Musings

Ladies and gentlemen, let us give a warm hand to Sydney’s newest celebrity! More controversial than Utzon and certainly more talked about than the demise of James Barnet’s sandstone monuments, it seems certain that everyone in Sydney has an opinion on Mr. Frank O. Gehry’s brown paper bag. Indeed, no woman but the dame of Sydney’s architectural criticism circuit Elizabeth Farrelly could have expressed more eloquently the status of Gehry’s structure: “But if, like me, you suspect there's more to life than unbridled market-forces, more to literature than Fifty Shades, more to architecture than the whackiest curves your software can spew up, more to beauty than two oiled and opulent orbs [of Kim Kardashian] – this "more", surely, is something our houses of higher learning should pursue.” (Farrelly, 2015).