UNFINISHED BUSINESS by GERALDINE BROOKS
Jørn Utzon returns to the Sydney Opera House.
Issue of 2005-10-17
Posted 2005-10-10
Fifty years ago, the state government of New South Wales, in Australia, announced a competition for the design of an opera house to occupy a sandstone headland in Sydney Harbour. Two hundred and thirty-three entries were submitted, of which the most arresting was by a little-known thirty-eight-year-old architect from Denmark. Jørn Utzon worked out of a studio near a house he had designed for his young family in the small seaside township of Hellebæk. He had won several competitions but had built nothing larger than a pair of modest housing projects. The son of a naval architect, he studied the Sydney site from nautical charts purchased at a marine bookstore in Copenhagen, to get a feel for the action of winds and tides against the landform.
His design evoked sails, shells, and gull wings. Alone among the entrants, Utzon had recognized that the building would be seen from all perspectives; when looked down upon from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the buildings nearby, it would have, in effect, a “fifth façade.” Eero Saarinen, the most distinguished of the competition judges, called the design “a work of genius.” Utzon had disregarded competition rules, using gold on drawings that were supposed to be black and white, and neglecting to include a required perspective of the building in its harbor setting. Saarinen himself took up pastels and completed two large sketches to fill the gap. In the end, the judges’ decision was unanimous, and Utzon began work on one of the most famous architectural designs of the twentieth century. The architect Louis I. Kahn remarked, “The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building.”
Yet the Sydney Opera House, instead of making Utzon’s career, almost ruined it. After he had worked for a decade and settled his family in Australia, conflict with the state government of New South Wales forced him to leave, with the project only two-thirds finished. The building was completed without regard for his intentions. Utzon went back to Denmark with his reputation tarnished. He became reclusive, declining to speak about his work. When the Opera House finally opened, in 1973, he refused an invitation to the ceremony. He has never returned to Sydney.
Last year, however, without fanfare a sign went up over construction scaffolding on the Opera House site. It read:
Throughout the long estrangement, Utzon has said, he never stopped thinking about the Opera House for a single day: “I have the building in my head like a composer has his symphony.” He has already remodelled the interior of one small reception room. Construction has started on revision of the building’s foyers and on its loggia. Behind high hoardings, construction workers are punching large holes through the granite-faced podium walls, to bring light and views of the harbor into the previously dingy drama-theatre foyers. Utzon is also redesigning the interior of one of the two main halls, and has completed a set of design principles that will guide future alterations, long after he is gone, to an edifice likely to stand for centuries. Perhaps for the first time in history, an architect is designing spaces he will never see for a building in which he has never set foot.
Utzon is elusive. For decades, he has relied on his family to protect him from unwanted intrusions. His two sons, Jan and Kim, are architects. His daughter, Lin, is a ceramic and textile artist. All have collaborated with their father on projects and served as his public face. Those who knew the family made it clear to me that a meeting with Jørn Utzon was unlikely under any circumstances, and impossible without his children’s approval. So I found myself, last winter, waiting to meet Lin Utzon under blossoming almond trees on the Spanish island of Majorca. Jørn Utzon and his wife, Lis, lived here from the nineteen-seventies until they returned to Denmark a couple of years ago. Behind me, the ruins of a Moorish fortress hugged a distant clifftop. I knew that somewhere just below, and echoing the lines of the ruin, was Can Feliz, one of two houses that Utzon had designed here. His daughter lives there now.
“You won’t be able to find it,” Lin told me when I phoned her from Sydney. “We will come down to the main road to get you.” She was right: Can Feliz comes into view only partially, at the end of a series of rising twists and turns past fields and clumps of pine trees-the perfect retreat for an obsessively private man. The house is modest in size but feels spacious; in the living room, two simple stone columns frame a panorama of woods and fields falling away to the distant ocean. A pair of Australian wattle trees were in bloom, golden against the softer gold of the local stone from which the house is built. “My parents loved the wattles in Sydney,” Lin said. “We all adored Australia. It was a huge influence on all our lives.” It was Lin, then aged ten, who took a phone call informing her father that he had won the Opera House competition, in 1957. Her parents were out, walking to the post office. She cycled after them, calling out the good news.
In many ways, Australia suited Utzon. He had grown up by water and woods, sailing and hunting with his father, who managed the shipyard at Ålborg, a port town in the north of Denmark. Aage Utzon was famous for designing fast yachts with pointed sterns, which, he said, were inspired by the study of fish. He taught his son how to use nature for inspiration and how to build models to test his ideas. In 1930, Aage took the family to the Stockholm Exhibition of modern design, and Jørn, then twelve, later recalled how this exposure to Functionalism changed his life: “My parents returned home completely carried away by the new ideas and thoughts. They soon commenced redoing our home. The concept was space and light. All of the heavy, unpractical furniture was moved out and simple things were brought in.”
Utzon was an indifferent student at school and barely scraped into the architecture course at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Once there, he thrived. His draftsmanship was excellent-both in the exacting technical drawings he had learned from his father and in his own distinctive, loose sketches in soft charcoal. He enjoyed the school’s requirement that students spend eight months working in building trades. In the academy’s library, he came across an illustrated Sung-dynasty building manual (its title, “Ying Tsao Fa Shi,” simply means “Building Standards”) which became a crucial influence on his design philosophy. The nine-hundred-year-old text showed how a limited set of elements could serve to build any structure, from a hut to a palace. This idea became so important to Utzon that when he later went to China he acquired his own copy of the rare, string-bound manual to take with him to Sydney. By then, Utzon’s cultural eclecticism had become a major part of his sensibility. In the late nineteen-forties, he made several important trips: one to Morocco, where he was captivated by the mud-brick strongholds and courtyard houses of the Berbers; and another to Mexico, where he saw the platform temples of the Yucatán, whose huge, stepped approaches were to become a dominant idea in his designs.
On his return to Denmark, he built a prototype for a low-cost, courtyard house. He developed his design by thinking about the various people who might inhabit such housing. He imagined families in detail, almost writing short stories about them-some who used their courtyards for beekeeping or boat building, some who were large and messy, others who were private and austere. Utzon’s design, based on an embracing pair of L shapes, was flexible enough to accommodate them all. The most important thing was “that you are able to imagine a life lived by people before you begin to design the house,” he explained in a taped letter to a group of architecture students. “In that way you can slowly form an idea of a room.”
When Utzon entered the Opera House competition, he went sailing around Hamlet’s castle, Kronborg, at Elsinore, which seems to float upon a promontory similar to the Opera House site. He came up with the idea of a massive podium that would form the base of the building, echoing Sydney’s sandstone headlands while cunningly accommodating all the backstage operations. Soaring above this would be two performance halls. As with the courtyard house, he vividly imagined the way people would use and inhabit the spaces. “The audience is assembled from cars, trains and ferries and led like a festive procession into the respective halls,” he wrote in his competition entry. In an article written in 1965, he compared the effect he sought to that of a Gothic church: “You never finish with it while you move around it or see it against the sky. This interplay with the sun, the light, the clouds is so important that it makes the building into a living thing.”
Now that the city of Sydney is instantly identified by the Opera House, it is hard to imagine the place as it was in the nineteen-fifties. I grew up there and can just recall the harbor of my early childhood, its sparkle often shrouded by the belching of ill-sited plants, its downtown foreshore cluttered with boxy, unimaginative office buildings. The mood of the time was conservative: Sydney seemed an unlikely city to embrace a radical and extravagant architectural experiment, especially one dedicated to the arts. Australians were slowly shrugging off an inferiority complex, dubbed the “cultural cringe,” which was a residue of the country’s penal-settlement origins and its recent status as an outpost of the British Empire. Sport ruled, and at least four of the building’s future tenants-Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet Company, the Sydney Dance Company, and the Sydney Theatre Company-didn’t yet exist.
But change was coming, driven in part by postwar immigration from Europe that had suddenly swollen Sydney’s population. The newcomers scrambled to find housing. “We were a family of four crammed into a one-bedroom flat, and we rented out the bedroom,” recalls Joseph Skrzynski, who until recently was the chairman of the Sydney Opera House Trust and a principal figure in effecting the reconciliation with Utzon. Skrzynski, the son of an aristocratic Polish landowner, cavalry officer, and concentration-camp survivor, arrived with his family in 1950.
The cultural expectations of such immigrants expanded the audience for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which had hundreds on a waiting list for seats in the city’s cramped Town Hall. Its conductor, Eugene Goossens, approached the state premier with the suggestion that Sydney build a venue expressly for music. Unexpectedly, the premier, Joe Cahill, a Labor Party politician and former railway worker, agreed. Cahill’s own tastes in entertainment ran to works such as the Donkey Serenade and the Lux Radio Theatre, but he advocated so tenaciously for the Opera House that it became known as the Taj Cahill. In forcing the project through a reluctant Cabinet, he vastly understated its likely cost, which eventually grew to ten times his estimate. By insisting that work commence on the building even before Utzon had resolved key design elements, Cahill gave the project a momentum that proved irreversible.
But Cahill’s enthusiasm for the project also contributed to a series of construction delays for which Utzon was blamed. The premature start meant, for instance, that piers needed to support the roof were sunk in place before the roof design was resolved. Utzon had drawn free-form sculptural shapes that the project engineers, Ove Arup & Partners, struggled in vain to convert into buildable solutions. Utzon, still living in Denmark, prowled his father’s shipyard. He thought about a saying of his father’s: “Here in the dockyard you construct and produce what you can’t buy, what is not to be had, what is necessary.” The large curves of the hulls gave him an idea: all of the Opera House’s roof shells could be generated from a single sphere. The solution was not only buildable; it allowed complex elements to be prefabricated using a small number of simple forms, as in his beloved Sung-dynasty manual. Excited, he returned to his studio and explained the idea to an assistant by cutting all the necessary shell-shaped segments from the skin of a single orange. However, the impact of the new design on the Sydney site was rather less elegant: the piers weren’t in the right places to bear the loads imposed by the new geometry. For several days, downtown Sydney shook from the explosions as the piers were blasted out and redone.
In 1963, as work on the site accelerated, Utzon moved to Australia with his wife and three children. Shunning the society of the local élite, the Utzons bought a large tract of gum-tree-shaded land an hour north of the city, between a wide ocean beach and a tranquil harbor, where their neighbors were boat builders and beachcombing bohemians. Utzon set up a studio in a nearby boat shed and hired a number of bright young Australian architects, who became, in effect, disciples. One of them, Peter Myers, recalled being on-site when the plywood forms were removed from the concrete beams that arc up on either side of the northern foyers like the ribs of a fan. “The concrete was perfect, the edges were pure, there wasn’t a blemish,” Myers said. He turned to see tears running down Utzon’s face. “And then I saw that the tough Italian workers were crying, too. Their pride in workmanship was being acknowledged, and we were all transported by what had been achieved.”
Myers says that Utzon treated his young staff as “colleagues, not assistants,” and recalls gathering at the family’s beach house for sunset picnics or impromptu boating expeditions. The accoutrements of the Utzons’ European life-a sleek Citroën car, a piano built of chrome and Perspex-left a lasting impression on them. Utzon always dressed with subtle taste-“It was clear he had a very good tailor in Copenhagen”-but the younger architects were free to abandon the suit and tie that would have been obligatory in most Sydney architecture firms of the day. Myers says that Utzon’s perfectionism and his refusal to be rushed into anything were summed up in an anecdote-“I must have heard him tell it fifteen times”-about the Danish furniture designer Kaare Klint. “Someone comes to Klint’s studio and asks him, ‘What are you working on?’ Klint replies, ‘I’m working on a chair.’ Eighteen months later, the same man visits and again asks Klint what he is working on. ‘I told you,’ Klint says, ‘I’m working on a chair.’ ’’
The roof tiles of the Sydney Opera House were Utzon’s version of the chair. He liked to say that almost everything about the building’s design was “on the edge of the possible,” and for the tiles he wanted something very specific: a tile that “had gloss but did not have a mirror effect. A tile with a coarse structure that resembled hammered silver.” He did not want a blinding flare off the roof surfaces, or a “normal” glaze, which looks “as if it is made from white cardboard.” He used many metaphors for what he was seeking. The tiles, he said, should contrast matte against sheen, like a fresh layer of snow on a frozen snowbank, or the shine of a fingernail against skin. “The material,” he wrote, “would have to be sought in the building of the ancient world, which has stood up to many years’ use without deterioration.” He travelled to China and Japan, looking at samples of ancient roof tiles and half-glazed ware. In an archive of his papers kept in a Sydney library, images of the tiled dome of the Great Mosque at Esfahan, in Iran, are filed alongside a more contemporary inspiration: an advertising photograph of a Swedish swimsuit model, the chevron pattern of her costume flowing easily over her curves. The Opera House tiles, Utzon decided, would be laid in chevrons, fanning out across the roof curves to express the form of the concrete beams beneath.
The Opera House tiles would need to stand up to extreme conditions, and, to develop them, Utzon chose a Swedish ceramic factory, Höganäs, which normally produced a far less glamorous product: stoneware tiles to line the sluices in paper mills, which are alternately exposed to boiling water and ice-cold river water. After many trials, Utzon settled on a tile made of the smooth local clay mixed with grainy, crushed matter to add texture. The raw tile was painted with a sauce or slick of the same material, fired, then overlaid with a transparent glaze before a final firing. Fixing more than a million tiles on steep surfaces hundreds of feet in the air posed immense difficulties, so the tiles were laid on the ground, where quality could be controlled, in chevron-shaped “lids,” which were then hoisted into place. To allow for variations in stress, the spaces between the tiles in each section had to be calculated by computer, at that time a novelty in building projects.
Developing the tiles and the method for laying them took more than three years. While Utzon was out of Australia making his studies, the engineers and others on-site grew frustrated. Communications between Europe and Australia were difficult in those days-calls had to be booked through an operator a day in advance-and sometimes Utzon couldn’t be reached for consultations. Premier Cahill had died suddenly in 1959, leaving Utzon without his chief political backer. In the 1965 elections, the costs and delays of Utzon’s project were a campaign issue, and the more conservative Liberal Party, which claimed that the project had got out of hand, won power. Utzon found himself reporting to Davis Hughes, a rural politician whose country constituents were unsympathetic to the extravagant urban edifice. As Minister for Public Works, Hughes “was champing at the bit to shut [Utzon] down,” Joseph Skrzynski recalls.
By then, the podium was complete and the roof shells were rising, rib by rib. Utzon had turned to the design of the theatre interiors, marrying the needs of staging and acoustics with the requirement to fit in the maximum number of seats. His vision was to have a sudden shift of mood from the processional approach to the theatres to a performance space that glittered with festive promise. Utzon admired the rich colors of Noh and Kabuki theatre and the gilded spaces of some traditional European theatres, but inspiration also came from the bushland near his studio. Richard Leplastrier, one of his young assistants, recalled walking with Utzon through the bush-he had, he says, a hunter’s “long, easy lope”-when they heard the cry of a neighbor’s peacock. “Color, Ricardo!” Utzon exclaimed. “If you really want to understand color, we must do studies of the birds!”
The effect Utzon wanted was “a climax in color” that would “uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre.” He was experimenting with intense, Sung-dynasty reds and shimmering gold leaf in one hall; peacock emeralds and blues highlighted with silver in the other. The halls would stand out “like a big exotic bird.” Each hall would have an elaborately curvaceous, acoustically ingenious plywood ceiling-“hanging like a cloud in the sky.” Utzon likened the way that the rippling ceiling would fit inside the curves of the outer roof to a walnut-the smooth outer shell containing the folded forms of the meat nestled within. Richard Johnson, the Sydney architect now collaborating with Utzon, has another explanation: “The auditorium is the musical instrument; the shell is the case.”
Utzon was working, as was his style, with a single supplier, a Sydney plywood manufacturer named Ralph Symonds, who shared his willingness to experiment almost endlessly. Hughes, however, felt that the time for experiments was past, and wanted drawings that could be put to competitive bidding. His view was a reasonable one in the context of any standard public building project. Utzon, however, maintained that drawings couldn’t be done until prototypes had been tested, and asserted scornfully that there was no point in putting the job to tender, as only Symonds had a factory equipped to make the vast plywood sheets required. “He wanted the best possible idea,” Skrzynski recalls, whereas Hughes “wanted the best idea you can have by Friday.”
Determined to force Utzon to comply, Hughes withheld the fees from which the architect paid his staff. By February, 1966, Utzon faced a cash crisis. He warned that if the money wasn’t paid he would have no alternative but to close his office and leave the project. Given its complexity and the advanced stage of construction, Utzon was confident that Hughes couldn’t let him go. He miscalculated. Hughes interpreted the move as Utzon’s resignation, and announced it to the press.
Thousands, including many of Australia’s most noted artists and writers, rallied in support of Utzon. Martin Sharp, an iconoclastic Sydney painter, created cartoons lampooning Hughes. In one, the minister delivers a stream-of-consciousness rant against Utzon: “Brilliant move forcing that Danish prima donna to resign, he’d want to sing his own bloody operas if we’d let him stay.” But the conservative Royal Australian Institute of Architects refused to call for a boycott, and Hughes was able to hand the design to a team of architects who worked directly under his control. The brief for the building was revised, discarding the idea of having the large hall serve both opera and concerts, making it a concert hall only. Opera was shoehorned into the smaller second hall that had been intended for drama, and the drama theatre was crammed into the podium, which had been intended to house only backstage operations. Millions of dollars’ worth of specially designed stage equipment had to be scrapped. The contractor charged with that task likened it to “cutting up a live deer.”
Utzon gathered his family and left for Denmark, travelling secretly to avoid the press. He journeyed via Mexico, and sent an insouciant postcard to one of his supporters in Sydney: “Went to Yucatán. The ruins are wonderful so why worry? Sydney Opera House becomes a ruin one day.” Utzon still believed that the architects Hughes had appointed would stumble, and that he would be recalled. He was right only on the first count. His replacement was Peter Hall, a thirty-five-year-old architect who had already been working for Hughes’s department. Hall was a talented designer in the Brutalist mainstream, which made him a disastrous choice for picking up the threads of Utzon’s work. He struggled to fathom Utzon’s style, which was, in the end, not so much a style as a manner of working: understanding the site, drawing ideas from nature and ancient buildings, then synthesizing forms that emphasized human comfort and delight. As Richard Weston, the author of the definitive book on Utzon, puts it, “A Gehry building depends on the taste of Gehry, while with Utzon’s, it is as if the site is fulfilling its destiny, as if some other hand had made it.”
Costs soared as Hall struggled to find solutions for the interiors. The concert hall became a pedestrian, Lincoln Center-style venue, the opera theatre an aesthetic and practical disaster. Instead of the festive climax Utzon had envisioned, its walls are a stark and forbidding black, with tiers of boxes in Brutalist concrete, many of which have limited sight lines. The acoustics in the cramped orchestra pit are so bad that musicians risk going deaf if they play there for an extended period. After the Opera House, Hall’s practice didn’t thrive. He died, alcoholic and beset by debts, in 1995.
Utzon, meanwhile, had found his reception back in Denmark distinctly chilly. The president of the Danish Association of Architects told him that, having abandoned one job, he couldn’t expect to get work from the government there, and he never did. His one really significant Danish commission came in 1969 from a church congregation in a Copenhagen suburb, and for once Utzon had a client willing to trust him on all details. The site is an unprepossessing strip of busy highway, so Utzon has created his own topography within. The building has few external windows but is saturated with light that falls from skylights set in a remarkable surging ceiling that rises like a wave.
After Sydney, Utzon worked on only one commission of a scale similar to that of the Opera House. In 1971, he designed the Kuwait National Assembly, on a site on the Persian Gulf. The design incorporated many ideas from Arab and Islamic tradition: a vast concrete form that swoops upward from the entrance, recalling the billowing tents of the Bedouin, and providing a majlis, or meeting place, where the emir can receive his subjects. Offices and departments are arranged along an internal “street,” evoking a souk, or bazaar. Along with early drawings, Utzon sent his assistant a picture of the Esfahan mosque, torn from a newspaper, with the words “arches as beautiful as these” scribbled on it.
But the Assembly project, too, was bedevilled by politics. The emir’s commitment to democracy proved weak, and the parliament that the building was meant to house was suspended for several years. Delays and revisions of the brief meant that the Assembly, as built, was a lesser building than Utzon had designed. When, in 1991, the departing Iraqi Army torched it, the interior was refurbished in a glitzy, Louis Farouk style that was the diametric opposite of Utzon’s clean, restrained original.
Bad luck dogged other projects. “It was like a curse that followed him,” Skrzynski said. A theatre that Utzon had devoted eight years to designing for Zurich was scrapped in a government cost-cutting campaign; another, in Lebanon, was cancelled when civil war broke out. An industrialist who had proposed a project in Portugal was killed in a car crash. No further grand commissions were forthcoming, and some years there was no work at all.
“That is how he came to build this house,” Lin, Utzon’s daughter, told me at Can Feliz, as she served tea in indigo-splashed porcelain cups of her own design. After the collapse of the Zurich theatre scheme, Utzon’s wife suggested building the house. “He needed very much to have a project,” Lin told me, as we walked across fields to one of the few vantage points from which the house reveals itself. “They came up here for many, many months, just with a chair each, and they would move around, sitting here and there, studying the different views, the play of light in different seasons, the strength and direction of the prevailing wind.” Utzon designed the house almost without plans, working instead with models and in close collaboration with local craftsmen, as he had tried to do with the Opera House. On the days he arrived carrying bottles of wine, the stonemasons knew he’d had a new idea overnight, and that some part of the building would have to be redone.
Can Feliz was the second of the two houses he built in Majorca. The first, Can Lis, named for his wife, is a series of small, connected pavilions perched on a coastal clifftop, and later that afternoon Lin took me to see it. In the main pavilion, there is a semicircular stone bench, softened with large linen pillows, curving toward the sea. Instead of capitalizing on the sea view with a large wall of glass, the obvious solution, Utzon has designed deep, slightly angled stone niches, each framing its own view of the sea. These reduce heat and glare in the manner of traditional Mediterranean homes, but also dramatize the play of light and shadow across the stone. The view becomes a sort of serial, as each opening draws the eye in turn. A boat was moving across the horizon as we stood there. It appeared, then vanished, then returned, each time as a kind of surprising apparition, worthy of renewed interest.
Of all the family, Lin retained the strongest ties with Sydney. She kept in touch with her Australian friends, and eventually married one of them. The marriage ended, but Lin visited Sydney frequently, taking her two children to see their father, and she knew how the city had embraced the Opera House. Despite the flaws of the theatre interiors, the building was an immensely successful and popular venue. It had also become a source of civic and even national pride, and was the focus of most significant Australian public celebrations.
It was on one of Lin’s visits to Sydney, in 1998, that the idea of asking Utzon to return to work on the Opera House was first broached. She met with Joseph Skrzynski, who had become the chairman of the Sydney Opera House Trust two years earlier, and he mentioned his concern that, as the building aged, refurbishments were being made on an ad-hoc basis. He wondered what Utzon would do, given the opportunity to revisit his design with all the technological advances of the last three decades at his disposal. He explained to Lin that he was afraid that calls to list the building as a World Heritage site might lead to its being preserved with all the mutilations to its original design locked in place forever.
At first, Lin was hesitant, unwilling to expose her father to further disappointment, but Skrzynski won her trust. Skrzynski, believing that the proposal should come from a fellow-architect, commissioned Richard Johnson, an award-winning Sydney designer, who had got his attention in 1998 during a meeting to discuss the conservation of the building. Johnson had taken the proposed master plan and thrown it on the floor. Johnson recalls, “I said, ‘The architect is still alive. The most “conservative” thing is to go back and reinforce his ideas.’ ”
On a misty day in 1999, however, when Johnson found himself being driven by Utzon up the winding road to Can Feliz, his bravado deserted him. “I thought, How the hell did I get myself into this mess? I was afraid of opening old wounds.” Utzon was, he said, “charming, interesting, all the rest of it,” but, after a day of talking, his answer was no. Johnson called Skrzynski from his hotel and said, “Sorry, Joe. I’ve blown it.” On the second day, he met Utzon again. They talked about music, landscape, happenings in Sydney, uses of the building, but the negative response still hung in the air between them. On the third and last day, they met, Johnson was convinced, just to say farewell. “I thought I was going to get the elegant brushoff,” Johnson said. But when that didn’t come Johnson says he decided to risk being direct: “I said, ‘We have no right to ask any more of you. But there are now many experts on the Sydney Opera House, and you are not one of them. But if you write down the design principles, then you are the authority.’”
Utzon agreed, asking that his son Jan travel to Sydney on his behalf to work with Johnson. “I grew up with this building,” Jan Utzon told me. He had started his architectural studies in Sydney and was often on-site between classes, talking with the architects and tradesmen who worked with his father. Even after the family returned to Denmark, the Opera House remained part of Jan’s life. “There was barely a day when it wasn’t discussed,” he told me. After thirty years’ experience working on his father’s projects, Jan is adept at translating his father’s ideas and sketches into detailed drawings.
Utzon’s judgment is sought on details large and small. Samples of finishes and materials are sent to Denmark for his consideration. For the recently remodelled reception-hall floor, he chose Australian southern blue gum, and instructed that it be finished unconventionally, rubbed with soap flakes to give it a soft sheen.
Skrzynski fielded only one negative reaction to the news of Utzon’s return. A gravel-voiced Davis Hughes, who has since died, called from his retirement home and delivered a forty-five-minute harangue, saying that Utzon had been incapable of finishing the Opera House the first time and shouldn’t be offered a second chance to waste public funds. He told Skrzynski, “I did Utzon a favor. I put him out of his misery like you put down a dog.”
I spoke with Jan not long after he had returned from supervising the concrete work for the drama theatre loggia, the first structural change to the building’s exterior since its completion. The loggia is a crisp march of square white columns, forty-five metres long. Twenty foundation piers have been sunk into the sea beneath the columns. Behind the colonnade, nine large new windows and a doorway have been knocked into the very thick wall of the podium, framing views across the water to the Harbour Bridge. When completed, more than fifty per cent of the once-claustrophobic western foyer wall will be glass. “We understand that it’s an ongoing process,” Jan said of the work on the building. “It might take thirty or even sixty years to get to the desired result.” Joe Skrzynski spelled it out more plainly: “We have five million to spend on the design work while Utzon is around-we’ve got that approved-to warehouse his intellect, his thinking.”
In 2003, in a decision prompted, in part, by the reconciliation, Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest accolade. The reconciliation, Lin says, has marked the beginning of “a happy period for my parents, and for all of us.” Her father “is at peace, working again on his ideas.”
As the light gradually retreated beyond Can Feliz’s large windows, Lin considered my request to meet her father. He had recently coöperated in the publication of a book on his work, something he had always declined to do before, and he had opened his personal archives for a series of shorter books, each of which presents a detailed study of one of his projects. The arrival of these authoritative publications means that Utzon’s work can finally be properly studied by architects and students. Lin thought that he seemed more inclined to talk about his work. “I’ll phone him,” she said. I sat with her husband, the artist and writer Hugues de Montalembert, while a very long conversation in Danish emanated from the next room.
When Lin finally rejoined us, her face was glum. “He said no.”
“He always says no the first time you propose something,” Hugues pointed out.
“I have an idea,” Lin said, disappearing into the courtyard. A few moments later, she returned, her arms laden with almond blossoms, lemon boughs, and wattle flowers-all from trees planted by her parents. “Take these to him, with my best love,” she said, handing me his closely guarded address. I glanced down at the paper. Utzon had the perfect address for a brooding Dane: he lived in Elsinore.
A day and a half later, I found myself clutching a bag of wilting Majorcan foliage, shivering on the doorstep of a simple Danish row house at the edge of a winter-stripped beech forest. Lin had told me the best time to call on her parents, and there was a car parked in the driveway, but no one answered my knock. I sat down on the frozen stoop, feeling rather foolish and wondering if the recluse was inside, waiting for me to give up and go away. After a while, a taxi pulled up. Two figures emerged, a fair-skinned woman and a tall, slightly stooped man, his skin, always deeply tanned in the photographs from his years in Australia, slightly mottled from the effects of a life lived as much as possible outdoors.
If the Utzons were irritated by the sight of an unwanted visitor, they were too polite to show it. Lis, smiling at her daughter’s stratagem, buried her face in the fragrant blossoms. Jørn shrugged off his overcoat, revealing a pale-yellow cashmere sweater, and offered me a glass of wine.
The Utzons’ home now is a small, light-filled space that demands much less of them than the stone masterpieces in Majorca. Yet every inch of it bears witness to Utzon’s past or present work. A spherical model demonstrating the Opera House’s roof geometry is fixed to the wall above the kitchen table. The bookshelves are filled with works that have inspired him: the Sung-dynasty building manual, books of nature photography, a monograph featuring the mosque in Esfahan. Behind the sofa is a large cartoon for a tapestry that Utzon designed for the new interior of the Opera House reception hall. In 2001, he showed this cartoon to Richard Johnson, saying, “I have dared to make a tapestry.” The design is inspired by a piece of music by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and has bright patches of color representing the musical pitches and long dark slashes suggesting the rhythm. Utzon wanted a splash of gold to evoke an explosion of violins. Johnson, who was with Utzon when the tapestrymakers presented their samples of wool, watched him reject twelve different types of gold thread. “He’d say, ‘No, none of that, brighter.’ ” He eventually rejected more than fifty samples before settling on an almost tinselly fibre. “The weavers couldn’t believe he would possibly want anything as vulgar as that,” Johnson said. At this early stage of Utzon’s reëngagement, there were doubts and whispers: Did the great man still have his stuff? But as soon as Utzon’s chosen thread was woven against the subtle creams and gentle greens, Johnson saw how the patch of sparkle would reiterate the glinting lights from the harbor, seen through large windows opposite. The tapestry, fourteen metres long, now hangs in the chamber that has been renamed the Utzon Room.
Utzon’s new plans for the redesigned interior of the opera hall have not yet been publicly released. At first, he said, he had opposed a major redesign along the lines of his original. “It seems that most people love the building, and it is very difficult to imagine everything being changed, that the building should be closed down for a number of years.” He also felt that it “would not be correct to go back to the thoughts and ideas that were new in the early nineteen-sixties” and were based on different uses for the halls. Johnson recalls once becoming so upset while discussing the flaws in the opera theatre that he had to stop talking. Utzon regarded him calmly and said, “You know, it’s like gardening. Every garden has a few weeds in it. That shouldn’t stop you enjoying the garden.”
Utzon’s new plan proposes sinking the floor of the theatre in order to expand the pit, increase and improve seating, and make room for a ceiling that will deliver better acoustics. He has revisited his idea for large convex shapes, formed on a cylinder, billowing out like the sound waves they reflect. A series of these shapes, made in plywood and diminishing in size, leads the eye mesmerically toward the proscenium. The hollow interiors of the plywood sections allow conduits for air-conditioning and wiring.
When I asked what sources he had drawn on for inspiration, he talked about the spiralling limbs of certain trees, and the “geometric secrets” of large mosques and Gothic churches. I asked him what colors he had chosen.
“The most beautiful colors, of course,” he said with a sly grin. “I am enthusiastic about the colors you find in Tibetan temples; the edge of orange just before it becomes red, or of violet when it becomes blue. I am thinking of the cop-per color of roofs . . . that would be a wonderful color for the seating.” All the years of living under the harsh sun of Spain had taught him, he said, to appreciate color in the early morning and at dusk-“at the moments of change.” He said that Matisse, who also lived in bright sunshine, “has a very small palette of color; Picasso also has not very much color. This happens, I think, if the light is too bright. But Scandinavia, where the light is muted, has made some marvellous painters.” He went into the sun room, returning with a sketch of a sunrise by the Swedish painter Carl Kylberg. Every color in the small painting is in transit-yellow becoming orange, green edging toward blue.
Knowing of his interest in Berber architecture, I had brought him a book I had worked on, about Morocco. He leafed through it eagerly, stopping and jabbing a finger at a photograph of dazzling gold wool, laid out to dry on the mud-brick rooftop of a dyer’s workshop in Fez. “This is what we must have for the curtain of the Opera Theatre!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly. “If we go to Fez, can you lead us to this place?”
He said he was pleased that construction had begun on the Western Loggia project. Until now, attending plays has been a second-rate experience at the Opera House, because, unlike the opera and concert halls, the theatres for drama have had no visual relationship with the harbor setting, and their foyers, spaces originally intended for backstage functions, were enclosed and cramped. But to bring the harbor into the foyers meant violating the mass of the podium, which Utzon had intended to stand as a solid counterpoint to the light sails soaring above it. He described his solution as a return to his original inspiration, the platform temples of the Yucatán. He drew out several photographs that showed platforms rising out of the jungle. There were, he pointed out, large openings in the base, but these were masked by the march of a substantial colonnade. So he arrived at the idea of large, deep niche windows, visually contained by the colonnaded space, where theatregoers can step outside and enjoy the harbor: “Hamlet’s castle here in Helsingør has these deep niches, and I have them also in my Majorca house. Combined with the rhythm of the colonnade-I think of it as giving lipstick to the building.”
Bob Carr, until recently the state premier, had shown me a letter that Utzon had written to him in 2003, in which he said he had “of course often wondered if I could have acted differently back then, in a way which would have allowed me to continue the work.” In the letter, he concludes that the decision was “out of my hands.” I hoped that Utzon would elaborate on the letter, but he brushed my question aside. During the long, silent years, when he sat with Lis on his lonely Majorcan clifftop fighting off depression, his children say that he gradually let go of bitterness, and these days determinedly focusses on remembering only the positive side of things.
“The main thing is that it even happened,” he said, rising restlessly from his seat next to Lis and coming to sit beside me on the sofa. “First, that they would give a foreign young fellow the responsibility to undertake such a thing-the most exciting and the most difficult project you could imagine.” Nothing comparable, he said, could have happened in Europe at the time. “We had four hundred and fifty different trades working on that site. It was a fantastic ballet every day. Huge elements-ten-ton pieces of concrete. They would raise them up into the air, and they would meet on the millimetre.” His long-fingered hands fanned the space between us as he remembered how it was.
“Everyone was doing more than their best. How can you express this? I asked a Finnish carpenter, and he said the word in Finnish is sisu-the desire for something extra that you pull out of yourself.” Designing the Opera House had been a great opportunity, he concluded, in which not one hour had been spent in vain.
Leaning forward, as if he wanted to be sure I was paying attention, he recalled something that the engineer on the project, Ove Arup, had said to encourage him as difficulties began to mount. “He said it is like when you climb Everest. You get a glimpse of Everest, and then it disappears. For a long time, all you see are the rows of hills in your way, and you can’t imagine that you will ever get there. And then, suddenly, you see Everest again, sparkling in the sunshine.”
Issue of 2005-10-17
Posted 2005-10-10
Fifty years ago, the state government of New South Wales, in Australia, announced a competition for the design of an opera house to occupy a sandstone headland in Sydney Harbour. Two hundred and thirty-three entries were submitted, of which the most arresting was by a little-known thirty-eight-year-old architect from Denmark. Jørn Utzon worked out of a studio near a house he had designed for his young family in the small seaside township of Hellebæk. He had won several competitions but had built nothing larger than a pair of modest housing projects. The son of a naval architect, he studied the Sydney site from nautical charts purchased at a marine bookstore in Copenhagen, to get a feel for the action of winds and tides against the landform.
His design evoked sails, shells, and gull wings. Alone among the entrants, Utzon had recognized that the building would be seen from all perspectives; when looked down upon from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the buildings nearby, it would have, in effect, a “fifth façade.” Eero Saarinen, the most distinguished of the competition judges, called the design “a work of genius.” Utzon had disregarded competition rules, using gold on drawings that were supposed to be black and white, and neglecting to include a required perspective of the building in its harbor setting. Saarinen himself took up pastels and completed two large sketches to fill the gap. In the end, the judges’ decision was unanimous, and Utzon began work on one of the most famous architectural designs of the twentieth century. The architect Louis I. Kahn remarked, “The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building.”
Yet the Sydney Opera House, instead of making Utzon’s career, almost ruined it. After he had worked for a decade and settled his family in Australia, conflict with the state government of New South Wales forced him to leave, with the project only two-thirds finished. The building was completed without regard for his intentions. Utzon went back to Denmark with his reputation tarnished. He became reclusive, declining to speak about his work. When the Opera House finally opened, in 1973, he refused an invitation to the ceremony. He has never returned to Sydney.
Last year, however, without fanfare a sign went up over construction scaffolding on the Opera House site. It read:
Throughout the long estrangement, Utzon has said, he never stopped thinking about the Opera House for a single day: “I have the building in my head like a composer has his symphony.” He has already remodelled the interior of one small reception room. Construction has started on revision of the building’s foyers and on its loggia. Behind high hoardings, construction workers are punching large holes through the granite-faced podium walls, to bring light and views of the harbor into the previously dingy drama-theatre foyers. Utzon is also redesigning the interior of one of the two main halls, and has completed a set of design principles that will guide future alterations, long after he is gone, to an edifice likely to stand for centuries. Perhaps for the first time in history, an architect is designing spaces he will never see for a building in which he has never set foot.
Utzon is elusive. For decades, he has relied on his family to protect him from unwanted intrusions. His two sons, Jan and Kim, are architects. His daughter, Lin, is a ceramic and textile artist. All have collaborated with their father on projects and served as his public face. Those who knew the family made it clear to me that a meeting with Jørn Utzon was unlikely under any circumstances, and impossible without his children’s approval. So I found myself, last winter, waiting to meet Lin Utzon under blossoming almond trees on the Spanish island of Majorca. Jørn Utzon and his wife, Lis, lived here from the nineteen-seventies until they returned to Denmark a couple of years ago. Behind me, the ruins of a Moorish fortress hugged a distant clifftop. I knew that somewhere just below, and echoing the lines of the ruin, was Can Feliz, one of two houses that Utzon had designed here. His daughter lives there now.
“You won’t be able to find it,” Lin told me when I phoned her from Sydney. “We will come down to the main road to get you.” She was right: Can Feliz comes into view only partially, at the end of a series of rising twists and turns past fields and clumps of pine trees-the perfect retreat for an obsessively private man. The house is modest in size but feels spacious; in the living room, two simple stone columns frame a panorama of woods and fields falling away to the distant ocean. A pair of Australian wattle trees were in bloom, golden against the softer gold of the local stone from which the house is built. “My parents loved the wattles in Sydney,” Lin said. “We all adored Australia. It was a huge influence on all our lives.” It was Lin, then aged ten, who took a phone call informing her father that he had won the Opera House competition, in 1957. Her parents were out, walking to the post office. She cycled after them, calling out the good news.
In many ways, Australia suited Utzon. He had grown up by water and woods, sailing and hunting with his father, who managed the shipyard at Ålborg, a port town in the north of Denmark. Aage Utzon was famous for designing fast yachts with pointed sterns, which, he said, were inspired by the study of fish. He taught his son how to use nature for inspiration and how to build models to test his ideas. In 1930, Aage took the family to the Stockholm Exhibition of modern design, and Jørn, then twelve, later recalled how this exposure to Functionalism changed his life: “My parents returned home completely carried away by the new ideas and thoughts. They soon commenced redoing our home. The concept was space and light. All of the heavy, unpractical furniture was moved out and simple things were brought in.”
Utzon was an indifferent student at school and barely scraped into the architecture course at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Once there, he thrived. His draftsmanship was excellent-both in the exacting technical drawings he had learned from his father and in his own distinctive, loose sketches in soft charcoal. He enjoyed the school’s requirement that students spend eight months working in building trades. In the academy’s library, he came across an illustrated Sung-dynasty building manual (its title, “Ying Tsao Fa Shi,” simply means “Building Standards”) which became a crucial influence on his design philosophy. The nine-hundred-year-old text showed how a limited set of elements could serve to build any structure, from a hut to a palace. This idea became so important to Utzon that when he later went to China he acquired his own copy of the rare, string-bound manual to take with him to Sydney. By then, Utzon’s cultural eclecticism had become a major part of his sensibility. In the late nineteen-forties, he made several important trips: one to Morocco, where he was captivated by the mud-brick strongholds and courtyard houses of the Berbers; and another to Mexico, where he saw the platform temples of the Yucatán, whose huge, stepped approaches were to become a dominant idea in his designs.
On his return to Denmark, he built a prototype for a low-cost, courtyard house. He developed his design by thinking about the various people who might inhabit such housing. He imagined families in detail, almost writing short stories about them-some who used their courtyards for beekeeping or boat building, some who were large and messy, others who were private and austere. Utzon’s design, based on an embracing pair of L shapes, was flexible enough to accommodate them all. The most important thing was “that you are able to imagine a life lived by people before you begin to design the house,” he explained in a taped letter to a group of architecture students. “In that way you can slowly form an idea of a room.”
When Utzon entered the Opera House competition, he went sailing around Hamlet’s castle, Kronborg, at Elsinore, which seems to float upon a promontory similar to the Opera House site. He came up with the idea of a massive podium that would form the base of the building, echoing Sydney’s sandstone headlands while cunningly accommodating all the backstage operations. Soaring above this would be two performance halls. As with the courtyard house, he vividly imagined the way people would use and inhabit the spaces. “The audience is assembled from cars, trains and ferries and led like a festive procession into the respective halls,” he wrote in his competition entry. In an article written in 1965, he compared the effect he sought to that of a Gothic church: “You never finish with it while you move around it or see it against the sky. This interplay with the sun, the light, the clouds is so important that it makes the building into a living thing.”
Now that the city of Sydney is instantly identified by the Opera House, it is hard to imagine the place as it was in the nineteen-fifties. I grew up there and can just recall the harbor of my early childhood, its sparkle often shrouded by the belching of ill-sited plants, its downtown foreshore cluttered with boxy, unimaginative office buildings. The mood of the time was conservative: Sydney seemed an unlikely city to embrace a radical and extravagant architectural experiment, especially one dedicated to the arts. Australians were slowly shrugging off an inferiority complex, dubbed the “cultural cringe,” which was a residue of the country’s penal-settlement origins and its recent status as an outpost of the British Empire. Sport ruled, and at least four of the building’s future tenants-Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet Company, the Sydney Dance Company, and the Sydney Theatre Company-didn’t yet exist.
But change was coming, driven in part by postwar immigration from Europe that had suddenly swollen Sydney’s population. The newcomers scrambled to find housing. “We were a family of four crammed into a one-bedroom flat, and we rented out the bedroom,” recalls Joseph Skrzynski, who until recently was the chairman of the Sydney Opera House Trust and a principal figure in effecting the reconciliation with Utzon. Skrzynski, the son of an aristocratic Polish landowner, cavalry officer, and concentration-camp survivor, arrived with his family in 1950.
The cultural expectations of such immigrants expanded the audience for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which had hundreds on a waiting list for seats in the city’s cramped Town Hall. Its conductor, Eugene Goossens, approached the state premier with the suggestion that Sydney build a venue expressly for music. Unexpectedly, the premier, Joe Cahill, a Labor Party politician and former railway worker, agreed. Cahill’s own tastes in entertainment ran to works such as the Donkey Serenade and the Lux Radio Theatre, but he advocated so tenaciously for the Opera House that it became known as the Taj Cahill. In forcing the project through a reluctant Cabinet, he vastly understated its likely cost, which eventually grew to ten times his estimate. By insisting that work commence on the building even before Utzon had resolved key design elements, Cahill gave the project a momentum that proved irreversible.
But Cahill’s enthusiasm for the project also contributed to a series of construction delays for which Utzon was blamed. The premature start meant, for instance, that piers needed to support the roof were sunk in place before the roof design was resolved. Utzon had drawn free-form sculptural shapes that the project engineers, Ove Arup & Partners, struggled in vain to convert into buildable solutions. Utzon, still living in Denmark, prowled his father’s shipyard. He thought about a saying of his father’s: “Here in the dockyard you construct and produce what you can’t buy, what is not to be had, what is necessary.” The large curves of the hulls gave him an idea: all of the Opera House’s roof shells could be generated from a single sphere. The solution was not only buildable; it allowed complex elements to be prefabricated using a small number of simple forms, as in his beloved Sung-dynasty manual. Excited, he returned to his studio and explained the idea to an assistant by cutting all the necessary shell-shaped segments from the skin of a single orange. However, the impact of the new design on the Sydney site was rather less elegant: the piers weren’t in the right places to bear the loads imposed by the new geometry. For several days, downtown Sydney shook from the explosions as the piers were blasted out and redone.
In 1963, as work on the site accelerated, Utzon moved to Australia with his wife and three children. Shunning the society of the local élite, the Utzons bought a large tract of gum-tree-shaded land an hour north of the city, between a wide ocean beach and a tranquil harbor, where their neighbors were boat builders and beachcombing bohemians. Utzon set up a studio in a nearby boat shed and hired a number of bright young Australian architects, who became, in effect, disciples. One of them, Peter Myers, recalled being on-site when the plywood forms were removed from the concrete beams that arc up on either side of the northern foyers like the ribs of a fan. “The concrete was perfect, the edges were pure, there wasn’t a blemish,” Myers said. He turned to see tears running down Utzon’s face. “And then I saw that the tough Italian workers were crying, too. Their pride in workmanship was being acknowledged, and we were all transported by what had been achieved.”
Myers says that Utzon treated his young staff as “colleagues, not assistants,” and recalls gathering at the family’s beach house for sunset picnics or impromptu boating expeditions. The accoutrements of the Utzons’ European life-a sleek Citroën car, a piano built of chrome and Perspex-left a lasting impression on them. Utzon always dressed with subtle taste-“It was clear he had a very good tailor in Copenhagen”-but the younger architects were free to abandon the suit and tie that would have been obligatory in most Sydney architecture firms of the day. Myers says that Utzon’s perfectionism and his refusal to be rushed into anything were summed up in an anecdote-“I must have heard him tell it fifteen times”-about the Danish furniture designer Kaare Klint. “Someone comes to Klint’s studio and asks him, ‘What are you working on?’ Klint replies, ‘I’m working on a chair.’ Eighteen months later, the same man visits and again asks Klint what he is working on. ‘I told you,’ Klint says, ‘I’m working on a chair.’ ’’
The roof tiles of the Sydney Opera House were Utzon’s version of the chair. He liked to say that almost everything about the building’s design was “on the edge of the possible,” and for the tiles he wanted something very specific: a tile that “had gloss but did not have a mirror effect. A tile with a coarse structure that resembled hammered silver.” He did not want a blinding flare off the roof surfaces, or a “normal” glaze, which looks “as if it is made from white cardboard.” He used many metaphors for what he was seeking. The tiles, he said, should contrast matte against sheen, like a fresh layer of snow on a frozen snowbank, or the shine of a fingernail against skin. “The material,” he wrote, “would have to be sought in the building of the ancient world, which has stood up to many years’ use without deterioration.” He travelled to China and Japan, looking at samples of ancient roof tiles and half-glazed ware. In an archive of his papers kept in a Sydney library, images of the tiled dome of the Great Mosque at Esfahan, in Iran, are filed alongside a more contemporary inspiration: an advertising photograph of a Swedish swimsuit model, the chevron pattern of her costume flowing easily over her curves. The Opera House tiles, Utzon decided, would be laid in chevrons, fanning out across the roof curves to express the form of the concrete beams beneath.
The Opera House tiles would need to stand up to extreme conditions, and, to develop them, Utzon chose a Swedish ceramic factory, Höganäs, which normally produced a far less glamorous product: stoneware tiles to line the sluices in paper mills, which are alternately exposed to boiling water and ice-cold river water. After many trials, Utzon settled on a tile made of the smooth local clay mixed with grainy, crushed matter to add texture. The raw tile was painted with a sauce or slick of the same material, fired, then overlaid with a transparent glaze before a final firing. Fixing more than a million tiles on steep surfaces hundreds of feet in the air posed immense difficulties, so the tiles were laid on the ground, where quality could be controlled, in chevron-shaped “lids,” which were then hoisted into place. To allow for variations in stress, the spaces between the tiles in each section had to be calculated by computer, at that time a novelty in building projects.
Developing the tiles and the method for laying them took more than three years. While Utzon was out of Australia making his studies, the engineers and others on-site grew frustrated. Communications between Europe and Australia were difficult in those days-calls had to be booked through an operator a day in advance-and sometimes Utzon couldn’t be reached for consultations. Premier Cahill had died suddenly in 1959, leaving Utzon without his chief political backer. In the 1965 elections, the costs and delays of Utzon’s project were a campaign issue, and the more conservative Liberal Party, which claimed that the project had got out of hand, won power. Utzon found himself reporting to Davis Hughes, a rural politician whose country constituents were unsympathetic to the extravagant urban edifice. As Minister for Public Works, Hughes “was champing at the bit to shut [Utzon] down,” Joseph Skrzynski recalls.
By then, the podium was complete and the roof shells were rising, rib by rib. Utzon had turned to the design of the theatre interiors, marrying the needs of staging and acoustics with the requirement to fit in the maximum number of seats. His vision was to have a sudden shift of mood from the processional approach to the theatres to a performance space that glittered with festive promise. Utzon admired the rich colors of Noh and Kabuki theatre and the gilded spaces of some traditional European theatres, but inspiration also came from the bushland near his studio. Richard Leplastrier, one of his young assistants, recalled walking with Utzon through the bush-he had, he says, a hunter’s “long, easy lope”-when they heard the cry of a neighbor’s peacock. “Color, Ricardo!” Utzon exclaimed. “If you really want to understand color, we must do studies of the birds!”
The effect Utzon wanted was “a climax in color” that would “uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre.” He was experimenting with intense, Sung-dynasty reds and shimmering gold leaf in one hall; peacock emeralds and blues highlighted with silver in the other. The halls would stand out “like a big exotic bird.” Each hall would have an elaborately curvaceous, acoustically ingenious plywood ceiling-“hanging like a cloud in the sky.” Utzon likened the way that the rippling ceiling would fit inside the curves of the outer roof to a walnut-the smooth outer shell containing the folded forms of the meat nestled within. Richard Johnson, the Sydney architect now collaborating with Utzon, has another explanation: “The auditorium is the musical instrument; the shell is the case.”
Utzon was working, as was his style, with a single supplier, a Sydney plywood manufacturer named Ralph Symonds, who shared his willingness to experiment almost endlessly. Hughes, however, felt that the time for experiments was past, and wanted drawings that could be put to competitive bidding. His view was a reasonable one in the context of any standard public building project. Utzon, however, maintained that drawings couldn’t be done until prototypes had been tested, and asserted scornfully that there was no point in putting the job to tender, as only Symonds had a factory equipped to make the vast plywood sheets required. “He wanted the best possible idea,” Skrzynski recalls, whereas Hughes “wanted the best idea you can have by Friday.”
Determined to force Utzon to comply, Hughes withheld the fees from which the architect paid his staff. By February, 1966, Utzon faced a cash crisis. He warned that if the money wasn’t paid he would have no alternative but to close his office and leave the project. Given its complexity and the advanced stage of construction, Utzon was confident that Hughes couldn’t let him go. He miscalculated. Hughes interpreted the move as Utzon’s resignation, and announced it to the press.
Thousands, including many of Australia’s most noted artists and writers, rallied in support of Utzon. Martin Sharp, an iconoclastic Sydney painter, created cartoons lampooning Hughes. In one, the minister delivers a stream-of-consciousness rant against Utzon: “Brilliant move forcing that Danish prima donna to resign, he’d want to sing his own bloody operas if we’d let him stay.” But the conservative Royal Australian Institute of Architects refused to call for a boycott, and Hughes was able to hand the design to a team of architects who worked directly under his control. The brief for the building was revised, discarding the idea of having the large hall serve both opera and concerts, making it a concert hall only. Opera was shoehorned into the smaller second hall that had been intended for drama, and the drama theatre was crammed into the podium, which had been intended to house only backstage operations. Millions of dollars’ worth of specially designed stage equipment had to be scrapped. The contractor charged with that task likened it to “cutting up a live deer.”
Utzon gathered his family and left for Denmark, travelling secretly to avoid the press. He journeyed via Mexico, and sent an insouciant postcard to one of his supporters in Sydney: “Went to Yucatán. The ruins are wonderful so why worry? Sydney Opera House becomes a ruin one day.” Utzon still believed that the architects Hughes had appointed would stumble, and that he would be recalled. He was right only on the first count. His replacement was Peter Hall, a thirty-five-year-old architect who had already been working for Hughes’s department. Hall was a talented designer in the Brutalist mainstream, which made him a disastrous choice for picking up the threads of Utzon’s work. He struggled to fathom Utzon’s style, which was, in the end, not so much a style as a manner of working: understanding the site, drawing ideas from nature and ancient buildings, then synthesizing forms that emphasized human comfort and delight. As Richard Weston, the author of the definitive book on Utzon, puts it, “A Gehry building depends on the taste of Gehry, while with Utzon’s, it is as if the site is fulfilling its destiny, as if some other hand had made it.”
Costs soared as Hall struggled to find solutions for the interiors. The concert hall became a pedestrian, Lincoln Center-style venue, the opera theatre an aesthetic and practical disaster. Instead of the festive climax Utzon had envisioned, its walls are a stark and forbidding black, with tiers of boxes in Brutalist concrete, many of which have limited sight lines. The acoustics in the cramped orchestra pit are so bad that musicians risk going deaf if they play there for an extended period. After the Opera House, Hall’s practice didn’t thrive. He died, alcoholic and beset by debts, in 1995.
Utzon, meanwhile, had found his reception back in Denmark distinctly chilly. The president of the Danish Association of Architects told him that, having abandoned one job, he couldn’t expect to get work from the government there, and he never did. His one really significant Danish commission came in 1969 from a church congregation in a Copenhagen suburb, and for once Utzon had a client willing to trust him on all details. The site is an unprepossessing strip of busy highway, so Utzon has created his own topography within. The building has few external windows but is saturated with light that falls from skylights set in a remarkable surging ceiling that rises like a wave.
After Sydney, Utzon worked on only one commission of a scale similar to that of the Opera House. In 1971, he designed the Kuwait National Assembly, on a site on the Persian Gulf. The design incorporated many ideas from Arab and Islamic tradition: a vast concrete form that swoops upward from the entrance, recalling the billowing tents of the Bedouin, and providing a majlis, or meeting place, where the emir can receive his subjects. Offices and departments are arranged along an internal “street,” evoking a souk, or bazaar. Along with early drawings, Utzon sent his assistant a picture of the Esfahan mosque, torn from a newspaper, with the words “arches as beautiful as these” scribbled on it.
But the Assembly project, too, was bedevilled by politics. The emir’s commitment to democracy proved weak, and the parliament that the building was meant to house was suspended for several years. Delays and revisions of the brief meant that the Assembly, as built, was a lesser building than Utzon had designed. When, in 1991, the departing Iraqi Army torched it, the interior was refurbished in a glitzy, Louis Farouk style that was the diametric opposite of Utzon’s clean, restrained original.
Bad luck dogged other projects. “It was like a curse that followed him,” Skrzynski said. A theatre that Utzon had devoted eight years to designing for Zurich was scrapped in a government cost-cutting campaign; another, in Lebanon, was cancelled when civil war broke out. An industrialist who had proposed a project in Portugal was killed in a car crash. No further grand commissions were forthcoming, and some years there was no work at all.
“That is how he came to build this house,” Lin, Utzon’s daughter, told me at Can Feliz, as she served tea in indigo-splashed porcelain cups of her own design. After the collapse of the Zurich theatre scheme, Utzon’s wife suggested building the house. “He needed very much to have a project,” Lin told me, as we walked across fields to one of the few vantage points from which the house reveals itself. “They came up here for many, many months, just with a chair each, and they would move around, sitting here and there, studying the different views, the play of light in different seasons, the strength and direction of the prevailing wind.” Utzon designed the house almost without plans, working instead with models and in close collaboration with local craftsmen, as he had tried to do with the Opera House. On the days he arrived carrying bottles of wine, the stonemasons knew he’d had a new idea overnight, and that some part of the building would have to be redone.
Can Feliz was the second of the two houses he built in Majorca. The first, Can Lis, named for his wife, is a series of small, connected pavilions perched on a coastal clifftop, and later that afternoon Lin took me to see it. In the main pavilion, there is a semicircular stone bench, softened with large linen pillows, curving toward the sea. Instead of capitalizing on the sea view with a large wall of glass, the obvious solution, Utzon has designed deep, slightly angled stone niches, each framing its own view of the sea. These reduce heat and glare in the manner of traditional Mediterranean homes, but also dramatize the play of light and shadow across the stone. The view becomes a sort of serial, as each opening draws the eye in turn. A boat was moving across the horizon as we stood there. It appeared, then vanished, then returned, each time as a kind of surprising apparition, worthy of renewed interest.
Of all the family, Lin retained the strongest ties with Sydney. She kept in touch with her Australian friends, and eventually married one of them. The marriage ended, but Lin visited Sydney frequently, taking her two children to see their father, and she knew how the city had embraced the Opera House. Despite the flaws of the theatre interiors, the building was an immensely successful and popular venue. It had also become a source of civic and even national pride, and was the focus of most significant Australian public celebrations.
It was on one of Lin’s visits to Sydney, in 1998, that the idea of asking Utzon to return to work on the Opera House was first broached. She met with Joseph Skrzynski, who had become the chairman of the Sydney Opera House Trust two years earlier, and he mentioned his concern that, as the building aged, refurbishments were being made on an ad-hoc basis. He wondered what Utzon would do, given the opportunity to revisit his design with all the technological advances of the last three decades at his disposal. He explained to Lin that he was afraid that calls to list the building as a World Heritage site might lead to its being preserved with all the mutilations to its original design locked in place forever.
At first, Lin was hesitant, unwilling to expose her father to further disappointment, but Skrzynski won her trust. Skrzynski, believing that the proposal should come from a fellow-architect, commissioned Richard Johnson, an award-winning Sydney designer, who had got his attention in 1998 during a meeting to discuss the conservation of the building. Johnson had taken the proposed master plan and thrown it on the floor. Johnson recalls, “I said, ‘The architect is still alive. The most “conservative” thing is to go back and reinforce his ideas.’ ”
On a misty day in 1999, however, when Johnson found himself being driven by Utzon up the winding road to Can Feliz, his bravado deserted him. “I thought, How the hell did I get myself into this mess? I was afraid of opening old wounds.” Utzon was, he said, “charming, interesting, all the rest of it,” but, after a day of talking, his answer was no. Johnson called Skrzynski from his hotel and said, “Sorry, Joe. I’ve blown it.” On the second day, he met Utzon again. They talked about music, landscape, happenings in Sydney, uses of the building, but the negative response still hung in the air between them. On the third and last day, they met, Johnson was convinced, just to say farewell. “I thought I was going to get the elegant brushoff,” Johnson said. But when that didn’t come Johnson says he decided to risk being direct: “I said, ‘We have no right to ask any more of you. But there are now many experts on the Sydney Opera House, and you are not one of them. But if you write down the design principles, then you are the authority.’”
Utzon agreed, asking that his son Jan travel to Sydney on his behalf to work with Johnson. “I grew up with this building,” Jan Utzon told me. He had started his architectural studies in Sydney and was often on-site between classes, talking with the architects and tradesmen who worked with his father. Even after the family returned to Denmark, the Opera House remained part of Jan’s life. “There was barely a day when it wasn’t discussed,” he told me. After thirty years’ experience working on his father’s projects, Jan is adept at translating his father’s ideas and sketches into detailed drawings.
Utzon’s judgment is sought on details large and small. Samples of finishes and materials are sent to Denmark for his consideration. For the recently remodelled reception-hall floor, he chose Australian southern blue gum, and instructed that it be finished unconventionally, rubbed with soap flakes to give it a soft sheen.
Skrzynski fielded only one negative reaction to the news of Utzon’s return. A gravel-voiced Davis Hughes, who has since died, called from his retirement home and delivered a forty-five-minute harangue, saying that Utzon had been incapable of finishing the Opera House the first time and shouldn’t be offered a second chance to waste public funds. He told Skrzynski, “I did Utzon a favor. I put him out of his misery like you put down a dog.”
I spoke with Jan not long after he had returned from supervising the concrete work for the drama theatre loggia, the first structural change to the building’s exterior since its completion. The loggia is a crisp march of square white columns, forty-five metres long. Twenty foundation piers have been sunk into the sea beneath the columns. Behind the colonnade, nine large new windows and a doorway have been knocked into the very thick wall of the podium, framing views across the water to the Harbour Bridge. When completed, more than fifty per cent of the once-claustrophobic western foyer wall will be glass. “We understand that it’s an ongoing process,” Jan said of the work on the building. “It might take thirty or even sixty years to get to the desired result.” Joe Skrzynski spelled it out more plainly: “We have five million to spend on the design work while Utzon is around-we’ve got that approved-to warehouse his intellect, his thinking.”
In 2003, in a decision prompted, in part, by the reconciliation, Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest accolade. The reconciliation, Lin says, has marked the beginning of “a happy period for my parents, and for all of us.” Her father “is at peace, working again on his ideas.”
As the light gradually retreated beyond Can Feliz’s large windows, Lin considered my request to meet her father. He had recently coöperated in the publication of a book on his work, something he had always declined to do before, and he had opened his personal archives for a series of shorter books, each of which presents a detailed study of one of his projects. The arrival of these authoritative publications means that Utzon’s work can finally be properly studied by architects and students. Lin thought that he seemed more inclined to talk about his work. “I’ll phone him,” she said. I sat with her husband, the artist and writer Hugues de Montalembert, while a very long conversation in Danish emanated from the next room.
When Lin finally rejoined us, her face was glum. “He said no.”
“He always says no the first time you propose something,” Hugues pointed out.
“I have an idea,” Lin said, disappearing into the courtyard. A few moments later, she returned, her arms laden with almond blossoms, lemon boughs, and wattle flowers-all from trees planted by her parents. “Take these to him, with my best love,” she said, handing me his closely guarded address. I glanced down at the paper. Utzon had the perfect address for a brooding Dane: he lived in Elsinore.
A day and a half later, I found myself clutching a bag of wilting Majorcan foliage, shivering on the doorstep of a simple Danish row house at the edge of a winter-stripped beech forest. Lin had told me the best time to call on her parents, and there was a car parked in the driveway, but no one answered my knock. I sat down on the frozen stoop, feeling rather foolish and wondering if the recluse was inside, waiting for me to give up and go away. After a while, a taxi pulled up. Two figures emerged, a fair-skinned woman and a tall, slightly stooped man, his skin, always deeply tanned in the photographs from his years in Australia, slightly mottled from the effects of a life lived as much as possible outdoors.
If the Utzons were irritated by the sight of an unwanted visitor, they were too polite to show it. Lis, smiling at her daughter’s stratagem, buried her face in the fragrant blossoms. Jørn shrugged off his overcoat, revealing a pale-yellow cashmere sweater, and offered me a glass of wine.
The Utzons’ home now is a small, light-filled space that demands much less of them than the stone masterpieces in Majorca. Yet every inch of it bears witness to Utzon’s past or present work. A spherical model demonstrating the Opera House’s roof geometry is fixed to the wall above the kitchen table. The bookshelves are filled with works that have inspired him: the Sung-dynasty building manual, books of nature photography, a monograph featuring the mosque in Esfahan. Behind the sofa is a large cartoon for a tapestry that Utzon designed for the new interior of the Opera House reception hall. In 2001, he showed this cartoon to Richard Johnson, saying, “I have dared to make a tapestry.” The design is inspired by a piece of music by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and has bright patches of color representing the musical pitches and long dark slashes suggesting the rhythm. Utzon wanted a splash of gold to evoke an explosion of violins. Johnson, who was with Utzon when the tapestrymakers presented their samples of wool, watched him reject twelve different types of gold thread. “He’d say, ‘No, none of that, brighter.’ ” He eventually rejected more than fifty samples before settling on an almost tinselly fibre. “The weavers couldn’t believe he would possibly want anything as vulgar as that,” Johnson said. At this early stage of Utzon’s reëngagement, there were doubts and whispers: Did the great man still have his stuff? But as soon as Utzon’s chosen thread was woven against the subtle creams and gentle greens, Johnson saw how the patch of sparkle would reiterate the glinting lights from the harbor, seen through large windows opposite. The tapestry, fourteen metres long, now hangs in the chamber that has been renamed the Utzon Room.
Utzon’s new plans for the redesigned interior of the opera hall have not yet been publicly released. At first, he said, he had opposed a major redesign along the lines of his original. “It seems that most people love the building, and it is very difficult to imagine everything being changed, that the building should be closed down for a number of years.” He also felt that it “would not be correct to go back to the thoughts and ideas that were new in the early nineteen-sixties” and were based on different uses for the halls. Johnson recalls once becoming so upset while discussing the flaws in the opera theatre that he had to stop talking. Utzon regarded him calmly and said, “You know, it’s like gardening. Every garden has a few weeds in it. That shouldn’t stop you enjoying the garden.”
Utzon’s new plan proposes sinking the floor of the theatre in order to expand the pit, increase and improve seating, and make room for a ceiling that will deliver better acoustics. He has revisited his idea for large convex shapes, formed on a cylinder, billowing out like the sound waves they reflect. A series of these shapes, made in plywood and diminishing in size, leads the eye mesmerically toward the proscenium. The hollow interiors of the plywood sections allow conduits for air-conditioning and wiring.
When I asked what sources he had drawn on for inspiration, he talked about the spiralling limbs of certain trees, and the “geometric secrets” of large mosques and Gothic churches. I asked him what colors he had chosen.
“The most beautiful colors, of course,” he said with a sly grin. “I am enthusiastic about the colors you find in Tibetan temples; the edge of orange just before it becomes red, or of violet when it becomes blue. I am thinking of the cop-per color of roofs . . . that would be a wonderful color for the seating.” All the years of living under the harsh sun of Spain had taught him, he said, to appreciate color in the early morning and at dusk-“at the moments of change.” He said that Matisse, who also lived in bright sunshine, “has a very small palette of color; Picasso also has not very much color. This happens, I think, if the light is too bright. But Scandinavia, where the light is muted, has made some marvellous painters.” He went into the sun room, returning with a sketch of a sunrise by the Swedish painter Carl Kylberg. Every color in the small painting is in transit-yellow becoming orange, green edging toward blue.
Knowing of his interest in Berber architecture, I had brought him a book I had worked on, about Morocco. He leafed through it eagerly, stopping and jabbing a finger at a photograph of dazzling gold wool, laid out to dry on the mud-brick rooftop of a dyer’s workshop in Fez. “This is what we must have for the curtain of the Opera Theatre!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly. “If we go to Fez, can you lead us to this place?”
He said he was pleased that construction had begun on the Western Loggia project. Until now, attending plays has been a second-rate experience at the Opera House, because, unlike the opera and concert halls, the theatres for drama have had no visual relationship with the harbor setting, and their foyers, spaces originally intended for backstage functions, were enclosed and cramped. But to bring the harbor into the foyers meant violating the mass of the podium, which Utzon had intended to stand as a solid counterpoint to the light sails soaring above it. He described his solution as a return to his original inspiration, the platform temples of the Yucatán. He drew out several photographs that showed platforms rising out of the jungle. There were, he pointed out, large openings in the base, but these were masked by the march of a substantial colonnade. So he arrived at the idea of large, deep niche windows, visually contained by the colonnaded space, where theatregoers can step outside and enjoy the harbor: “Hamlet’s castle here in Helsingør has these deep niches, and I have them also in my Majorca house. Combined with the rhythm of the colonnade-I think of it as giving lipstick to the building.”
Bob Carr, until recently the state premier, had shown me a letter that Utzon had written to him in 2003, in which he said he had “of course often wondered if I could have acted differently back then, in a way which would have allowed me to continue the work.” In the letter, he concludes that the decision was “out of my hands.” I hoped that Utzon would elaborate on the letter, but he brushed my question aside. During the long, silent years, when he sat with Lis on his lonely Majorcan clifftop fighting off depression, his children say that he gradually let go of bitterness, and these days determinedly focusses on remembering only the positive side of things.
“The main thing is that it even happened,” he said, rising restlessly from his seat next to Lis and coming to sit beside me on the sofa. “First, that they would give a foreign young fellow the responsibility to undertake such a thing-the most exciting and the most difficult project you could imagine.” Nothing comparable, he said, could have happened in Europe at the time. “We had four hundred and fifty different trades working on that site. It was a fantastic ballet every day. Huge elements-ten-ton pieces of concrete. They would raise them up into the air, and they would meet on the millimetre.” His long-fingered hands fanned the space between us as he remembered how it was.
“Everyone was doing more than their best. How can you express this? I asked a Finnish carpenter, and he said the word in Finnish is sisu-the desire for something extra that you pull out of yourself.” Designing the Opera House had been a great opportunity, he concluded, in which not one hour had been spent in vain.
Leaning forward, as if he wanted to be sure I was paying attention, he recalled something that the engineer on the project, Ove Arup, had said to encourage him as difficulties began to mount. “He said it is like when you climb Everest. You get a glimpse of Everest, and then it disappears. For a long time, all you see are the rows of hills in your way, and you can’t imagine that you will ever get there. And then, suddenly, you see Everest again, sparkling in the sunshine.”