious Cranbrook School and went on to complete a combined architecture and arts degree at the University of Sydney. At the end of his studies he was awarded a generous travel scholarship that afforded him a year in Europe, during which time he visited Utzon in Hellebæk.

On returning to Australia, Hall went to work for Ted Farmer at the Department of Public Works where he assisted the Government Architect in designing the Goldstein College Dining Hall at the University of New South Wales, which was awarded the prestigious Sulman Medal.

Having already resigned from the Department in early 1966 to pursue his own practice Hall was approached by Farmer with the offer of the Opera House project.

Hall was willing to accept the role on the condition that there was no possibility of Utzon returning. Even so, his appointment was too much for many of his fellow architects, who insisted that no one but Utzon should complete the Sydney Opera House. Despite this pressure, after conferring directly with Utzon, Hall accepted the position. Nine days after Hall’s appointment was publically announced, on 28 April 1966, Utzon and his family left Australia for good.

Government-appointed architects Peter Hall, David Littlemore and Lionel Todd, who were responsible for completing the Opera House project in the wake of Utzon's withdrawal from the project.

“They have only been given prints of old drawings relating to what has been built and nothing on all the new parts.”
Quote from a letter from Utzon's assistant, Mogens Prip-Buus, to his parents, 3 April 1966.

Some weeks after their appointment in late April, the three architects reviewed the work left to them after Utzon's departure and were unanimously shocked by what they found.

There were sketches and designs, rather than the documentation they were expecting to find. There were no groups of working drawings, nor were there the crucial drawings illustrating Utzon's most recent thinking. They were all missing, along with about 5000 sketches and drawings that had been placed in storage by Utzon's office assistant, Bill Wheatland, where they would remain largely unseen until 1972.

When Peter Hall accepted the job, he was under the impression he would be following Utzon's plans. So it came as a shock for him to discover that the scope of the work required would be on a much larger scale.

Hall spent the following months overseas visiting Utzon's consultants, including engineers Ove Arup and Jack Zunz and acousticians Cremer and Gabler, and Willem Jordan, with whom he collaborated on the halls. He also visited various concert halls in Japan, Europe and the United States.

With Utzon's departure from the project confirmed, Peter Hall and his partners worked through the requirements to establish a new brief for Stage Three of construction.

It would need to incorporate the revised requirements of the principal users of the Sydney Opera House, particularly the Australian Broadcasting Commission which, the government insisted, should be convinced that changing its venue from Sydney Town Hall would be worthwhile. The ABC required both a sufficient concert hall in which Sydney Symphony Orchestra could perform in front of 2800 people and an appropriate recording environment.

As one of the acoustic consultants, Cremer, pointed out in a letter to Hall on 30 August 1966: "It is a pity that the ABC had not stated these requirements before the competition in 1957. This would have avoided the principal difficulties of the project which arise from the planning of two multipurpose halls of different capacity."

In this section of Hall's diaries we see the deliberations of an architect inheriting all the complexity that Utzon had been managing before his withdrawal.

The foyer spaces of Sydney Opera House demonstrate most clearly the intersection between Utzon's and Hall's architecture and design.

At the time of its opening, the Concert Hall was celebrated for its world-class acoustics, and in 2004 continued to be highly ranked in acoustics expert Leo Beranek's index of 58 Concert Halls across the world.