Chapter 13: 1965, the Move to Sydney
Jørn Utzon arrived in Sydney via Tahiti on March 4th 1963, after three months in America. Upon arrival, he and his wife Lis were immediately driven to lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip aboard the Royal yacht Britannia. The Royal Couple had spent some time the previous day exploring a transformed Bennelong Point and were clearly impressed by the enormous concrete structure.
At lunch, Utzon was introduced to Patrick White who, accompanied by his partner Manoly Lascaris, later toured the site with Utzon and wrote: "it has made me feel glad I am alive in Australia today. At last we are going to have something worth having."
During those years in which the Sydney Opera House had gone from idea to reality, the project had come to symbolise Australia's growing cultural awareness, sophistication and the sense that it was establishing a new identity for itself in the world, as alluded to in Patrick White's note.
A new generation had inherited Joseph Cahill's hopes and aspirations. The transformation of Bennelong Point held the promise of the shrine to culture Cahill had envisaged for his people a modernist masterpiece, unique and signifying the avant garde through the impressive platform.
Something previously unseen and strikingly new, an assertion of Australia's cultural confidence, now stood on the site of Bennelong's house, a counterpoint to the young nation's convict and colonial past.
This new wave of youthful idealism, buoyed by the revolutionary mood of the 1960s, sustained Cahill's idea that the opera house would embody the flowering of Australian culture, and nurture it into the future.
It is no surprise then that Utzon would find himself highly regarded as the mysterious, enigmatic and fascinating author of this transformation.
In many ways, these public perceptions of Utzon were correct yet he was also human: vulnerable, and with contradictions.
Prior to his arrival in Sydney, Utzon had already had some triumphs, in the solution of many design challenges relating to the creation of the perfect building. He would, however, be less capable when it came to compromising this perfectionism to suit the realities of the project, and Australia's different temperament.
It was becoming increasingly clear to those who worked closely with Utzon, that he was more interested in the solution to ideas than the very different discipline of realising them. Utzon was inclined to say he had solved problems, when what he meant was he had done so in principle only. Ove Arup would later say that he was allergic to this statement.
As early as 1962, when lying on a beach in Hawaii, Utzon told Jack Zunz he didn't care if the opera house was never finished in his head, the problems had already been solved and he could already see the completed building.
Utzon would repeat this view many times in the years following his withdrawal from the project, as if the physical realisation was less important than the imaginative, which allowed Sydney Opera House to conform to his ideal. But in 1963, he was still striving hard to see that idea become a physical reality.
With his arrival in Australia, the story began to take a different course, as the seeds of discontent and ineptitude began to grow, amidst the brilliance of the work and its authors.
