Peter Hall (architect)

In 2006 Hall was awarded the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ (NSW Chapter) 25 Year Award in recognition of his contribution to the Opera House. The jury cited Hall’s interiors as ‘among the major achievements of Australian architects of the 1960s and 1970s’ and that they combined with Utzon’s ‘great vision and magnificent exterior’ to form ‘one of the world’s great working buildings’. More recently a number of research projects and publications have examined Hall’s career and reassessed his role in the completion of the Opera House. Research has been informed by a re-examination of the circumstances leading to Utzon's resignation and the revelations of Hall’s personal papers, now in the collection of the State Library of NSW. In 2015 the association OpusSOH Inc was formed to promote recognition of Hall’s work and in 2016 he was the subject of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s documentary ‘Australian Story’. The fourth, revised, edition of the Opera House Conservation Management Plan (2017) acknowledges and documents Hall and his team’s contribution, assessing the radially-ribbed plywood Concert Hall as of ‘exceptional significance’ within the building’s significance hierarchy.

Peter Hall befriended and supported many Sydney artists including sculptor Clement Meadmore, whom he had hoped to commission to create the courtyard sculpture for UNSW’s Goldstein College, and was friends with the celebrated Sydney photographer Max Dupain, whom he commissioned to record the completed Opera House. But perhaps Hall’s most important commission was that of local artist John Coburn to design the huge stage curtain tapestries for the Opera Theatre and Drama Theatre. The ‘Curtain of the Sun’ and ‘Curtain of the Moon’, woven at Aubusson in France in the early 1970s, are amongst the many significant legacies of Hall’s seven years at the helm of the Opera House design completion.

Hall enjoyed overseas travel, his letters and travel diaries recording his wide-ranging interests – art, architecture, history – and cultural curiosity. Throughout his adult life he remained closely attuned to contemporary art and design trends. In the mid 1960s he designed renowned Sydney interior designer Marion Hall Best’s Woollahra shop, with its Japanese tatami-matted floors, modern Scandinavian furniture and colourful Marimekko fabrics. For the Opera House he specified bold carpet and upholstery colours as a counterpoint to the dominant concrete and plywood interior elements and, with interior designer Diana Luxton, designed the moulded plywood theatre seating – still in use today – to complement the interior cladding. Records show that Hall was unafraid to go into battle with the government to ensure the highest quality fittings and fixtures and strong contemporary colours. At the media launch of the seating design in 1972 he declared ‘I’ve chosen clear, strong colours like the ones Matisse used … Nobody’s going to walk through muted, grey interiors here.’

Peter Brian Hall (16 May 1931 – 19 May 1995) was an Australian architect active in Sydney and elsewhere from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Schooled in the tenets of modernism his practice was also informed by a strong sense of the importance of function and context in design. During his early years Hall was the recipient of numerous education scholarships and bursaries, most notably a traineeship and then employment with the office of the New South Wales Government Architect, a source of highly creative architecture during the 1960s. However, Hall is best known for completing the Sydney Opera House after the resignation of its original architect, Jørn Utzon, in February 1966. Aged just 34 he was invited by the Government Architect to act as design architect in the newly formed consortium Hall Todd & Littlemore to resolve the issues which had led to Utzon’s resignation, principally the design of all the interiors and the enclosing glass walls of the unfinished building. The Opera House opened in October 1973 and despite its subsequent success as Sydney’s most popular performance venue, understanding of the work of Hall and his team has been coloured by the controversial circumstances of their appointment. For Hall, both personally and professionally, Utzon’s legacy was a poisoned chalice – an unprecedented challenge to complete the building to a standard commensurate with its sublime exterior, but one that brought little recognition during his lifetime.