Jorn Utzon designed the Sydney Opera House - and walked off the site halfway through the building project. After 36 years, at the age of 83, he is about to go and see it for the first time and supervise its refurbishment, writes Giles Tremlett
The old Majorcan peasant with the battered hat and the wrinkled, walnut face knew the creator of the eighth wonder of the world well. "The architect? He is a friend of mine. Take the road to the right," he said, pointing towards a gravel track. Or perhaps I had misunderstood. Because in this corner of the world where Jorn Utzon, the Danish designer of the Sydney Opera House, has hidden himself away, the peasants barely speak Spanish and the local dialect of Catalan is almost unintelligible to anyone arriving from Madrid.
After slogging across country, up and down dirt roads and taking several wrong turns, I eventually climb to the top of a hill to find a modern, honey-stone building nestling among pine trees with a breathtaking view all the way to the glittering Mediterranean.
Utzon walks out of the house where he has lived for the past decade and, in his polite, Scandinavian way, dispels a reputation for being an obstinate recluse. "You look like a nice person," he finally says. "Come back at five."
Nobody can quite remember who first dubbed the Sydney Opera House "the eighth wonder of the world". Time magazine has declared the emblematic building on Bennelong Point one of the five wonders of 20th-century architecture - "a union of unique structure and breathtaking location" that "may grow old but will never be dated". Utzon is something of a tortured, tragic genius. He is as famous for walking out on the building halfway through construction in 1966, disgusted by the financial squeeze imposed by a changed New South Wales government, as he is for designing it in the first place.
He has never been back to see his iconic building in its completed state, its billowing white structure bounded on three sides by the emerald water of Sydney Harbour. Now, with the recent decision to spend $12.5 million refurbishing the opera house with Utzon's help, the future shape of the building is, at least partially, back in his hands. He will advise from a distance, helping to guide the work of his architect son Jan and Australian Richard Johnson. Quite how the partnership will work is not clear, but it seems, from what the opera house authorities say, that Utzon will have an effective veto on proposals.
Authorities in Sydney claim that at 83 he is too frail to travel, but he looks fit enough. One suspects that, even now, it would be too painful an experience for him.
It is, nevertheless, a remarkable turnaround. "His return to the project after 35 years marks a historic moment for both the Sydney Opera House and the people of Australia," NSW state premier Bob Carr declared in March. Either Utzon has mellowed considerably with age or that walkout was not the door-slamming, piqued artist's rage that some people imagine.
"We loved the building. We were so happy in Australia. This was a beautiful period," he explains before launching into some Danish irony. "Australia gave me a chance to show what a bad architect I was. It was an extraordinary thing, this freedom." At the time, however, the opera house almost ruined his professional life. Now he recognises that it gave him a unique chance to create art from building materials. "The enjoyable thing is that somehow . . . we still can communicate on a building that has become so important," he says. Utzon won the competition despite, technically, breaking the application rules.
Legend has it that his entry was rejected at an early stage, but one of the judges, Eero Saarinen, pulled the drawings out of the pile of discards and was so amazed that he declared he could support no one else.
After collecting the prize money, Utzon returned to Scandinavia, fully expecting never to be called back. "He told his wife that he never expected it to turn into a real job. It was always a kind of dream," explains Richard Weston, a Cardiff University professor who has just published a book on Utzon's work.
Utzon's 1957 commission was, by today's standards, remarkable. He was invited to turn his competition drawings into reality, though nobody had any real idea how much the opera house would cost and Utzon himself had not yet worked out how to build it. His motto, "To work on the edge of the possible", guided the building process - and, ultimately, led to his departure. "We felt that we were working in the same way as musicians, that we couldn't make it good enough," he explains.
"It is human to make something extraordinary. It always has been." Utzon loves matching engineering with art. He compares designing a giant building both to creating sailing ships, as his father did, and to conducting an orchestra. "It is as grand and great as anything," he says. "You don't know what is in yourself until you try." The then state premier Joseph Cahill, who funded the project with a special lottery, told him that if he had any problems, he was to go straight to him. "He felt his citizens lacked what every big town in Europe had. This one man's decision was based on a very human, marvellous feeling for people." Cahill also ordered building work on the site, formerly home to a municipal tram shed, to start far earlier than it should have done. He was afraid he might lose elections or die - and that his successors would drop the project.
Utzon's solution to the challenges of Bennelong Point was to bury the guts of the theatre in a platform on which would sit his magnificent white shells, all segments of spheres of the same dimensions. "The audience sees only the harbour and the performance," he explains. After seven years of working with engineers on different models, the building began to emerge.
Paul Robeson, on a visit to Sydney, clambered on to the scaffolding and sang to the workers. Then Utzon walked out.
"It was absolutely not possible to continue. It was very simple. I was not wanted by the new minister of public works," he explains. Cahill's Labour party had lost elections to the conservative Liberal-Country party. Officially, the final argument with the new public works minister Davis Hughes was over a bill for models of his daring, experimental designs for wooden beams in the building's interior. Even then, however, he expected to be asked back. "He thought they would realise he was needed. But the call never came," says Weston. It would take seven more years, and a 15-fold increase on the first budget, to finish the building.
Australia lost out as a result.
Once he had left, a smear campaign began. The opera house, far from securing work and fortune, blighted his career.
The new government made out that he did not know how to finish the interior. He was rubbished as an impractical visionary - a stinging charge for one so in love with engineering and construction. He went back to Denmark and was told he would not get projects because he had let down a client. He ended up teaching at a university in Hawaii and is said to have ghosted projects for other architects. He built admired houses and churches in Denmark - but big public buildings eluded him. A theatre in Zurich fell foul of the oil crisis. He and his son Jan built the Kuwait parliament, though he was never as intimately involved with it as he was with the opera house, and he left much on site work to Jan. It made him bitter. When he was given a gold medal for architecture in 1980 he declared: "If you like an architect's work, you give him something to build, not a medal." He is rumoured to have turned down other, more valuable awards.
The opera house, meanwhile, was creating its own legends. At least one potential suicide, standing on the edge of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is said to have changed her mind after contemplating Utzon's building.
By the time his reputation was properly rehabilitated, Utzon himself was losing interest in big, stressful projects. Friends say he is a sensitive man, a poet among architects. The bruising modern battleground of public architecture is not his thing. Although he has made his peace with Sydney, he has developed his own theory about where things went wrong. Davis Hughes, he believes, wanted to open the building himself. "He was somehow in love with the possibility of being the man who got that building finished. When I first went to meet him he sat in his office, and beside him were two one-and-a-half-metre pictures of the opera house site," he recalls. "He could have torn it down if he wanted to. You can be grateful he finished it. That's a message for him." It is impossible to tell whether he is being forgiving or plain ironic. What was lost when Utzon walked out were his colourful plans for the interiors. These involved ingenious curved wooden beams and cascades of glass. They were replaced by dull, functional interiors that leave most visitors, awestruck by the exterior, disappointed. "The people who took over were perfectly good architects, but you can't compete with a genius. You can't second-guess one either," says Weston.
When news broke, three years ago, that the building was to be renovated, Utzon's Australian fans - already angrily demanding that new blocks of flats near the opera house should be torn down and lobbying for it to become a Unesco world heritage site - demanded his return. "Criticising the building is like criticising a geological epoch," said one of them, architect Peter Myers.
News that he was still alive, however, caught some younger architects by surprise. He had spent most of his time since 1973 out of public view in Majorca. Now that he is back, will the interior of the Sydney Opera House recover some of its original, lost features? He is not sure. "We can't answer that. Time will show." In fact, it is impossible for the opera house to retrace its steps. It needs modernising, says Utzon, and that means taking into account factors that simply did not apply 30 years ago. Materials, equipment and even the way plays are performed have all changed radically.
But the Utzon magic will still be cast. A vast colourful tapestry covering one wall of a new chamber-music hall is expected to be one of the first examples. "Nothing is going to be added that has not been discussed with serious thought behind it," he promises.
Friends say that Utzon, an intensely private man in an age of superstar architects, has been reinvigorated by his return to the opera house, by his realisation that he had made a unique building, and by the fact that a definitive book on his work has finally appeared. "It weighs four kilos!" he exclaims, obviously pleased.
He is, perhaps, giving a lot away about his inner self and his disappearance from public view when he smilingly proclaims: "My gratefulness is giving me fine stability. Instead of being unhappy, I am positive about the things you get commissioned as an architect - and not negative about the things you do not get."