Chapter 10: Hellebk, Denmark. Fitzroy Street, London
At Bennelong Point, four years of work to realise Stage One had begun on what, at the time, was emerging as the largest concrete structure in the Southern hemisphere. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, teams of architects and engineers in Hellebk, Denmark, and Fitzroy Street in London worked to realise the design and construction of Stages Two and Three of Sydney Opera House.
Those involved remember these years of hard work and innovation in design and engineering as an extraordinary period in their lives. Looking back, we also see the beginning of tensions between a desire for perfection and the shorter road to completing the building.
On one side, Utzon was concerned with crafting the building to the highest standards and he had been convinced that his client, the NSW government under Cahill, would support him.
Instead, the client was showing an increasing willingness to compromise on Utzon's approach.
Ove Arup and Partners, the consultant engineers, would be caught between these two points of view in the complex events that ensued.
Jørn Utzon's practice was situated in a rented town house in Hellebk, on the Danish island of Zealand, a small village which runs along the waterway known as resund, separating the island from Sweden. It is just north of the city of Helsingr, home to Kronborg castle, which had been immortalised by William Shakespeare as Elsinore Castle in "Hamlet".
Surrounded by beech forest and a lake system, Hellebk is a beautiful and peaceful setting that provided a rarefied environment for the international group of architects and engineers who worked alongside Utzon.
The engineers of Ove Arup and Partners often spoke of the pleasure they felt in leaving the commotion of Fitzroy Street in the centre of London for the peace of Hellebk.
A quote from a 1959 letter from Hugo Molman to Povl Ahm: "No doubt you are enjoying life in Hellebk, the 'kolde bord' in the 'badehotel' and bathing and sailing in Jørn's boats. Who knows, you may even find some time for some work now and then."
There can be little doubt that both Arup engineers and Utzon's architects, designers and consultants found a great deal of time for work.
It was estimated that the work undertaken by Ove Arup and Partners up to 1962, even before beginning the construction of the roof, totalled more than 150,000 hours, undertaken by engineers of 12 different nationalities; the equivalent of more than 100 years of full time work for a single person.
In Hellebk, life revolved around work, with long weekdays and Saturday mornings frequently spent at the drafting tables.
Despite being an excellent draftsman himself, Utzon rarely drew plans, instead providing his staff of gifted younger architects with sketches drawn with his characteristic 6B lead pen. Utzon would distribute these among the architects and, in briefing them, elaborate on concepts in the sketches.
He would also take them for walks into the beech forest, pointing out subtle forms found in nature, the interpretation of which were fundamental to Jørn Utzon's approach.
His education in the European craft movements, the many facets of modernism, sculpture and the eclectic mix of these with traditional forms found in ancient human history, were all underpinned by the deep influence of nature and its forms.
It may come as no surprise then that Utzon did not want ready-made solutions. There was no trade literature allowed, nor were sales representative permitted to visit. The spartan interior of the office housed only one telephone and little more than the models and drafting tables at which the architects worked.
Young architects wishing to work with Utzon came to Hellebk from all over the world. Some were accepted only once they had slept overnight on the doorstep of the house. In 1959, hoping to work in the office, Peter Hall travelled to Hellebk, but was unable to spend enough time to be of use to Utzon. Hall would after Utzon's withdrawal in 1966 take on the contentious task of completing Stage 3.
Apart from the Danes, architects from Japan, Italy, Britain and Australia worked for Utzon, realising designs for the many facets of the building.
The office would steadily grow in numbers as the years went on. At the beginning, in 1958, there were about 9. During 1960 the design staff had grown to 12, which Utzon thinned again by the end of the year, explaining that twelve was too many. By late 1961, before the discovery of the spherical solution, there were upwards of twenty staff, some hired whilst Utzon was away in Sydney, and the design office relocated 10 kilometres south to better accommodate them.
Several visits from Sydney occurred over the years. In 1960, Professor Ingham Ashworth, chair of the Sydney Opera House Technical Committee, and one of the project's original champions, visited Hellebk with a contingent of members from the Union of International Architects.
They toured Utzon's office and a large warehouse space that had been swiftly rented and filled with models which the young assistant architects had raced to finalise over the previous fortnight for the auspicious visit.
Ashworth's group had splintered off from the main conference held in London some weeks earlier. There, the master builder Pier Luigi Nervi had criticised architects who designed structures without a proper understanding of technical aspects. Whether or not this critique as shared by members of the group, their presence in Hellebk further emphasised how much Utzon's design had emerged as one of the most exciting projects in the world.
So while Hellebk seemed to promise a peaceful setting, the reality was quite different. With the many visitors, some of which Utzon would on occasion from, the great volume of project work to be completed, and the substantial travel by Utzon himself over the years, there was no mistaking the hectic and industrious nature of this period.
Chief among Utzon's talented staff was Yuzo Mikami who worked for Utzon from 1958 to the end of February 1961, crucial years of the design process.
Utzon had written to Kunio Maekawa, a leading modernist architect, asking for an assistant who had worked on the Japanese Pavilion for Expo 58, the 11th World's Fair. When Yuzo Mikami was shown the letter he seized the opportunity.
Yuzo Mikami's story offers a fascinating perspective on Sydney Opera House. He alone worked for two masters, through the heyday of the Hellebk design period for Utzon, and then from 1962 with Ove Arup, drafting working drawings for the final design of the building. Both his own work under Utzon and Arup, and his documentation of the project as a whole, reveal a crucial perspective on the story.
Mikami worked with Utzon on the Red Book and designed both the Inaugural Plaque laid by Cahill and the never-realised roof of the main theatre auditorium. Over the years, he drafted hundreds of designs and schematics, including many of the most important documents, such as the elevation of the superstructure showing the final ribbed scheme based on Utzon's spherical solution, and the view of the sequence of construction of Stage 2.
Yet Mikami was just one of the talented architects and engineers who contributed to the project.
Over the four years from 1958 to 1962, Mikami, along with Ove Arup, Poul Schouboe, Jack Zunz, Povl Ahm, Ronald Jenkins, Hugo Molman, Knud Lautrup-Larsen, Aage Hartvig Petersen, Morgens Prip-Buus, would help Jørn Utzon realise his masterful design.
As 1961 came to a close, the most crucial discovery of the design period would present itself in the shape of a sphere.
