Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House

愛護建築師就是要給他多點建築來表現

Jorn Utzon

Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, died on November 29th, aged 90

Reuters

DETAILED architectural plans were slow to emerge from Jorn Utzon. He liked to gather insights, textures, effects of the light, before he drew anything. The concept, he used to say, embodied everything the realisation needed. The Lutheran church he designed in Bagsvaerd, in his native Denmark, began as a study of drifting clouds and sunlight on a day at the beach. An art museum in Silkebourg emerged from salt poured out of a shaker on a café table. And his entry for the most important competition of his life was a series of sketches of triangles and random parabolas, free shapes bounded by “curves in space geometrically undefined”. Along with the sketches came a cartoon self-portrait of a tall, thin, many-armed young man dipping a pen into his skull, which had sprung open like an inkpot.

His entry was thrown out at first, and not just for that. It broke several of the rules laid down for the competition to design a new opera house (in fact, two performance halls) on Bennelong Point, in Sydney. It was too big for the site; there was not enough seating; and, most notably, there was no estimate of cost. But Mr Utzon could not possibly cost it, because he had no idea whether it could ever be built. It was his dream-answer to the challenge of a “beautiful and demanding” site, one he couldn’t resist; but, like the church at Bagsveard, it was inspired largely by clouds, boats and light. Mr Utzon had never been to Sydney. Instead, as a practised sailor, he had studied the local naval charts. When one of the judges plucked his entry out of the pile of also-rans, he was as astonished, and unprepared, as everyone else.

The year was 1957. He was 38, and had little other work to his name except a workers’ estate, of yellow-brick houses grouped round courtyards, near Elsinore. What he wanted for Sydney was the effect he had noticed when tacking round the promontory at Elsinore, of the castle’s piled-up turrets against the piled-up clouds and his own billowing white sails; the liberation he had felt on the great platforms of the Mayan temples in Mexico, of being lifted above the dark jungle into another world of light; the height and presence of Gothic cathedrals, whose ogival shape was to show in the cross-sections of the Sydney roof-shells; and the curved, three-dimensional rib-work of boat-building, as he had watched his own father doing it at Aalborg. The load-bearing beams of the Opera House shells he called spidsgattere, in homage to the sharp-sterned boats his father made.

Most of all Mr Utzon wanted a contrast between the massive base of the concert halls, made of aggregated granite and without windows, and the glass walls and soaring shells above. Everything mechanical and functional was to be housed in the base, as in elemental rock. But the roofs were to be gleaming white, in deliberate contrast to the red-brown dark sprawl of Sydney, covered with ceramic tiles to catch and reflect the light, especially the fleeting colours of morning and evening. Outside, Mr Utzon wanted people to experience a feeling of uplift and detachment from the city; inside, he hoped they would be steeped in rich, restful colours, in preparation for the music or the drama to come.

Perfection and plywood

In fact, much of the drama came from himself. His aim was total control to achieve “perfection”, nothing less. But he was dealing with the government of New South Wales, which was impatient and sceptical and needed to watch costs; with engineers, under Ove Arup, who reasonably thought that they should be in charge of the structural stages; and with builders who wanted timely and finished designs. The spat that proved the last straw was over moulded plywood, which Mr Utzon wanted to use structurally as well as for panelling. In 1966 he was “forced out”, as he saw it, by the minister of public works, and left Australia. He never returned, not even for the opening in 1973; ten years late and, at more than A$100m, 1,400% over budget.

Sydney brought him fame, but few commissions. The Kuwaiti parliament building, also billowing and white, was his only other big international project. Though he was charming, elegant and an architect of genius, the difficulty of dealing with him and his dream-designs had got abroad. He won medals and the 2003 Pritzker prize, architecture’s Nobel; “but if you like an architect’s work”, he said once, “you give him something to build.”

Very late in life he was approached to become a consultant on the Opera House, and accepted. In truth, he had never stopped thinking about it. Mentally he was still patrolling the site, noting the course of storm-drains and the interplay of vaulting and walls. The multiple problems, as he had often said, were not his fault. They were created by the Sydney Opera House, which was there in his head, beautiful, demanding and continually evolving.

His greatest joy was to know that inside that building, up the steps from the main concourse, on the right, was a hall that in 2004 was named after him. It is a wide, low, bare space with huge easterly windows, floored in pale timber and with a ceiling of folded concrete beams that seem to hover lightly, bathed in reflections from the sea. The Utzon Room is exactly what he dreamed of; and it is also the only room yet built exactly to his plans.