Then they try to make amends,” Jan Utzon, Jorn Utzon’s 54- year-old son, also an architect, observes He grew up in Australia. “Most of my father’s work was never even shown because the government put a lid on it, claiming he didn’t do the drawings so they didn’t have to pay fees. Now that they have found them all in the public library, a number of people feel it would be nice to have him back in one way or another.” Everyone, including Utzon, accepts that there would be no point in reviving the same plans that he drew up in the Fifties, but to interpret the concept of them for the electronic age.Utzon, who lives in Majorca, will not return to Australia. He says that, at 81, he is too frail but his sons, Jon (54) and Kim (42), both of whom are architects based in Denmark, can interpret his wishes if he decides to sign up for the job. It is by no means certain that he will.The project began when the government of New South Wales announced a competition for an opera house in 1957 at Bennelong Point, the spectacular harbour peninsula visible from every direction in Sydney. Architects internationally were invited to submit designs for a programme to include two halls, a restaurant and meeting rooms.

It was intended to elevate Sydney’s cultural viability and visibility.Frequently – and wrongly – described as sails silhouetted against Sydney harbour, Utzon’s design was conceived as shells. Their express purpose was to conceal the height of the fly tower for shifting theatrical machinery. Having found the form for the function, the architect then needed to find the materials to best express it He wanted to build a thin concrete membrane. As it turned out, at that scale and size, the weight of the concrete itself meant it had to become enormously thick to support such height and span.The shells threatened to be too heavy for the platform on which they stood. Utzon proposed auditorium shell forms which were segments of a single sphere 300 feet in diameter. Folding thin cement into those distinctive, spiny-backed shell shapes turned them into a stronger membrane capable of carrying a certain weight over a certain span So the distinctive silhouette was dictated by load bearing. Jan Utzon explains it best with a sheet of A4 paper: “By itself lightweight and pliable but, when folded into pleats, capable of supporting a pencil.” Concrete ribs cast in modular pieces were then joined together on site and covered with prefabricated tiles and chevron shaped panels as Utzon, working with engineers Ove Arup, created an organic form with the most advanced technology.

To this day, the Sydney Opera House is still voted one of the top ten construction projects in the world. Jan Utzon recalls its impact in 1957.”From the beginning my father’s design was different from how other architects worked at the time. His way of dealing with architecture and expressing himself is partly functional, yet partly a wish to make a strong, simple structure out of many simple elements which, when combined, create a rich atmosphere Take a tree with leaves Pick one leaf and it’s relatively simple. Put clusters on the tree and you have a magnificent structure.”So what went wrong? The acoustics were blamed at one time Some say it was the budget. And some, bloody-mindedness.”It was a lot of things in combination,” says Jan Utzon.

“Primarily, the client in control changed and the brief changed. The Labour government who’d been in power for some 20 years started the project. In 1965 they were beaten by the Liberals, who had different interests.”Labour had seen the building primarily as a vehicle for opera The Liberal government saw it as important for broadcasting. They wanted the fly tower and all the stage-set machinery taken out to enlarge the auditorium, holding 3,000 people in a big concert hall without a stage They discarded the idea of putting on opera in it. Utzon argued that the entire building had been structured around these programmes. There would not have been any need for tall shells because they were designed to cover the fly tower.A smear campaign began about Utzon’s acoustics failing the test of operatic divas.