Participatory Culture and the Social Value of an Architectural Icon: Sydney Opera House

Cristina Garduno Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317083856
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book develops new and innovative methods for understanding the cultural significance of places such as the World Heritage listed Sydney Opera House. By connecting participatory media, visual culture and social value, Cristina Garduño Freeman contributes to a fast-growing body of scholarship on digital heritage and the popular reception of architecture.

In this, her first book, she opens up a fresh perspective on heritage, as well as the ways in which people relate to architecture via participation on social media. Social media sites such as YouTube, Pinterest, Wikipedia, Facebook and Flickr, as well as others, become places for people to express their connections with places, for example, the Sydney Opera House. Garduño Freeman analyses real-world examples, from souvenirs to opera-house-shaped cakes, and untangles the tangible and intangible ways in which the significance of heritage is created, disseminated and maintained.

As people's encounters with World Heritage become increasingly mediated by the digital sphere there is a growing imperative for academics, professionals and policy-makers to understand the social value of significant places. This book is beneficial to academics, students and professionals of architecture.

p.14

1 World Heritage inscription and social value

The inscription of the Sydney Opera House in 2007 as a World Heritage site was a significant milestone for the World Heritage program. News headlines reported that the Sydney Opera House had won ‘top status’, and that the inscription was ‘a standing ovation’, finally recognising the building as ‘masterpiece of mankind’.¹ The inscription was significant because, at the time, the Sydney Opera House was, at 34 years of age, the youngest site to be listed and only the second site inscribed during the lifetime of its architect, Jørn Utzon (1918–2008).² The recognition of the Sydney Opera House as World Heritage marks the broadening scope of the World Heritage programme to include Modern Architecture.

In 1957 when the Sydney Opera House project was first commissioned, Sydney aspired to be an international city.³ The Sydney Opera House project was closely followed and the progress and costs of its realisation were frequently publicised in the media. The technical and political difficulties during construction, as well as issues of authorship, affected both public and expert opinions on its significance and contribution to culture. This public scrutiny during the realisation of the Sydney Opera House lays the ground for the way in which the inscription of the Sydney Opera House also served to formally establish the building’s importance at a global level. Gaining World Heritage status was a key event in the history of the Sydney Opera House, one that not only offered legal protection for the building’s preservation, but also publicly signalled its value as an exemplar of Modern Architecture. This international recognition, in the form of World Heritage inscription, can be seen as a way to quell ongoing contestation on its significance as a work of architecture; a response to the way this place has been publicly described both as the greatest building of the 20th century and as a flawed masterpiece.⁴

While the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) has been highly successful as the central legal instrument of UNESCO’s World Heritage program it has also been criticised.

The World Heritage Convention is the highest level of protection and recognition of heritage places and provides an accepted approach to preservation by bringing together the international community. However, the World Heritage Convention embodies Western notions of cultural heritage, thereby excluding more recent forms of culture or those of less wealthy and developed nations. Further, while World Heritage purports to speak for all the convention does not recognise social values. This chapter situates the 2007 inscription of the Sydney Opera House within the contemporary discourse of heritage and discusses its significance within the canon of Modern Architecture through the history of the Sydney Opera House and its nomination as a World Heritage site. The chapter argues that the inscribed World Heritage values are significant as they institutionalise the building’s architectural values for a public audience and present a challenge to social values.

p.15

Coming together through World Heritage

Heritage has its roots in the 19th-century historical and architectural practices concerned with the preservation of ancient monuments and historic buildings. For much of the 20th century, heritage was the buildings (and objects) inherited from our predecessors, a definition that has its roots in the French concept of patrimony and which emerged in Europe (particularly in Britain, France and Germany) as part of modernity.⁵ As the conditions of the 19th century gave rise to a middle class and the aristocracy was destabilised, ‘new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations’ came into play.⁶ For example, the museum as a heritage institution took on a regulatory role through its collecting and exhibiting practices, acting as a custodian of the past at the same time as informing present identity. The museum served as a repository of desirable civic, social and national identities and aspirations. Just as the museum strove to protect and regulate artefacts deemed as culturally significant, European nations began developing ways of conserving and protecting historic buildings. The second half of the 19th century saw the rise of charters and legal instruments that sought to protect ancient monuments or religious, historically or architecturally important buildings.⁷

According to Jukka Jokilehto, the principles of building conservation first arose at the end of the 19th century in the scholarship of John Ruskin, William Morris and Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.⁸ There were two main approaches that have influenced the practice, recognition and theorisation of heritage over the last century. On one hand, Viollet-le-Duc was an advocate of ‘romantic restoration’, which proposed that buildings be reinstated to a state of completeness, even if they had never existed in this state in living memory. Romantic restoration emphasised unity in the architectural whole, instead of being concerned with architectural interventions made at different times. On the other hand, Ruskin and Morris championed the approach of the ‘conservation movement’, which in contrast to romantic restoration was concerned with protecting the fabric of buildings as an embodiment of technical skill and aesthetic expression, or as evidence of particular historical events. According to Jokilehto, the modern approach to conservation as delineated by the World Heritage Convention is a synthesis of these two approaches.⁹ In contemporary practice of heritage conservation, sites gain authority and significance with age and authenticity is interpreted in terms of historical accuracy, as determined by expert sources. This combined approach is embedded in the earliest documents that attempt to regulate and articulate methods and principles for the preservation of buildings. The best known of these is the 1964 Venice Charter, which provides the conceptual foundation for the World Heritage Convention.¹⁰

The legacy of these early approaches to conservation is important as they have become embedded in the legal instruments, which are used in practice to define and decide what is, and what is not, considered heritage. However, as David C. Harvey observes, ‘every society has had a relationship with its past, even those which have chosen to ignore it’.¹¹ This challenges the definitions of heritage purported by Ruskin, Morris and Viollet-le-Duc as the foundation of heritage and resituates heritage in the present. Harvey argues that by

p.16

extending the temporal scope of heritage both backwards and forwards, it becomes possible to conceive of a history of heritage – or ‘heritage of heritage’ – that has more power; heritage heroes such as William Morris, for instance, can be placed not as elements of an inevitable sequence of growing heritage concern, nor even in the context of their own time, but in the context of our needs and yearnings for a specific past and our desires for a particular future.¹²

Harvey’s position is important for the overall discussion on World Heritage and social value because it situates heritage, not as an immutable and inherent quality that can be discovered, but rather as a status assigned to places that is defined by society. Jokilehto overcomes this issue by acknowledging that all societies have altered and repaired monuments and buildings, but that heritage is distinguished by the development of the principles of conservation.

World Heritage formalised the notion of the global significance of places. Prior to the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972 no international instruments existed. The convention states in the preamble ‘that parts of the cultural or natural heritage are of outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole’.¹³ Listing provides a means for distinguishing places with exemplary cultural significance from the rest of our physical world, and offers visible means for publicising inscribed sites alongside the concept of World Heritage. World Heritage status brings opportunities for new projects and international collaborations and financial assistance from the World Heritage Fund. Because of these geopolitical and financial consequences, as well as the cultural value of having sites acknowledged on an international stage, World Heritage is significan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Participatory Culture and the Social Value of an Architectural Icon: Sydney Opera House
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 World Heritage Inscription and Social Value
• 2 Social value and Iconicity
• 3 Participatory Culture and Socio-visual Value
• 4 Mediating Identity: Telling and Critiquing
• 5 Mediating Experience: Making and Trading
• 6 Mediating Time: Visiting and Capturing
• 7 Entangled Significance: Personal Tributes
• 8 Recognising Networked Significance in Heritage
• Bibliography
• Image Credits and URLs
• Index