Bennelong Point, where Utzon’s genius bore fruit

Wednesday, 10th December 2008

Eric Ellis, who interviewed the reclusive architect in 1992, considers the inspiration behind his modernist milestone

So what was it? What precisely was Jørn Utzon thinking when he conceived that brilliant masterpiece on Bennelong Point, the acme of 20th-century architecture.

Was it seashells? Or harbour spinnakers, the billowing ‘nuns’ scrums’ as yachties call them over a Tooheys or six? Was it a childhood spent around the Øresund boatyards of Denmark, the hulls his naval architect father would lovingly shape? Mexico’s soaring Aztec and Mayan temples at Monte Alban and Chichen Itza that Utzon tramped around after the second world war? Palm fronds? Or the cave dwellings of Chinese troglodytes?

Or was it, as a doped-out ragtrader once prosaically insisted to me between tokes of his joint at Balmain Market, a collection of egg cups to complement the neighbouring bridge-as-toast-rack, as depicted on the ‘Breakfast in Sydney’ T-shirts he was selling?

The one voice missing from last week’s obituaries was Utzon’s.

I interviewed Jørn Utzon in September 1992 at Can Lis, the retreat named for his wife that he built on a Mallorcan clifftop that looks a lot like Sydney’s coast. Utzon hadn’t spoken to the Australian media since being hounded from Sydney by the bitter philistine Sir Davis Hughes in April 1966. Today, a week after his death and 42 years after he left Australia never to return, that interview 16 years ago remains one of the few he ever did. ‘It is time to talk,’ he told me back then. ‘Just this once and to nobody else. I have a story and I think now is the right time to say it.

‘Many people say my design was inspired by the sailing yachts in the harbour or by seashells,’ he said. ‘This is not the case. It is like an orange, you peel an orange and you get these segments, these similar shapes. It was like this in my models. It was not that I thought it should be like sails in the harbour. It just so happened that the white sails were similar. I was influenced by the sails only to the extent that my father was a naval architect and I was familiar with big shapes.

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