SubscribeDetailed architectural plans were slow to emerge from Jorn Utzon. He liked to gather insights, textures, effects of the light, before he drew anything. The concept, he used to say, embodied everything the realisation needed. The Lutheran church he designed in Bagsvaerd, in his native Denmark, began as a study of drifting clouds and sunlight on a day at the beach. An art museum in Silkebourg emerged from salt poured out of a shaker on a café table. And his entry for the most important competition of his life was a series of sketches of triangles and random parabolas, free shapes bounded by “curves in space geometrically undefined”. Along with the sketches came a cartoon self-portrait of a tall, thin, many-armed young man dipping a pen into his skull, which had sprung open like an inkpot.- From The Economist's obituary on Utzon.
His entry was thrown out at first, and not just for that. It broke several of the rules laid down for the competition to design a new opera house (in fact, two performance halls) on Bennelong Point, in Sydney. It was too big for the site; there was not enough seating; and, most notably, there was no estimate of cost. But Mr Utzon could not possibly cost it, because he had no idea whether it could ever be built. It was his dream-answer to the challenge of a “beautiful and demanding” site, one he couldn’t resist; but, like the church at Bagsveard, it was inspired largely by clouds, boats and light. Mr Utzon had never been to Sydney. Instead, as a practised sailor, he had studied the local naval charts. When one of the judges plucked his entry out of the pile of also-rans, he was as astonished, and unprepared, as everyone else.
The year was 1957. He was 38, and had little other work to his name except a workers’ estate, of yellow-brick houses grouped round courtyards, near Elsinore. What he wanted for Sydney was the effect he had noticed when tacking round the promontory at Elsinore, of the castle’s piled-up turrets against the piled-up clouds and his own billowing white sails; the liberation he had felt on the great platforms of the Mayan temples in Mexico, of being lifted above the dark jungle into another world of light; the height and presence of Gothic cathedrals, whose ogival shape was to show in the cross-sections of the Sydney roof-shells; and the curved, three-dimensional rib-work of boat-building, as he had watched his own father doing it at Aalborg. The load-bearing beams of the Opera House shells he called spidsgattere, in homage to the sharp-sterned boats his father made.
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posted by KokuRyu at 4:23 PM on November 29, 2008