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

Looking back it at all today, it doesn’t matter what inspired the Sydney Opera House. The building — if that’s what it is, the word seems inadequate here — speaks for itself, however it was conceived. If anything is singular about it, its because its one-of-a-kind, beyond unique, throw-away-the-plans, Utzon as Australia’s Postnik Yakovlev, the 16th-century architect who, as Muscovite legend has it, was blinded by Ivan the Terrible (a.k.a. Davis Hughes?) after finishing St Basil’s Cathedral so he could never create something as beautiful again.

What matters more to Australia is some of the rest of what Utzon told me back in 1992: what was lost.

‘There was this feeling of a new epoch, a new school in architecture, not just among our group but from other learned people in Europe and America. We were doing things in our time, in our way as we might have been Romans in their era, or the pyramids in Egypt.

‘People talk about how the pyramids were built and how marvellous they were but this was exactly the same thing, with industrial techniques, with fantastic constructions that were being invented and it was happening there in Australia … and nobody seemed to care, nobody knew.

‘It always surprised me that there was no more interest in that fantastic construction that went on in front of all these people.

‘The fantastic site, its function, the scale of the project and the fact that it was in Australia, a new country, a young country with the potential for limitless imagination, made us all absolutely selective and perfect in what we did.

‘Sydney could have been an architectural laboratory; there would have been 10 or 15 buildings just as fabulous as this if we had stayed there.

‘Of this I feel sure.’

Eric Ellis is a foreign correspondent based in South-East Asia.