Acclaim for Utzon at long last

Jorn Utzon, the Danish-born Modernist best known for his design of the much-celebrated Sydney Opera House, has won the 2003 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

Over a 40-plus year career, Utzon created a range of significant works whose bold abstract aesthetic was often tempered by a subtle understanding of more ancient precedents. The exquisite, undulating concrete roof of the Bagsvaerd Church near Copenhagen, for example, was inspired by Chinese pagodas. The walled courtyards of the Fredensborg housing development in Denmark mirror urban patterns of ancient Islamic villages.

But Utzon’s reputation rests on a single project, his opera house design.

With its shimmering, shell-shaped forms jutting out into Sydney’s harbor, the complex instantly became one of the world’s most recognizable buildings, an icon of 20th century design. Equally important, its completion in 1973 signaled a turning point in the history of Western architecture -- the moment when the profession began to break free of a generation’s worth of dreary functionalist dogma. At the same time, the design proved difficult to build, and Utzon was forced to leave the project before it was finished. He never returned to see the realized opera house.

In announcing Utzon’s selection for the $100,000 award -- established in 1979 by the owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain -- Bill Lacy, the Pritzker’s executive director, said that the architect “rightly joins the distinguished company of a handful of Modernists who shaped the most notable buildings of our time; buildings that stand for entire cities, and even continents, in our collective memory.”

The 84-year-old Utzon, who is retired and in fragile health, was unavailable for comment. Speaking for his father during a telephone interview from his home in Denmark, his son Jan said that “the award was quite out of the blue. My father is really delighted and honored.” Born in 1918 in Copenhagen, Utzon came to design early. His grandfather was the manager of a textile factory. His father, a naval architect, was a well-respected yacht designer. As a child, Utzon explored the local shipyards. “These huge ships in dry docks, they were part of his daily life,” Jan said. “I think it helped him to visualize large structures.”

In many ways, Utzon’s early career followed a predictable path. In 1937 he enrolled in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Five years later, soon after the German invasion of Denmark, he left for Sweden, where he worked in the office of Poul Hedquist, a respected Scandinavian Modernist.

Such training was soon coupled with a growing fascination with older vernacular forms. In 1947, for example, Utzon briefly traveled to Morocco, where he first discovered the earthbound architecture that would inflect much of his later work. Other interests included Japanese teahouses and various Mayan ruins.

Utzon’s early works hint at this growing range of influences. With its blank brick facade, for example, the 1952 house he built for his family in Hellebaek, north of Copenhagen, has a primitive, fortress-like appearance. By comparison, his Middelboe House, completed a year later, seems to float on its slender columns -- an obvious reference to Mies van der Rohe’s earlier Farnsworth House.

Nowhere in these projects, however, is there evidence of an architectural maturity capable of handling one of the most high-profile civic commissions of its time. In 1957, when Utzon won the Sydney Opera House competition, he was 38 years old -- a mere pubescent in architectural terms. He had less than a decade’s experience running his own practice and had completed only a handful of small houses.

As legend has it, Utzon’s scheme was rescued from a pile of rejected proposals at the eleventh hour by a member of the selection committee. Eero Saarinen, a juror who was then a major figure on the Modernist scene, was captivated by the design’s whimsical forms, and he lobbied for its selection over 233 other entries.

But it immediately became apparent that the project could not be built as designed. Utzon was partnered with the British-born engineer Ove Arup, and the team spent years laboring over how to make the free-form shells structurally viable without losing the delicacy of their forms.

Eventually it was Utzon who cracked the puzzle. Fidgeting with an orange in his Denmark office, he imagined the shells as curved triangular plates cut out of a single sphere. The uniformity of the shapes’ curvature made it easier to resolve the design’s structural problems, and it gave the forms a visual clarity that only added to their power.

By then, however, delays had taken a severe toll on Utzon’s reputation. Australia’s rival political parties bickered over the project’s soaring cost; a royal commission was set up to investigate the cause of various delays. At one point, the government refused to pay the architect’s fees. In 1966, Utzon resigned and a team of local architects was hired to complete the interiors.

Nonetheless, when it opened in 1973, the Sydney Opera House was immediately recognized as an architectural triumph. Resting on a vast granite slab, the soaring white shells that house the two main halls unfurl at the harbor’s edge like enormous, billowing spinnakers. At times, the forms seem almost weightless.

In subsequent years, Utzon went on to build a number of significant, if less known, works. Among the best of these is the 1965 Fredensborg development, whose uniform brick walls and internal courtyards are clearly inspired by Utzon’s travels in the Islamic world. Organized as a series of fingers that protrude into the landscape, the complex has a rough, tactile quality that roots it in its natural surroundings.

In 1976 Utzon completed what is arguably his second great masterwork, the Bagsvaerd Church outside his native Copenhagen. Made of precast concrete panels, the structure’s simple, boxy exterior has been compared to the timber-frame farm buildings that were a prominent feature of the Nordic landscape. Inside, the undulating surface of the concrete ceiling has a serene, mystical quality. Such formal tensions give the project an unexpected complexity.

As the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton put it: “The vault signifies the sacred in Western culture. And yet the highly reconfigured section adopted in this instance can hardly be regarded as Western. Indeed the only precedent for such a section in a sacred context is Eastern -- the Chinese pagoda roof.”

Utzon’s Kuwait National Assembly, completed in 1982, is shaped by a similar sensibility, albeit on a much bigger scale. The complex, which includes offices, an assembly hall and a mosque, is arranged as an enclosed grid pierced by an internal street.

A public square marks the complex’s formal entry. Framed by enormous tapered columns, the square is sheltered by a concrete canopy that seems to sag under its immense weight. (The complex was set on fire by retreating Iraqi troops during the 1991 Gulf War and has since been restored.)

Despite such works, Utzon has never received the critical acclaim that was his due. He was not a prolific talent. But he has left us with a handful of masterworks of genuine originality, something few other architects can claim. The Pritzker award should help focus attention on those achievements.

“If you look at my father’s architecture,” Jan said, “you will see that all of his projects are different. They change because of the climate, the site, the cultural context. His aim was simply to find an architecture that was suitable to its place.”

This year’s award will be presented on May 20 at a ceremony held at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain. The prize comes with a bronze medal.