The Architect Who Never Saw It Finished
Jørn Utzon—the Sydney Opera House
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ydney. 29 January, 1957. A little-known Danish architect learned his design had just won an international competition. The building it described had no name yet. It barely had a shape anyone knew how to build. |
Jørn Utzon (1918–2008) was thirty-eight, working out of a modest office in Hellebæk, a small town north of Copenhagen. He submitted twelve drawings, entry number 218 out of more than 223 designs sent in from 28 countries.
One of the four judges was Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), the Finnish-American architect behind the TWA terminal in New York. Saarinen is said to have pulled Utzon’s entry back out of a stack of rejected designs and refused to accept any other winner. The judges agreed. Utzon, an unknown Dane, had won.
This is the building that resulted, sixteen years and one resignation later.
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| Jørn Utzon, the Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, completed 1973. |
Utzon first drew the roof shells as smooth, flowing curves… inspired partly by orange peel and partly by clouds. Nobody could work out how to build curves like that in concrete. Engineers spent years failing to solve it. In 1961, Utzon found the answer: every shell, however it looked, could be cut from segments of one single giant sphere, the way you might slice up an orange. That one insight let the engineering firm Arup finally get the roof off the drawing board.
The original 1957 budget was seven million Australian dollars. By the time a new state government took office in 1965, the costs had already climbed far past that, and the new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, started withholding Utzon’s fees and second-guessing his designs. Utzon resigned in February 1966. He left Australia with his family two months later, and never set foot in the country again.
I once stood underneath those shells expecting to admire an engineering trick. Instead I found myself thinking about the man who solved the hardest part of the puzzle and then had to watch someone else finish the picture.
Sydney architects and ordinary residents marched through the streets with “Bring Utzon Back” posters. It made no difference. The building opened in October 1973, with Queen Elizabeth II presiding. Utzon was not there. In 1999, more than three decades later, the New South Wales government finally invited him back to design one interior space, a reception room that reopened in 2004 as the Utzon Room, the only room inside the building built exactly to his original plan.
The Sydney Opera House became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, one year before Utzon died in Denmark, at ninety. He had solved the impossible geometry of the roof from thousands of miles away. He had never once seen the finished building in person.
A telegram announced his name in 1957… the building he never got to walk through still carries it.
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