History

The 1957 competition drew 233 entries from 32 countries. The assessors — including the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen — had initially set aside Utzon’s design as too vague to evaluate, then retrieved it from the rejected pile on Saarinen’s initiative. The scheme showed the shells in a sketch style that could not yet be resolved into buildable geometry; the assessors declared it the winner on the basis of the power of the concept. The subsequent engineering challenge consumed fifteen years and the talents of Peter Rice, one of the most gifted structural engineers of the century.

Utzon’s “spherical solution” of 1961 — realising that if all the shells were portions of a single sphere, they could be precast from identical ribs — was the breakthrough that made the building constructible. The shells were precast in segments and assembled on a temporary steel armature, then clad in the Swedish ceramic tiles. The tiles arrive at Sydney in a condition of permanent moisture from the harbour; the two-colour pattern (which looks like a single colour in most photographs) only becomes apparent in raking light.

Utzon resigned in February 1966 after the new Liberal government cut his fees and refused to make advance payments; he never returned to Sydney and never saw the completed building. The political dispute permanently overshadowed the project’s completion. Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003; the citation noted that there was no doubt that the Sydney Opera House was “one of the great buildings of the 20th century.” He died in 2008, five years before the building’s 40th anniversary. The Utzon Room, completed in 2004 to his designs, was the only interior he ever saw executed.