U is for Utzon - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

I never met Jørn Utzon, but I did see him speak once. It was 1978. He was sixty years old, a slender, elegant and very tall man, and had come to London to collect the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. In his speech, he suggested that if you truly wish to honour an architect, you commission him to design a building, you do not just give him a medal.

It took another ten years for me to actually see Sydney Opera House, the design that made him famous and which transformed the world’s view not just of Sydney but of Australia too. Utzon never saw it completed. He left the country in 1966, nine years after winning the competition to build what turned out to be one of just a handful of genuinely iconic works of twentieth-century architecture, when the opera house’s superstructure was only just beginning to take shape. Utzon did not go back.

He resigned from the project after a series of bitter rows with local politicians that were not primarily about money, though it was obviously an issue. As in the case of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, politicians were accused of deliberately underestimating costs to get the project started by putting up a misleadingly optimistic budget, then squeezing the design team. Ultimately the conflict was about power. The real questions were: was this going to be an architect’s building, or was it going to be a monument to New South Wales’s minister for public works at the time? Or was it, as in fact happened, something for the city and for Australia?

At the same time, there were serious technical questions about the building that provoked the rupture. Before desktop computing had eliminated almost every limit that constricted structural engineering, Utzon was asking for a lot in trying to get his complex shells built in load-bearing concrete, while accommodating all that the brief called for. He had to cram a great deal into a restricted space; so much that the multiple auditoriums were never going to provide enough seats for a financially viable opera house.

And there was also the question of Utzon’s own frame of mind. He began the project with the best advice that he could get, working with the enormously influential engineer Ove Arup. The relationship between the two Danes, warm at first, turned toxic. After Arup’s death, the English critic Peter Murray was given access to his private papers. They suggest that the engineer repeatedly offered Utzon workable technical solutions, but because they did not reflect the purity of the architect’s vision they were ignored. Throughout a particularly troubled period, Utzon failed even to acknowledge Arup’s letters. Utzon seemed paralysed by the complexities facing him, quite unable to offer a clear way ahead. The fact that Arup refused to walk away from the project when Utzon resigned triggered a bitter and lasting break between them. To Utzon, Arup was being disloyal. For Arup, the responsibility was to the client to finish the job. Utzon lost the political game, and was finessed into resigning without ever fully understanding that he was taking an irrevocable step. He thought his resignation was a threat that he would never be expected to have to act on. When his bluff was called, Utzon left Australia permanently. He was replaced by a panel of local architects, who went on to complete the building. One of them had actually signed a petition that circulated in the New South Wales government architect’s office pledging not to work on the project if Utzon was sacked.

For an architect there can be no fate worse than seeing a project that should have been the crowning achievement of his career taken away from him by what he saw as a cabal of uncomprehending philistines. It was not a question of budget overruns that allowed the politicians to oust Utzon. In fact the worst of these came long after Utzon had left Australia. What did for him in the end was a change of party in the New South Wales state government that coincided with disagreements - ostensibly about the cost and character of the proposed plywood-lined interior - fought out in the claustrophobically small world of local government in Sydney. And it left Utzon humiliatingly out of pocket, the victim of a punitive double-taxation regime, in debt to a combination of the Australian and the Danish tax authorities.

Utzon maintained a dignified silence about his treatment by Sydney. When the Queen finally opened the opera house in 1973, Utzon was invited, but was unavoidably elsewhere. When the Royal Australian Institute of Architects awarded him its gold medal, Utzon accepted, but he stayed away from the ceremony. When Utzon was asked to take part in designing a resort in Queensland, he agreed to take on the commission, but sent his two architect sons, Jan and Kim, to deal with the client instead. Sydney tried to make amends by awarding him the freedom of the city in 1998, but the Lord Mayor had to take the keys to Denmark to present them to him. For the building’s twenty-fifth birthday that year, Utzon’s daughter, Lin, went to Sydney and joined the state premier in launching the Utzon Foundation, a trust to award a £37,000 biennial prize for outstanding achievement in the arts - but Jørn Utzon himself never went back.

After Utzon’s eightieth birthday, there was something of a reconciliation with Australia. A decision was taken to remodel the interiors of the opera house as much in the manner that Utzon had intended as possible. And his son Jan took part in the planning process in an attempt to deal with the acoustic problems of the auditorium and the difficulties caused by a critical lack of space behind the scenes. It was not an easy task. Utzon’s grandson Jeppe, also an architect, has questioned whether it was in fact possible at this stage to fully realize the original vision.

Utzon survived the trauma of Sydney. He was able to design other important buildings, at least two of which - the Bagsvaerd Church in his native Denmark (1968-76), and the Kuwait National Assembly Building (designed from 1971 onwards, completed 1983 and rebuilt 1993) - must be counted masterpieces. Like Sydney, they seemed to stand outside the mainstream of twentieth-century modernism. All three have a sculptural purity that makes them truly compelling works of architecture. The house that Utzon built himself in Mallorca, overlooking the Mediterranean, in which he spent many years, was a domestically scaled summation of Utzon’s architectural ideas, full of tactile qualities and reminders of architecture’s roots in the fundamentals of light playing on stone.

Yet for an architect of Utzon’s special talent, it was a modest output for such an extended career. And the Kuwait building, like Sydney, was fatally compromised. It was the unloved child of a short-lived move towards democratic government in Kuwait, abandoned by the ruling family, shelled by the Iraqis, and blandly restored by the American architects HOK after the Gulf War.

Could it have been any different for Utzon? On one level, there is a temptation to think that had the opera house gone more smoothly, then it could have opened the way to a career that might even have matched that of one of the twentieth-century’s acknowledged architectural giants, Louis Kahn perhaps, or even Le Corbusier.

If Utzon had managed a sustained run of work exploring the essential themes that underpinned his greatest successes, he could genuinely have transformed the architectural landscape. But he didn’t, and perhaps he never could have done. Utzon was profoundly out of sympathy with the idea that architecture could be practised as a corporate business, taking on multiple projects around the world. When Utzon won the opera house competition, he turned down an offer to design Louisiana, an art gallery just outside Copenhagen. It would have been the perfect commission, yet Utzon rejected it because he did not want to risk losing concentration on the opera house. There was something in Utzon’s psychological make-up that seemed to make him find the idea of professional success too troubling to get to grips with. Certainly, Utzon’s personal architectural language was a curious mix of influences and sources, from the sweeping curves of the yachts that his father specialized in designing to Mexico’s man-made landscape of Monte Albán and other great pre-Colombian sites, from the medieval castles of the old Denmark of his homeland to the work of the European modern masters.

But Sydney Opera House is a truly singular building, one that changed Utzon’s life, and probably the course of Australian history as well. The competition to design it was launched in 1956, the year that Melbourne, Sydney’s great rival, was hosting the Olympics, at a time when Melbourne was still the unchallenged central focus of urban Australia. Melbourne was bigger, more famous, richer and more successful than its northern rival.

The opera house, financed by a specially constituted state lottery, managed to change all that. It was the landmark that signalled the start of a huge turnaround in perceptions of Australia in general and Sydney in particular. It was the project that more than any other allowed Australia to ditch the ‘cultural cringe’. Architecturally that cringe is monumentalized in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra where, in a bitter architectural reference to Sydney, the designers incorporated a fragment of the opera house in the main entrance hall. According to the museum’s architect: ‘It’s not the bit by Utzon, it’s a fragment of the glass curtain that was designed after he had gone, to show how wrong Australia can get things.’

The opera house was the building that made Sydney Harbour escape from a tangle of industrial squalor and tram lines to become one of the greatest waterfront cities in the world. By the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, forty-four years after those held in Melbourne, the opera house was a familiar but still striking image in the television coverage broadcast round the world. And it was Utzon who had made it possible.

Nothing quite like the Sydney Opera House design had been seen before. Utzon had, however, entered a competition a decade earlier to design a replacement for London’s Crystal Palace, and even though he was unsuccessful his submission did show that he offered the city the chance to build something just as extraordinary as the opera house. It was personal, sculptural and apparently quite outside the mainstream of architectural development at the time. The only work that seemed to relate to it was the soaring, sweeping concrete roofs designed by Eero Saarinen, one of the judges for the opera house competition. Saarinen adopted a similar approach to Utzon’s for the TWA Terminal at New York’s JFK airport.

The opera house belonged to an alternative pattern of modernity. And had Utzon had a different temperament, it might have been so much more than a historical one-off. But he didn’t. That has not stopped the growth of an Utzon cult in Australia and beyond; a cult which presents him as a wronged genius. It’s a cult that has played into the mania of the first years of the twenty-first century for icon building, one that has thankfully subsided somewhat from its peak at the creation of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim building in Bilbao. Not uncoincidentally, Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, a tribute from a jury that included Frank Gehry. And, perhaps equally revealingly, Utzon, who was born in Copenhagen and studied architecture at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worked in the Helsinki office of Alvar Aalto, another champion of non-standard building types and curves.

Sydney and Bilbao seem to suggest a certain superficial similarity. Both are buildings whose inventiveness have served to make them the identifying landmark for their respective cities. They have both become a kind of urban logo. But in fact they represent very different sensibilities. Utzon’s opera house is the product of a highly controlled and controlling approach to architecture, shaped by the belief that perfection is a possible option for design. Gehry’s architecture is also capable of producing the most memorable and recognizable of forms and shapes. But Gehry is from California, not from Scandinavia, and his work is based on the acceptance of the random and the accidental. If Utzon could have learned how to do that, he would never have had to leave Australia.