Utzon, the Danish architect whose eye-catching, nautically inspired design for the Sydney Opera House overcame a series of controversies surrounding its budget and acoustics to become one of the most recognizable landmarks of the 20th century, helping to usher in the current era of buildings beloved for their daring and photogenic forms, has died. He was 90. Utzon died of a heart attack early Saturday morning while asleep at his home in Copenhagen.
Few architects have been as closely associated with a single building as Utzon was with the 1973 opera house, which emerges -- part sailboat, part sea creature -- from a site on the edge of Sydney Harbor. In 1957, when he was just 38, he was named the surprise winner of an international competition for the project. His design for a cluster of five auditoriums tucked beneath a roof of billowing white concrete shells impressed a jury that included architect Eero Saarinen. It ultimately prevailed over 232 other entries.
In the end, though, Utzon's opera house commission proved to be the very definition of a mixed blessing, giving the architect years of heartache to go with broad newfound fame. In 1959, Joe Cahill, who as premier of New South Wales had been an early and influential champion of Utzon's design, died suddenly, and in the years that followed, controversy swirled around the proposed building. Utzon was criticized so heavily for cost overruns -- racking up a bill of more than $100 million, in Australian dollars, for a project budgeted at $7 million -- and construction delays that he resigned from the job and left Australia in disgust in 1966, seven years before the opera house was completed. Government-appointed architects finished the interior, making drastic changes to the layout of the theaters. Utzon never saw the final product in person and never returned to Australia.
Though he went on to design a handful of acclaimed public buildings in Northern Europe, along with the 1982 Kuwait National Assembly, Utzon's career output was relatively small, particularly given the boost his win in the opera house competition provided his fledgling practice.
For certain observers, the opera house was a cautionary tale about the risks of pursuing inventive architectural shape-making at the expense of function and budget. Davis Hughes, who served as director of public works for New South Wales during the height of the opera house controversy in the mid-1960s and was among the fiercest opponents of the design, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in 2002: “You could say that he produced the shells. He was a sculptor. He was not an architect."
