A dream made concrete

You are celebrated as the architect of one of the most famous buildings in the world, now in your late eighties and living quietly in your home outside Copenhagen. One day a beautiful blonde German girl knocks on your door. She is clutching a folder of her photographs of the extraordinary structure on the other side of the world which, following a dispute in 1965 with a new Australian Government, you have never seen completed. For her, that architectural work was love at first sight. For you, her images are a love letter that confirms the enduring greatness of your conception. It is happiness on both sides, and its fruit the publication of this hauntingly beautiful book.

Few modern buildings can have been more photographed than the Opera House on Geelong Point in Sydney Harbour. But Katarina Stübe’s obsession with its towering, sail-like shells has sought out perspectives, angles, points of view that run against every clichéd image and restore to the building the wonderous strangeness of Jørn Utzon’s 1957 prize-winning conception.

Therein also reside problems of design, construction and functionality, many of which persist to this day. The textual commentary by Utzon’s son, Jan, himself an architect and intimately involved with the on-going development of the building, owns up to the problems without probing them too uncomfortably. One of the most taxing of these was how Utzon’s vision was actually going to be built. The constructional design was handed over to Ove Arup in London, where in the early 1960s, as a very junior engineer, I myself toiled over a drawing board on the project. Calculation of the stresses in the concrete shells was proving intractable as Utzon had wanted their curving surfaces to be of a very complex form.