For mystics, there’s that cosmically platonic sphere itself, as well as all that light dancing on water, all that earth ascending into heaven-plus Utzon’s accounts from the 1950s of climbing the altar platforms of Mayan pyramids to contemplate clouds and Quetzalcoatl. Yellow Book/New South Wales Government State Records Longitudinal section through major hall.įor all no-longer-quite-so-young architects in search of a big break, there’s the stunning 1957 international competition win at age 38 (not a minute too late, nor too soon, professionally speaking) and the twice-told-tale of juror Eero Saarinen arriving late to the deliberations and rescuing those illegibly moody drawings of entry Number 218-charcoal calligraphy of sea and sky-out of the reject pile to which the local yokels had consigned it.įor all architects who draw in poetry and build in prose, there’s the rationalization of the unbuildably indeterminate roof forms in those drawings into notional fragments of a single sphere, their construction already underway. He was no immortal-a Corbusier or a Wright-but just an unusually skilled modern architect not so different from you and me at our absolute best who’d worked and studied with some of the greats (Asplund, Aalto, Rasmussen) who was possessed of a small and uneven body of work and who, with the help of an enduringly great engineer and a briefly great client, got it extraordinarily, immortally, irrefutably, indispensably, miraculously right.
(As he wrote to Le Corbusier in 1962, “I feel a personal connection with you, as, you could say, an architectural son.”) That his actual work was so inimitable makes it all the more possible to dream of him without any anxiety of influence.
#SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE DRAWING PROFESSIONAL#
That his professional story ends so unhappily-or rather that it fades out into such a long and poignant anticlimax-makes it all the more inviting to imagine that we might step into his shoes and finish his mission. He looked the part, too: an architect out of central casting in the Gary-Cooper-as-Howard-Roark mould, as tall as Rem Koolhaas, as beautiful as Jacques Herzog, as Danish as Bjarke Ingels. Utzon is our sage Kenobi, our renegade Solo, our heroic Skywalker, all in one. His story, mostly the legend of that single and singular building, the Sydney Opera House, provides the enduring foundational myth for all contemporary architectural practice. If Jørn Utzon did not exist, we would have to invent him.
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