Adelaide Festival Centre turns 50

On 2 June 1973, then-prime minister Gough Whitlam officially opened the Adelaide Festival Centre, establishing the South Australian capital as a major arts city and marking a "major step forward in modern architecture."

On that night, the Festival Theatre - the complex's main building, and the first to be finished - played host to a performance of Beethoven's Choral Symphony and Fidelio (Act Two, Scene 1). Fifty years later, the Festival Centre is an established icon of arts and architecture on the banks of the Karrawirra Parri/River Torrens, and it will mark its anniversary with a gala concert.

The Festival Centre was designed by Hassell and Partners and built in three stages from 1970 to 1980. It comprises the multipurpose, 2000-seat Festival Theatre; the drama theatre The Playhouse (now the Dunstan Playhouse); the experimental theatre The Space (now the Space Theatre) and a number of smaller galleries and function spaces.

Leading the design was the late John Morphett, an architectural rebel who brought the lessons of Walter Gropius and other leading modernists to Australia. In his obituary for Morphett, Gordon Kanki Knight relates how the architect prepared for the commission by visiting the world's best theatres, taking in 42 halls in 42 days.

Following this whirlwind tour, Morphett "designed the building quickly, opting for two white octagonal shells in concrete."

"I didn't do many designs for the place," Knight has Morphett saying. "It was remarkably simple. I went home one night and built a little cardboard model and I thought that it might work. We refined it, but initially it was essentially as it came out.

"The design encloses fairly logically the functions inside," he explained. "You need an auditorium, you need a stage, so you put a different shell over each one and where they join is critical - the proscenium line is expressed where the volumes meet."