Jorn Utzon: 1918-2008
Jorn Utzon, the man who took Sydney to 'the edge of the possible' with his design for the Sydney Opera House, has died aged 90. Time Out pays special tribute to the man whose epic imagination gave our city its greatest icon.
Built on the site of the home Governor Arthur Phillip gifted to his Gadigal warrior friend Bennelong back in 1790, the Sydney Opera House began crawling like a leviathan from the crushed sapphire seas of Sydney Harbour in 1957 and, according to one Sydney tourism website half a century on, has risen to become "as representative of Australia as the pyramids are of Egypt and the Colosseum of Rome."
Utzon - the son of a naval engineer and graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen - was 38 when he was named the surprise winner of an international competition to build an opera house where, in 1788, great piles of shells abandoned after Gadigal feasts had towered 12 metres and where, at the time of Utzon's triumph, a "crenulated fort of monumental ugliness" in the form of a dilapidated tram terminus stood.
Having beaten 232 other entries, Utzon's vision was for a cluster of five auditoriums tucked beneath a roof of billowing white concrete. The designs he had submitted were no more than preliminary sketches inspired by the act of peeling an orange: the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere. But one of the judges, Eero Saarinen, described the drawings as the work of a "genius" and declared he could not endorse any other choice.
Utzon set to work refining his original conceptual designs for the shells over several years. However, the Joseph Cahill government was so keen to get started they arranged for the engineers, Ove Arup and Partners, to put out tenders for the podium without adequate working drawings; this work actually began in 1959 while Utzon was still in Denmark working on the final plans. So began the fateful saga of the Sydney Opera House's construction.
Government intervention would conspire to unravel Utzon and his project in the years to come. Utzon had spectacular plans for the interior of the Opera House's halls, but was foiled in mid-1965 when the state Liberal government of Robert Askin was elected. Askin had been a vocal critic of the project prior to gaining office and his new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, was even less sympathetic. These twin evils soon derailed Utzon's vision.
Hughes had no interest in art, architecture or aesthetics. He was, as journalist Elizabeth Farrelly later reported, "a fraud, as well as a philistine, having been exposed before Parliament and dumped as Country Party leader for 19 years of falsely claiming a university degree. But the Opera House gave Hughes a second chance. For him, it was all about control - the triumph of homegrown mediocrity over foreign genius."
Utzon and the new minister now went to war. Attempting to rein in the escalating cost of the project, Hughes began questioning Utzon's designs, schedules and cost estimates, eventually cutting payments. Unable to pay his staff, Utzon was forced to resign as chief architect in February 1966. When he walked away, the shells were almost complete, and costs amounted to only $22.9 million. Major changes to the original plans for the interiors ultimately rose that figure to $103 million. Utzon never saw the final product in person and never returned to Australia. Hughes maintained his piggish ignorance to the end, quipping in 2002: "You could say that (Utzon) produced the shells. He was a sculptor, not an architect."
Though he went on to design a handful of acclaimed public buildings in Northern Europe - all of which are now accorded "mythic status" among architecture and design boffins - as well as the globally acclaimed 1982 Kuwait National Assembly, Utzon's career output was kyboshed by having his vision for the Sydney Opera House wounded by partisan squabbling only tangentially connected to architecture.
The cracked fable of Sydney's Opera House became a cautionary tale about the risks of pursuing inventive architecture at the expense of function and budget. "Given the costs involved - the destruction of the career and oeuvre of an undisputed master of 20th century architecture - Sydney provides a lesson in what not to do," wrote Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish planner and architecture professor in 2005. "Utzon was 38 when he won the competition - how would the work of the mature master have enriched our lives? We'll never know. That's the high price Sydney has imposed by its incompetence in building the Opera House."
The Opera House was finally completed, and opened in 1973 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia. It was 10 years late and $96 million over budget, but was given to the world as a 183-metre arena whose roofs were covered in a subtle chevron pattern etched upon 1,056,006 glossy white and matte-cream self-cleaning Swedish-made tiles of which world-renowned architect Louis Kahn remarked: "The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building." The architect was not invited to the ceremony, nor was his name even mentioned.
Yet the legacy of Jørn Utzon's design, its influence and its beloved place in the hearts of Sydneysiders have reverberated around the world in the 35 years since, culminating in the Sydney Opera House's declaration as a World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007.
"In the Sydney Opera House Jørn Utzon realised the great synthesis of earth and sky, landscape and city, vista and intimacy, thought and feeling, in terms of a unity of technological and organic form," said Norwegian architect and expert in modern architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz, in the nomination document for World Heritage Listing. "Hence we may safely say that the Sydney Opera House represents a masterpiece of human creative genius, and a most significant step in the history of modern architecture."
In 2003, Utzon was named the winner of the Pritzker Prize for his work on the Sydney Opera House. As the legendary architect and visionary Frank Gehry, who served on the Pritzker jury that year, noted: "Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinarily malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country. In fact, it is the first time in our lifetime that an epic piece of architecture has gained such universal presence."
For Utzon himself, a more heartfelt salutation came in 2003 when officials in Sydney asked him to design updates to the interior of the Opera House. Utzon accepted the invitation and, relying on photographs of the building and video recordings of performances on its stages, completed the work from his home. His reward came when the Utzon Room was officially dedicated in October 2004.
But, honoured as we was, the dedication meant little to Utzon. "The fact that I'm mentioned in such a marvellous way, gives me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction," the deeply private man said in a statement. "I don't think you can give me more joy as the architect. It supersedes any medal of any kind that I could get and have got."
It was a point reiterated by Utzon's son, Jan, who took his father's place at the March 2006 opening ceremony accorded those final masterful touches. There, Jan explained that his father "is too old by now to take the long flight to Australia" and was destined never to see in person the fruit of his genius. "But he lives and breathes the Opera House and as its creator, just has to close his eyes to see it."
