MAKE TOMORROW BETTER
Sydney Opera House is an example of late modern architecture; it is admired internationally and treasured by the people of Australia.
In 1956 the Premier of New South Wales, Australia, announced an international competition for the design of an opera house for Sydney. It attracted more than 200 entries from around the world and was won by Jørn Utzon, a relatively little-known architect from Denmark. The story goes that during the judging of the competition, one judge, American architect Eero Saarinen, arrived in Sydney after the other three judges had started assessing the entries. He looked through their rejected entries and stopped at the Utzon design, declaring it to be outstanding.
It was Utzon’s life and travels that had shaped his design for the Sydney Opera House. Though he had never visited the site, he used his maritime background to study naval charts of Sydney Harbour. His early exposure to shipbuilding provided the inspiration for the design of the roof, which is a series of curved ‘shells’ that look like the sails of a sailing ship billowing in the wind. From his travels to Mexico, he had the idea of placing his building on a wide horizontal platform.
Construction of the platform began in 1959, and throughout the early 1960s Utzon amended his original designs in order to develop a way to build the large ‘shells’ that cover the two main halls. The construction of the roof brought together some of the world’s best engineers and craftsmen, devising innovative techniques to create a major visual impact in accordance with Utzon’s vision. The design was one of the first examples of the use of computer-aided design for complex shapes.
Although Utzon had spectacular plans for the interior, he was unable to realise them. Cost overruns contributed to criticism of the project and, after a change of government, the Minister of Works began questioning Utzon’s schedules and cost estimates. Payments to Utzon were stopped and he was forced to withdraw as chief architect in 1966. Following his resignation, there were protests through the streets led by prominent architect Harry Seidler and others, demanding that Utzon be reinstated as architect. However, Utzon was not reinstated and left Australia in 1966. He never returned, and new architects were appointed to complete the building in his absence. The original cost estimate for the Opera House was $7 million, with the completion date set for 26 January 1963. However, the Opera House was not formally completed until 1973, having cost $102 million.
Since its opening in 1973, Sydney Opera House has earned a reputation as a world-class performing-arts centre and become a symbol of both Sydney and Australia. Situated at Bennelong Point on Sydney Harbour, it consists of a series of large precast ‘shells’ made of concrete, each composed of sections of a sphere of 75.2 metres radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental platform. The building is 183 metres long and 120 metres wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers, which are sunk approximately 25 metres below sea level.
Although the roof structures are commonly referred to as ‘shells’, they are precast concrete panels supported by concrete ribs. The ‘shells’ are covered with 1,056,006 white and cream-coloured tiles manufactured in a factory in Sweden that generally produced stoneware tiles for the paper-mill industry. The design solution and construction of the shell structure took eight years to complete, and the development of the special ceramic tiles took over three years. Apart from the tiles covering the ‘shells’, the building’s exterior is mostly clad with granite quarried in Australia.
Contrary to its name, Sydney Opera House includes multiple performance venues. It is among the busiest performing-arts centres in the world, holding over 1,500 performances each year. It hosts a large number of performing-arts companies, including the four resident companies: Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
With its grand setting and cathedral-like atmosphere, the Concert Hall is Sydney Opera House’s most prestigious performance space. The largest of all interior venues, it delivers outstanding acoustics thanks to its high ceiling and wood panelling. There is a sizeable outdoor forecourt from which people ascend to the main entrance. The steps, which lead up from the forecourt to the main performance venues, are nearly 100 metres wide.
In 1999 Utzon was re-engaged to develop a set of design principles to act as a guide for future changes to the building. All of this design work he did from his base in Europe. These principles help to ensure that the building’s architectural integrity is maintained. The first alteration to the exterior was the addition of a new colonnade, which shades nine large glass openings in the previously solid exterior wall. This Utzon-led project, completed in 2006, enabled theatre patrons to see the harbour for the first time from the theatre foyers. The design also incorporates the first public lift and interior escalators to assist less-mobile patrons.
Since 2007, the cultural, heritage and architectural importance of Sydney Opera House has been protected by its inclusion on the World Heritage List.
Graziers see them as pests, and poisoning is common, but some biologists think Australia’s dingoes are the best weapon in a war against imported cats and foxes.
A
A plane flies a slow pattern over Carlton Hill station, a 3,600 square kilometre ranch in the Kimberley region in northwest Australia. As the plane circles, those aboard drop 1,000 small pieces of meat, one by one, onto the scrubland below, each piece laced with poison; this practice is known as baiting.
Besides 50,000 head of cattle, Carlton Hill is home to the dingo, Australia’s largest mammalian predator and the bane of a grazier’s (cattle farmer’s) life. Stuart McKechnie, manager of Carlton Hill, complains that graziers’ livelihoods are threatened when dingoes prey on cattle. But one man wants the baiting to end, and for dingoes to once again roam Australia’s wide-open spaces. According to Chris Johnson of James Cook University, “Australia needs more dingoes to protect our biodiversity.”
B
About 4,000 years ago, Asian sailors introduced dingoes to Australia. Throughout the ensuing millennia, these descendants of the wolf spread across the continent and, as the Tasmanian tiger disappeared completely from Australia, dingoes became Australia’s top predators. As agricultural development took place, the European settlers found that they could not safely keep their livestock where dingoes roamed. So began one of the most sustained efforts at pest control in Australia’s history. Over the last 150 years, dingoes have been shot and poisoned, and fences have been used in an attempt to keep them away from livestock. But at the same time, as the European settlers tried to eliminate one native pest from Australia, they introduced more of their own.
C
In 1860, the rabbit was unleashed on Australia by a wealthy landowner and by 1980 rabbits had covered most of the mainland. Rabbits provide huge prey base for two other introduced species: the feral (wild) cat and the red fox.
The interaction between foxes, cats and rabbits is a huge problem for native mammals. In good years, rabbit numbers increase dramatically, and fox and cat populations grow quickly in response to the abundance of this prey. When bad seasons follow, rabbit numbers are significantly reduced – and the dwindling but still large fox and cat populations are left with little to eat besides native mammals.
D
Australian mammals generally reproduce much more slowly than rabbits, cats and foxes – an adaption to prevent overpopulation in the arid environment, where food can be scarce and unreliable – and populations decline because they can’t grow fast enough to replace animals killed by the predators. Johnson says dingoes are the solution to this problem because they keep cat and fox populations under control. Besides regularly eating the smaller predators, dingoes will kill them simply to lessen competition.
Dingo packs live in large, stable territories and generally have only one fertile female, which limits their rate of increase. In the 4,000 years that dingoes have been Australia, they have contributed to few, if any, extinctions, Johnson says.
E
Reaching out from a desolate spot where three states meet, for 2,500 km in either direction, is the world’s longest fence, two meters high and stretching from the coast in Queensland to the Great Australian Bight in South Australia; it is there to keep dingoes out of the southeast. The fence separates the main types of livestock found in Australia. To the northwest of the fence, cattle predominate; to the southwest, sheep fill the landscape. In fact, Australia is a land dominated by these animals – 25 million cattle, 100 million sheep and just over 20 million people.
F
While there is no argument that dingoes will prey on sheep if given the chance, they don’t hunt cattle once the calves are much past two or three weeks old, according to McKechnie. And a study in Queensland suggests that dingoes don’t even prey heavily on the newborn calves unless their staple prey disappears due to deteriorating conditions like drought.
This study, co-authored by Lee Allen of the Robert Wicks Research Centre in Queensland, suggests that the aggressive baiting programs used against dingoes may actually be counter-productive for graziers. When dingoes are removed from an area by baiting, the area is recolonized by younger, more solitary dingoes. These animals aren’t capable of going after large prey like kangaroos, so they turn to calves. In their study, some of the highest rates of calf predation occurred in areas that had been baited.
G
Mark Clifford, general manager of a firm that manages over 200,000 head of cattle, is not convinced by Allen’s assertion. Clifford says, “It’s obvious if we drop or loosen control on dingoes, we are going to lose more calves.” He doesn’t believe that dingoes will go after kangaroos when calves are around. Nor is he persuaded of dingoes’ supposed ecological benefits, saying he is not convinced that they manage to catch cats that often, believing they are more likely to catch small native animals instead.
H
McKechnie agrees that dingoes kill the wallabies (small native animals) that compete with his cattle for food, but points out that in parts of Western Australia, there are no foxes, and not very many cats. He doesn’t see how relaxing controls on dingoes in his area will improve the ecological balance.
Johnson sees a need for a change in philosophy on the part of graziers. “There might be a number of different ways of thinking through dingo management in cattle country,” he says. “At the moment, though, that hasn’t got through to graziers. There’s still just one prescription, and that is to bait as widely as possible.”
24. The dingo replaced the as the main predatory animal in Australia.
25. Foxes and cats are more likely to hunt native animals when there are fewer .
26. Australian animals reproduce at a slow rate as a natural way of avoiding .
The starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world: first folios of Shakespeare, Gutenberg Bibles and manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Yet the library’s most controversial possession is an unprepossessing vellum manuscript about the size of a hardback book, containing 240-odd pages of drawings and text of unknown age and authorship. Catalogued as MS 408, the manuscript would attract little attention were it not for the fact that the drawings hint at esoteric knowledge, while the text seems to be some sort of code — one that no-one has been able to break. It is known to scholars as the Voynich manuscript, after the American book-dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the manuscript from a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912.
Over the years, the manuscript has attracted the attention of everyone from amateur dabblers to top code-breakers, all determined to succeed where countless others have failed. Academic research papers, books and websites are devoted to making sense of the contents of the manuscript, which are freely available to all. “Most other mysteries involve second-hand reports,” says Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University, a leading Voynich expert. “But this is one that you can see for yourself.”
It is certainly strange: page after page of drawings of weird plants, astrological symbolism and human figures, accompanied by a script that looks like some form of shorthand. What does it say — and what are the drawings about? Voynich himself believed that the manuscript was the work of the 13th-century English monk Roger Bacon, famed for his knowledge of alchemy, philosophy and science. In 1921 Voynich’s view that Bacon was the writer appeared to win support from the work of William Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, who claimed to have found the key to the cipher system used by Bacon. According to Newbold, the manuscript proved that Bacon had access to a microscope centuries before they were supposedly invented. The claim that this medieval monk had observed living cells created a sensation. It soon became clear, however, that Newbold had fallen victim to wishful thinking. Other scholars showed that his “decoding” methods produced a host of possible interpretations.
The Voynich manuscript has continued to defy the efforts of world-class experts. In 1944, a team was assembled to tackle the mystery, led by William Friedman, the renowned American code-breaker. They began with the most basic code-breaking task: analysing the relative frequencies of the characters making up the text, looking for signs of an underlying structure. Yet Friedman’s team soon found themselves in deep water. The precise size of the “alphabet” of the Voynich manuscript was unclear: it is possible to make out more than 70 distinct symbols among the 170,000-character text. Furthermore, Friedman discovered that some words and phrases appeared more often than expected in a standard language, casting doubt on claims that the manuscript concealed a real language, as encryption typically reduces word frequencies.
Friedman concluded that the most plausible resolution of this paradox was that “Voynichese” is some sort of specially created artificial language, whose words are devised from concepts rather than linguistics. So could the Voynich manuscript be the earliest-known example of an artificial language? “Friedman’s hypothesis commands respect because of the lifetime of cryptanalytic expertise he brought to bear,” says Rob Churchill, co-author of The Voynich Manuscript. That still leaves a host of questions unanswered, however, such as the identity of the author and the meaning of the bizarre drawings. “It does little to advance our understanding of the manuscript as a whole,” says Churchill.
Even though Friedman was working more than 60 years ago, he suspected that major insights would come from using the device that had already transformed code-breaking: the computer. In this he was right — it is now the key tool for uncovering clues about the manuscript’s language.
The insights so far have been perplexing. For example, in 2001 another leading Voynich scholar, Dr Gabriel Landini of Birmingham University in the UK, published the results of his study of the manuscript using a pattern-detecting method called spectral analysis. This revealed evidence that the manuscript contains genuine words, rather than random nonsense, consistent with the existence of some underlying natural language. Yet the following year, Voynich expert René Zandbergen of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, showed that the entropy of the text (a measure of the rate of transfer of information) was consistent with Friedman’s suspicions that an artificial language had been used.
Many are convinced that the Voynich manuscript is not a hoax. For how could a medieval hoaxer create so many tell-tale signs of a message from random nonsense? Yet even this has been challenged in new research by Rugg. Using a system first published by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano in 1150, in which a specially constructed grille is used to pick out symbols from a table, Rugg found he could rapidly generate text with many of the basic traits of the Voynich manuscript. Publishing his results in 2004, Rugg stresses that he had not set out to prove the manuscript a hoax. “I simply demonstrated that it is feasible to hoax something this complex in a few months,” he says.
Inevitably, others beg to differ. Some scholars, such as Zandbergen, still suspect the text has genuine meaning, though believe it may never be decipherable. Others, such as Churchill, have suggested that the sheer weirdness of the illustrations and text hints at an author who had lost touch with reality.
What is clear is that the book-sized manuscript, kept under lock and key at Yale University, has lost none of its fascination. “Many derive great intellectual pleasure from solving puzzles,” says Rugg. “The Voynich manuscript is as challenging a puzzle as anyone could ask for.”
William Newbold believed that the author had seen cells through a . William Friedman concluded that the manuscript used an artificial language based on and believed the would continue to bring advances. Gabriel Landini used in his research. Gordon Rugg employed a grille to pick symbols from a , concluding the manuscript lacked genuine meaning.