1961
Jørn Utzon’s model for the Sydney Opera House
The ship building
This is the architect’s model for the geometry of the Sydney Opera House shells in paint, wood and Letraset type.
A hut ‘built of brick, twelve feet [3.6 metres] square, and roofed with tiles’ was constructed for Gadigal man Bennelong in 1790 – hence the name of the peninsula on the eastern side of Sydney Cove. A century and a half later, New South Wales premier Joe Cahill instigated an international competition for another building there. The winning design had a roof of one million tiles.
Danish architect Jørn Utzon was 38 when he won the Sydney Opera House competition. His father was a naval architect and he grew up around shipyards. Nautical imagery was at the forefront of his mind as he pored over naval maps, films and pictures of Sydney Harbour. Utzon had travelled through Europe and America, meeting, at one time or another, all the major figures of high modernism. He had also studied Hinduism and had visited Mayan temples in Central America. All of these ideas came together in his initial drawings.
The Utzon plan was one of the last received by the judging committee but it was overwhelmingly the favourite. Its design was so bold and innovative that it expressed the idea of a culture moving forward unencumbered by cultural traditions. It was innovative in part because it had never been tried before.
Once Utzon was commissioned, he had to work out how to make the light sculptural roof: the designs he had submitted were little more than preliminary drawings. Some initial designs sent to the Anglo-Danish engineers Ove Arup & Partners referenced waves rising and breaking on a beach, while one was the ribbed fan shapes of palm leaves over a terraced floor. Arup advised Utzon that his geometric shells could not be built.
‘We had to commence building at a stage where the working drawings had not yet been completed or finalised, so construction began at the building site a long time before we had completed the drawings, and construction drawings were being produced just ahead of construction as the building grew,’ Utzon wrote recently.
This of course is not the best way to do things but on the other hand, if the decision back in the late 1950s had been that the project should have been completed entirely and then sent out for tender, then the Opera House would not exist today. It is thanks to the political foresight of Cahill that the building was commenced on the loose grounds it was, and that Sydney now has this landmark.
Many aspects of the Opera House’s design had to be developed more or less from scratch, simply because they hadn’t been done before. One of the overriding principles in Utzon’s work was finding solutions that were in harmony with the natural world. It wasn’t until two years into the construction that he finally found a solution to the problem of the sails or shells. His ‘key to the shells’, inspired by peeling an orange, allowed him to ‘attain full harmony between all the shapes’, as is demonstrated by the Utzon model shown here. He worked as a sculptor rather than on paper to bring his vision alive.
Utzon’s assistant Helge Hjertholm recalled the architect slicing spherical triangles from an orange and creating shells with the peel. All the segments of the Opera House roof could be derived from a single sphere – the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere. The Helsingor shipyards produced a wooden model of this idea.
Utzon intended the building to be a sculpture. He intended its white tiled sails to reflect the beauty of the sun and its changing light, and to contrast with the darkness of the harbour and foreshores.
The Opera House took 16 years to complete. Part of the attraction of the building is its sculptural quality and the legend of its birth. Utzon had the vision and organically had to work through the problems of bringing his vision into life. In this sense, the Opera House is an embodiment of the creative process itself.