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Sphere of influence
By Patrick Whiteley (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-22 08:57
In 1957, when Utzon won the Sydney design competition, he was hardly known outside his native country. For the next five years he operated out of his Denmark office before moving his family to Sydney to closely monitor the mission. Utzon's supporters say the New South Wales government underestimated construction costs, and as they rose and the project was delayed, he became a target for politicians pandering to suspicious local voters, who were still making up their minds over the merits of such a radical and expensive building. When the government stopped paying Utzon in 1966, he left Australia and never returned.
 "The real loss in the Sydney Opera House project is not the huge cost overrun in itself," wrote Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor of planning at Aalborg University in Denmark, in the Harvard Design Magazine in 2005. "It is that the overrun and the controversy it created kept Utzon from building more masterpieces." Cater says that when Utzon returned to Denmark, the president of the country's Association of Architects told him his abandonment of the Sydney project was a disgrace and he wouldn't get work from the Danish government.
 Utzon would receive only one other commission on the same grand scale as the Opera House, the Kuwait National Assembly, in 1971. His genius was finally acknowledged in 2003, 30 years after the Opera House was opened when he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest accolade in architecture. The citation read: "There is no doubt that the Sydney Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings of the 20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known throughout the world - a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent." |
