Crazy

Butterpaper directs us to a nutty piece in the Sydney Morning Herald where film maker Phillippe Mora takes two thousand words to accuse Utzon of plagiarism for not providing written acknowledgement of having been aware of a building that has overlapping shell form. Mora it seems saw a model of the Sternkirche by Otto Bartning—a project that was never built—in a museum in Germany and because the project had overlapping shell forms, assumed that Utzon must have copied this in Sydney.

Whether or not Utzon was aware of this project is beside the point, of course Utzon like any responsible architect drew on many historic sources for the design of the Sydney Opera House many of which are well documented. To expect every artist to acknowledge every single influence on a work is an absurd and naive expectation. When discussing his 1999 film ‘Mercenary II:Thick and Thin‘ does Mora include an acknowledgment of every single film he has watched that bares any similarity whatsoever to this work?

Mora interviews a number of architects and historians, all of whom dismiss the claims of plagiarism as absurd, but still draws his own conclusion at the end that yes, he thinks that Utzon copied Bartning’s Sternkirche.

The best part however, is the section towards the end of the piece where Mora inexplicably embarks on a tangent describing in detail Alvar Aalto’s links with the early Nazi movement, and making the leap that as Utzon and Aalto had a close relationship and because Albert Speer and Utzon saw value in ruins, that Utzon was coached by Eero Saarinen not to mention these secrets in parochial Sydney. WTF? “My research revealed some darker elements to this unfolding mystery” Mora states ominously, stopping short of directly calling out Utzon as a Nazi sympathiser, before going back to his plagiarism rant.

To cap it off, the Sydney Morning Herald then republished their own story as ‘news’ the same day giving this rubbish undeserved credibility.