In 1956, Jorn Utzon entered a design competition to design an Opera House for Sydney, Australia. His entry, one of over 200, contained schematic designs that explained the concept for the building, but no engineering guidance for how it should (or could) be built. Had he stopped to consider what was possible and constrain himself to what had come before, it’s unlikely his submission would’ve pushed the boundaries in the way that it did.
Standing out from the crowd or doing something different is always risky. There are norms in every culture and industry – things people just expect. In the mid-1950s, architecture was characterised by modernist values; function over form, glass boxes. Minimal ornamentation and decoration were all ‘normal’. Many of the other Sydney Opera House entries were ‘normal’.
But the thing about normal is that it changes. No one knows how and when it will happen, but inevitably, it does. At the time of the Sydney Opera House Competition, it was the four judges who decided it was time for a change when they awarded Utzon the first prize. Because of that, the Opera House stands as an iconic ‘masterpiece’, a one-of-a-kind.
If artists start with what is ‘normal’ rather than what isn’t, we’ll likely do OK. The architects who won second and third prize for the Sydney Opera House were successful firms both before and after the competition. But going beyond normal, living in the space where the risk lies, sharing a vision of something before we know whether it’s even possible, it’s only then when we’re even in with a chance to be the one that creates the new normal, the next one-of-a-kind.