Visionary architect
Had Jorn Utzon been allowed to execute his extravagant architectural vision, the Sydney Opera House would surely be recognised universally as the finest building of the 20th Century. As it was, the long-running saga of its design, construction and unhappy completion offers a complicated tale both of towering and thwarted ambition. To this day, Utzon's masterpiece remains incomplete.
Even within Australia, I wonder how well the story is known of Utzon's resignation in 1966 following an acrimonious row with the state government of New South Wales over cost blow-outs and construction over-runs. Immediately after his resignation, the Danish architect flew out of Australia and never returned.
His departure meant that Utzon was responsible for the iconic whites shells, the most self-confident symbol of modern Australia, while the interiors were finished off by a team of local architects. In fashioning the inside of his shells, Utzon envisaged a burst of sub-aqua colour, with a pallet drawn from the underwater world. Instead, the Opera House made do with what was supposed to be a cut-price alternative. One of the many ironies is that when Utzon left the project the cost had escalated to A$22.9m. Ultimately, the price-tag soared to A$107m ($70m).
Eventually, the building was opened by the Queen in 1973, ten years after the original completion date and 30 times over budget. Since then, over four million people have visited the building each year and marvelled at its staggering beauty.
Of course, Utzon's design, which edged out over 800 entries in an international competition in 1957, was extraordinarily bold and visionary. Even as construction began on the podium of the Opera House, Utzon and his team of engineers had not yet come up with a design solution for the gigantic shells which would one day rise above it. Sceptics feared it would be impossible to build. The bean-counters feared it would be too expensive. Eventually, Utzon solved the problem himself, his eureka moment coming when he peeled the skin from an orange.
In the late-1990s, the Sydney Opera House Trust tried to make peace with Utzon, and he agreed to draw up a series of design principles for the building which would govern future changes to the structure. Since then, a small number of smallish rooms have been renovated in keeping with his original designs. But, for the most part, the interiors remain a colossal disappointment. No wonder many of Sydney's architects mounted a protest march - an architectural protest march! - when the incoming Liberal state government made Utzon's position untenable.
Many will still believe that the Opera House is inarguably the greatest building of the last century, even an eighth wonder of the world. Frank Gehry, the great and ground-breaking American architect, noted: "Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious criticism to a building that changed the image of an entire country. It is the first time in our lifetime that such an epic piece of architecture gained such universal presence."
When I was a young architectural student, it was certainly one of my favourites.
The sadness is that Jorn Utzon went to the death this weekend knowing this most revolutionary of structures could have been even better.
I'm 
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~08~RS~)
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I don't believe its right to say 'Utzon solved the problem [of shells] himself' just as much as it would be wrong to say that it was actually Arup who found the solution, the opera house represents the worlds best moment in collaboration between architects and engineers, surely it was a team effort
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A good summary of the Utzon/Opera House story. It's funny how people (especially in the UK) who denounce "modern architecture" always seem to conveniently forget about the Opera House. It's as modern as modern can be, and yet universally admired. What the Opera House actually demonstrates is that if you're going to do modern architecture, better not do it half-heartedly. Oh, and it helps if your building is in a sunny and beautiful location.
It's not true though that the building was finished off by "local architects". Ove Arup himself was personally involved in the project right until its end, as was a Danish relative of mine who stayed on after Utzon left.
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I interviewed Utzon for the Sydney Morning Herald at his Mallorcan home in 1992 for the 25th anniversary of the building.
As Utzon told it to me at the tiime, and contrary to this blog's assertion above, the orange peel (actually it was orange segments, not peel) 'eureka moment' came not in trying to make his shell design work at the site, it inspired the original award-winning design itself at his studio in Denmark, before construction began.
Utzon was very complimentary of Ove Arup in making his revolutionary design possible, in realising it in practice - and in doing so devising ground-breaking engineering techniques that Ove Arup would employ in other projects elsewhere in the world.
Mr Utzon was rather less complimentary about the Australian state bureaucrats and politicians involved in the construction, notably the Public Works Minister of the day, Sir Davis Hughes, who politicised the build and turned the architects' professional body against Utzon. He saw Hughes as an interfering, visionless philistine; these are my terms, not his; Utzon was disappointed about his treatment in Australia but never once displayed or articulated any bitterness at his treatment. Just puzzlement.
In terms of the epochal scale and the ground-breaking architectural and engineering achievements required to realise his design, Mr Utzon likened the construction of the Opera House to Giza's pyramids and some of the structures of ancient Rome, but was disappointed and frustrated that in Australia at the time "nobody seemed to care, nobody knew."
He said "the fantastic site, its function, the scale of the project and the fact that it was in Australia, a new country, a young country with the potential for limitless imagination, made us all absolutely selective and perfect in what we did. I have never felt this responsibility before. It was very, very important. Sydney could have been an architectural laboratory; there would have been 10 or 15 buildings just as fabulous as this if we had stayed there."
Sadly for Sydney, he was not encouraged to stay and realise that vision.
For what its worth, the story is here:
www.ericellis.com/utzon.htm
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As the previous blogs say, the real heroes are Arup, particularly Irishman Peter Rice who, at the age of 28 turned Utzon's unbuildable ideas into concrete reality. Those who defend modern architecture should remember that it is an applied art, perhaps that is the secret of Calatrava's sucess, he trained as a structural engineer as well as being a sculptor. The sunshine helps as well
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how many people know what the opera house looks like inside? i know aussies, sydneysiders even, that have never been inside.
its a masterpiece regardless and with the bridge it makes sydney harbour an icon.
fair credit to Utzon for his work.
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I am pleased to see others have mentioned the name of Ove Arup, one of the most creative civil engineers of the last century. I remember going to a lecture at L'Pool University in the late 60's at which Arup spoke admiringly about Utzon and the problems he and his colleagues were faced with, in finding an engineering solution to build the shells. What they achieved was ground-breaking for civil engineering-Designing and building something that was curving continuously in two directions and out of concrete. The mathematics of the design that Ove explained very carefully that night left me impressed and very sad that I wasn't able to understand their complexity.
Robert Jones
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It's just so unhelpful to call a building or an architect 'the best of the twentieth century', as if architecture were some reality-television dance show or Olympic sport. Think about it: how is Utzorn 'better' than Aalto, for example, and in what ways does Sydney Opera House beat out all the other buildings to be 'inarguably' the 'best building of the twentieth century'? It's clearly not unarguable since I'm making an argument, and if there were to be such a fruitless competition more people would surely vote for Disneyland than for Sydney's Opera House. Even that one comparison brings up the question of 'What constitutes a building?'. Maybe you begin to see the futility (not to mention the silliness) of trying to make such a claim.
If you want to pursue this kind of chauvinistic line with architecture ("We've got the best building") you'd be better off talking about how Dubai or Taiwan or whoever it is at the moment has the tallest skyscraper in the world. That is at least indisputable, even if it is the kind of argument you hear from 8-year-olds.
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@6:
Ove was a structural engineer and it was structural, not civil, engineering and engineers that and who came up with the design of the iconic roofs.
Regardless of the semantics, it is always the architects who receive the vast majority of plaudits, certainly from the public: engineers are generally passed over - indeed, many people don't know of their existence, believing that the architect does it all - but, without structural engineers, these fantastic structures would never be built.
I make an exception for Calatrava, naturally...!
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To Shytalkz,
You are quite wrong to say that Arup, or anyone other than Utzon, came up with the related spheric segments that make up the form of the Sydney roof. Arup would have been responsible for figuring out alternatives for the construction, but that is something quite different from saying he designed it. Design in the sense that it is used in structural engineering has a very specific and quite different (technical) meaning to what is understood by the general public.
While there's nothing wrong with calling him a structural engineer Ove Arup was a civil engineer. The word 'civil' is used in British English to make a distinction from the old-fashioned 'military' engineer, rather than in the current US sense of the word where it means someone who designs roads and bridges but not buildings.
It's true today that there are some famous architects whose work isn't that great and that there are some engineers whose work ought to be better-known. On the other hand putting down architects is not going to help rectify this, particularly when you pick on someone really great like Utzon.
Santiago Calatrava, by the way, has degrees from ETH in Zürich in both structural engineering and architecture.
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#6, is that Rob Jones of Liverpool Poly 79-83?
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To AJP:
I meant "design" from the pov of making it stand up, rather than the concept of its form. Calatrava, of course, does both, being one of those rare animals who is qualified in both disciplines.
Arup was in fact qualified MIStructE and MICE, ie both a chartered civil and a chartered structural engineer.
Whilst what you say regarding the origin of the term "civil" as a distinction from "military" in engineering disciplines is correct, the UK differentiation is actually no different from that of the states. There is, however, some degree of overlap between the kind of work that civil and structural engineers undertake.
I do not denigrate architects in my earlier comments; indeed, I would readily accept that, if the world was both conceived and designed by engineers, it would comprise predominantly straight lines and be intrinsically boring. The point I was making was that, without engineers, none of these magnificent structures would exist, other than as a napkin doodle in an architect's pocket.
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I was always of the belief that seeing the segments of the orange was how Utzon came up with the idea for the design in the first place. As opposed to: he already had the idea, but the orange helped him figure out to construct it ... as you have suggested.
And perhaps this fits in with everybody's little debate above about whether it was Utzon or Arup. I believe the segments of the orange helped give Utzon the idea for the design in the first place. After the no doubt lengthy process following of designing the building, submitting that design, finding out he'd actually won, etc ... THEN they would have begun figuring out how to build it. Working with Arup and the other engineers helped them all devise a plan together.
As a child I was never that taken with the Opera House - perhaps I took it for granted as something that was always there, it even seemed a bit weird looking. As I grew up I began to really appreciate its spectacular beauty, and how ground-breaking it actually was. For an Australian, there is nothing that says "I'm home" quite like seeing the Opera House out of that plane window after a long period abroad.
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Regardless of who engineered the thing, what we should be remembering is the brilliance and vision of Utzon and the shameful treatment by him of the NSW government at the time. Our cultural cringe was truly alive and well back then!!!
The fact that his name was not even mentioned by the Queen at the opening ceremony (or that he was invited) is a disgrace and shows how small-minded people can be.
I have never been inside the building, but each time I visit Sydney, I feel drawn to the Opera House - its so different, depending on how close or far away you are. A magnificent legacy.
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The story behind the Opera House is like another agony and ecstasy, a war of wills between Utzon (Michelangelo), goaded and constantly strongarmed, and the nettlesome Davis Hughes (Pope Julius II), the impatient pontiff looking in on the recumbent painter atop the scaffolding asking, "When will you make an end of it?", understanding only the ecstasy of viewing a finished masterpiece, not the agony of creating it.
Like other artistic, in this case architectural/engineering achievements, at the end it is the work itself that stands iconic for generations.
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Jorn Utzon stands out larger than life as always, an architect with great vision and well ahead of his time especially during the early sixties when Australia was somewhat a backwater of main stream architectural designs. It was unfortunate that Utzon would have to be involved with the Askin/Hughes consipiracy at a time when all foreigners were treated with suspicion to a certain degrees. As a young engineering student I was at the opening ceremony of this great Aussie icon and undoubtedly feel that even to these days all talents whether foreign or local could make contribution to the modernisation of a relatively young nation.
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After Utzon used the "pallet" for decoration, was he going to burn it or use it for acoustic insulation?
in a less pedantic vein, I have read the thread about architects "versus" engineers with interest. (Please note the inverted commas before you flame me - I agree that they can be creative partners.)
I have a particular take on this question as my father was an engineer. He never worked on the Opera House, but a friend of his did. Apparently Utzon's original idea was that the ends of the main shells (the ends facing the harbour) would be enclosed with a gigantic single, vertical sheet of glass. Apparently the expansion and contraction rates of glass is so different from that of concrete that this idea was quite infeasible. Hence the rather ugly solution that now exists with the multiple panes of glass mounted on the cantilevered frames.
I'm not knocking the people who came up with this solution - they had to produce something that was going to keep the weather out. I think this is rather what the Opera House is - a breathtaking conception but an under-designed plan. As people used to say about Citroens, the triumph of engineering over design!
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Imagine Sydney without the Opera house? I can..... Melbourne would be the number 1 most well known Australian city. Why? The city itself is culturally miles ahead... The power of one building hey ~
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Are you being provocative netcrusher? Don't you think it might also be the climate, harbour, facilities, ease of getting around, Kirribilly House, climate, climate, climate. Melbourne is nothing to look at compared to Sydney.
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#18 I'll let you know once I've been to Sydney, but from my experience of Melbourne and everything I've been told about Sydney, NETCRUSHER might actually have a point!
Substance should beat Style.
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All* great achievements of recent vintage are collaborative efforts filled with the usual human failings. The construction of St. Paul's Cathedral was fraught with the usual mistakes, delays, cost over - runs bickering and bad feeling, but that is forgotten.
When I lived in Australia, the Opera House was completed and opened for business. The story making the rounds of us young civil engineers was that they jumped the gun on the construction of the foundation. When the design for the sails came out, they had to jackhammer out great portions of the completed foundation, which they trucked away in the silence of the night under the noses of the already howling critics. Crikey!
*OK wise guy, name the great achievement and it's sole creator.
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Nick:
He would have been a visionary architect....
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Oh, NETCRUSHER. Envy is a curse. If Melbourne is such a fantastic place, why the constant bitterness towards Sydney? Why does some vague sense of international recognition mean so much to you? Lets be honest, no one comes to Australia for the culture, do they? Melbourne might well be ahead of Sydney in this area, but it's still dwarfed by almost any European city. Sydney is loud, brash, uncultured and we love it, and apparently so do a lot of other people. Sydney is Sydney, while Melbourne is a kind of half hearted attempt at Barcelona. Sorry.
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Sydney without the Opera House?
Frankly, I'd rather go to Perth....
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