On 29 January 1957, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the state premier announced that the competition to design an opera house on Bennelong Point had been won by entry number 218: a set of ethereal sketches by Jørn Utzon, a 38-year-old Dane who had never built anything much larger than a house. The drawings showed white shells billowing above Sydney Harbour like sails at anchor — and gave almost no indication of how such a roof might stand up. A much-repeated story holds that the American juror Eero Saarinen arrived late, fished Utzon's scheme out of the discard pile and pronounced it the winner. The tale appears in nearly every account of the building, but the jury kept no minutes, so it remains cherished legend rather than documented fact.
What is documented is the price of optimism. The government of premier Joe Cahill put the cost at seven million Australian dollars and promised completion by early 1963. Cahill, gravely ill and determined to make the project irreversible, ordered work to begin in March 1959, before the design was anywhere near resolved; parts of the podium later had to be rebuilt when the structure above them changed. The money, at least, was raised shrewdly — through a dedicated state lottery, so the ordinary taxpayer was never directly billed for what followed.
The spherical solution
The roof was the problem. Utzon's competition shells were free-form curves that the mathematics of the day could not tame, and for four years he and the London engineers Ove Arup and Partners tried parabolas, ellipsoids and ruled surfaces without finding a form that could be both calculated and afforded. The breakthrough came in 1961, and it came from the architect: derive every shell in the composition from the surface of a single sphere, 75.2 metres in radius. Segments cut from one sphere all share the same curvature, the way pieces of peel taken from anywhere on an orange do — which meant the ribs of every shell could be assembled from identical, mass-produced concrete elements rather than sculpted individually in place. The spherical solution turned an impossible sculpture into a kit of parts, and it is the reason the building exists at all.
The roof's gleam was engineered with equal cunning. It is clad in just over a million tiles — 1,056,006 is the figure the Opera House itself cites — made by Höganäs in Sweden to Utzon's specification: chevrons of glossy white and matte cream, arranged so the shells shimmer in the harbour light without dazzling, and largely wash themselves clean in the rain.
The architect walks away
In 1965 a new state government took office and the ministry of public works passed to Davis Hughes, a country politician who saw the project as a scandal in need of taming. He questioned Utzon's schedules, demanded drawings the architect said could not yet exist, and — decisively — stopped paying him. In February 1966, owed a small fortune in fees and stripped of real authority, Utzon resigned, expecting to be called back. He was not. Within weeks he left Australia quietly, and despite a protest march through Sydney demanding his reinstatement, he never returned. A panel of local architects led by Peter Hall completed the building, reversing key parts of the design: the larger hall, planned for opera, became a concert hall, and opera was consigned to the smaller one — a compromise criticised ever since.
The building Queen Elizabeth II opened on 20 October 1973 had taken sixteen years rather than six, and cost 102 million dollars against the seven originally promised — an overrun in the region of 1,400 per cent, absorbed entirely by the lottery, which cleared the debt by 1975. Utzon stayed away in Denmark, and by most accounts his name was not spoken during the opening ceremony.
The ending, at least, is gentler than the middle. In 1999 the Opera House brought Utzon back as a design consultant to set down principles for the building's long-term care, and in 2004 a refurbished reception hall reopened as the Utzon Room — the only interior in the building realised to his design. In 2003 he received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, and in 2007 UNESCO inscribed the Opera House on the World Heritage list, one of the very few buildings ever listed while its architect was still alive. Utzon died in Copenhagen in November 2008, aged 90, without ever having stood before the finished building. He insisted this troubled him less than the world assumed: he had only to close his eyes, his family said, to see it perfectly. The masterpiece and its maker spent forty years on opposite sides of the planet — and the roof he conjured from the skin of a sphere still looks like nothing else on Earth.
Quiz nuggets
- Jørn Utzon, a 38-year-old Dane, won the 1957 design competition with entry number 218.
- His 1961 "spherical solution" derives every roof shell from a single sphere 75.2 metres in radius.
- The roof is clad in 1,056,006 Swedish-made tiles in glossy-and-matte chevrons.
- Utzon resigned in February 1966 after minister Davis Hughes stopped paying his fees, and never returned to Australia.
- Opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973, it cost A$102 million against a A$7 million estimate — roughly 1,400 per cent over — a debt cleared by a state lottery in 1975.