Opinion
‘Dad, Dad, you won!’: Lin Utzon on life with the man who designed the Opera House
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist and authorLin Utzon is the daughter of Jørn Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this week. She is visiting Sydney for the festivities, and I spoke to her on Friday. She speaks with a soft Danish lilt.
Fitz: Do you feel like Rembrandt’s daughter, the offspring of a genius for the ages?
Lin and Jan Utzon, the children of Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon, are in Sydney for the building’s 50th anniversary.
LU: Yes, I do. When I arrived in Australia for these celebrations, and again see what a miracle the Opera House is, I ask myself, “How was my father able to conceive something like that?” He was a genius, but also a humble man. I remember being in the local supermarket with him in Mallorca after he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2003, and this young woman friend ran up, and was giving him strong praise. And he said, “Lucy, can you tell me what is in my trolley?” She said, “Tomatoes and peas, and bread and eggs.” He replied, “So you see, I’m an ordinary man.”
Fitz: Back in January 1957, as a little girl, you were the one who took the phone call to say to your father, an unknown Danish architect, he had won the competition to build the Opera House. You had to run and find your father and mother walking in the forest. “Dad! Dad! You won! You won the competition!” What was his reaction when you told him that?
LU: Euphoric. I was 10 years old, I didn’t know what it meant. Just that the two gossipy old ladies at the local switchboard, said, “Quick! Sydney is calling. Run and find your father. He has won their competition!” But it was a big moment.
Fitz: I loved your father’s quiet comment to a colleague upon landing here, to the effect of, “Great harbour, but why do they build so many red boxes around it?” His view was that in Sydney our architecture was not that great.
Architect Jørn Utzon, pictured at the unpacking of the Sydney Opera House model at Sydney Town Hall in 1957. Credit: Alan Kemp
LU: Well, it was a very strange feeling. Because from Denmark it was a very adventurous trip to get here, through the Caribbean the southern states of America, and Tahiti. So we didn’t really expect to arrive to English, red brick architecture, school uniforms and ladies with hats and things like that. It was quite “other”.
Fitz: In Australia, we of course know Jørn Utzon as a brilliant architect. Was he a great father too?
LU: I adored him. I have people say to me, “Oh, it must have been difficult to have somebody who is such a brilliant man for a father.” No, for to have a father who was living a life that was so positive and so constructive – it was fabulous for a young person because everything was possible. And I still have conversations with him, once in a while, when I need to.
Lin Utzon with her father, Jørn.Credit: Lars Hansen
Fitz: You mean like he’s there, or just imaginary conversations?
LU: Sometimes I feel he is there.
Fitz: I won’t intrude to ask what your conversations with your father are about. But may I ask if you were to have a conversation with your father now about how Sydney is celebrating his Opera House, 50 years after the opening, what would your report to your father be?
LU: I would say how incredible the feeling is now, of how everybody understands that the building he gave Sydney and Australia now defines the country more than the kangaroo, and how the people of Sydney also changed because of it, because the bar became higher, a higher level of artists performing. And the whole exuberance of the harbour is now reflected by that building. Before it was more of a city that in its red brick boxes turned away from the harbour. Now it turns towards.
Fitz: What do you remember of those years living in Sydney as his masterpiece started to take shape?
LU: I felt incredibly blessed. We arrived and were received with the same magnificent hospitality from everyone. It was a new adventure. I did love my country, Denmark, but Australia was something else. It was wild. You know that huge Pacific, and the bush, and getting to know all of Australia, as my father started building the Opera House was magnificent.
Fitz: My favourite bit of criticism when I was doing a book on the Opera House was a columnist for the Daily Mirror, who, on first seeing the model when your father was announced as the winner, wrote “It looks like an untidily sliced apple or perhaps a bunch of toenails clipped from some large albino dog!” What about you? When you visited the site, did you recognise the staggering beauty of the Opera House as it grew?
LU: [Laughs.] Yes, and I remember that feeling of being part of something really exceptional.
The competition drawing for the opera house staircase between the two halls, submitted by Jorn Utzon in 1956.Credit: The Sydney Opera House.
Fitz: And yet, all started to come apart for your father when the Askin government was elected in 1965, meaning he no longer had the political support – and they wanted him to speed everything up. Do you remember there being tension in your house?
LU: I do remember, because my father had a difficult time sleeping. He was always out walking around Palm Beach.
Fitz: This next question is delicate, but I must ask. Is it possible that the architectural genius of your father was not matched by managerial genius? No one doubts the genius of Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but it would not surprise if the same brains that could have conceived their masterworks, might have struggled – perhaps like your father – running massive projects with hundreds of moving parts?
LU: How do you mean?
Fitz: I mean that when your father resigned, he had a dozen draftspeople at most, because he wanted to keep control of everything. He was replaced by three architects who ended up with 119 draftspeople doing the thousand rooms, and it still took seven years!
LU: I think he was a brilliant manager as well because everything he did was brilliant. And at Sydney, he had the most devoted staff you can imagine. It affected everybody enormously that the project stopped.
Fitz: But my point is that even though Askin’s minister for public works, Davis Hughes, knew nothing of architecture, do you have no sympathy for the government which said, “We’ve got to get this finished!” If your father had not left Sydney, could it have been done in seven years? Ten years? Twenty years? How long would it have taken do you think?
LU: I don’t know, but it would have been finished. It would have been like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, with the Pope …
Fitz: “When will you make an end?” “When I am done.”
LU: Yes. All he could do was promise to do “my absolute best.”
Fitz: It must have been hard for him, after resigning, to leave?
LU: Yes. On the morning of departure, he and I went down and sat on Palm Beach and it was one of those days where there was just enough fog to soften the light and the waves were coming in huge. And we just sat on the beach and talked about leaving. He said, “No matter what, it was a fabulous gift to be able to come here and do this.”
Fitz: The most haunting image I had from doing the book was as you leave your place on the northern beaches and head to the airport, you’re in the taxi with your father and as you go over the Bridge, he looks out to the Opera House, the unfinished symphony, to gaze upon his masterpiece for the last time …
LU: [Softly.] Yes, and it was extraordinary, because there was a thick shroud of fog which meant he could barely see it. It was very symbolic.
Fitz: The obvious tragedy is that he could never come back to see his completed masterpiece, despite at one point considering coming back, wearing “some lipstick and a wig and go back to Australia as a woman”, so that, incognito, he could walk around and see it up close. You were the first member of the family to come back and see progress.
LU: The first time I came back, was with my then-husband, Alex Popov, and a friend of ours organised that we could go on the building site. The person was taking us around, and somebody on the site yelled out “I know who you are, you’re Utzon’s daughter!” and the person taking us said “This will get me fired”. There was a very bad atmosphere towards my father at the time.
Fitz: And then when you came back the second time, to see the finished masterpiece?
LU: It was, completely, unavoidably, magic. I haven’t been to the pyramids. But it’s something where you feel in a way it’s been there for all time. It’s so logical, it’s so perfect. You don’t feel it’s a strange object that’s been put down on the country – you feel that it’s been there forever, and the city around it is more alien than the Opera House.
Jorn Utzon at the Sydney Opera House.Credit: Fairfax Media
Fitz: It still staggers me that he could never come and see it.
LU: He thought of it like a symphony, and he knew it was finished. But, first of all, there was my mother who said that he couldn’t bear to see what was done to it – the fact it was not completed to his full vision. That was one side, but the other question was if he would have been able to cope if there was controversy, which he was like a magnet for. He couldn’t have coped with that kind of pressure.
Fitz: Just before your father died, he talked to The Guardian, and said “Every day I wake up and think of the Opera House. It gives me such pleasure that the building meant so much to the people of Sydney in Australia. That makes me very happy.” It sounds like, despite everything, he died a very happy man.
LU: He was. He was totally aware that he was just another little ant among all of us little ants on the Earth, but if you have the incredible luck and privilege to be given a task like the Opera House where you can do something so exceptional, and be so challenged to do more than you ever dreamt you could do, you are extraordinarily lucky, and he was satisfied with what he had achieved.
Fitz: Thank you. I’m seriously sure I speak for the people of Sydney and Australia in saying to the Utzon family, you have our enduring gratitude for Jørn Utzon giving us a treasure beyond measure for the ages.
LU: [Softly.] Thank you so much. I don’t take it for granted at all that Sydney and the Opera House include me and my family in things like these celebrations. It is exceptional. I, too, am filled with gratitude.
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