Quotes of the Day

Apart from the modern vehicles, Jørn Utzon's original submission to a design competition for an opera house on Sydney's Bennelong Point reads like a Hollywood stage direction for a biblical epic: "The audience is assembled from cars, trains and ferries and led like a festive procession into the respective halls, thanks to the pure staircase solution…" With his winning entry for the Sydney Opera House in 1957, the 38-year-old Dane proved to be as ambitious a choreographer of spectacle as D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. Leaving behind the rush and grind of the city, opera-goers would be transported up a 100-m terraced plateau, into gilded pleasure domes worthy of Kubla Khan, with cavernous interiors of blue and silver, red and gold, transporting audiences into ecstasy. But when Utzon left the project in 1966, leaving its completion to a committee of local designers, audiences were left without their climax. Halls were swapped, interiors muted and Utzon's iconic shells became, in his own words, "a false thing."

Thirty-eight years later (note the symmetry), Utzon is back - if not in body, at least in spirit. In 1999, the elderly architect was invited by the Opera House Trust to pen a set of design principles for the ageing building. Three years later, Utzon was employed as principal architect in a $A69 million improvement plan, to be supervised by his son Jan, and Sydney-based Richard Johnson. His first completed interior, a $A4 million chamber-music and function hall, was unveiled in September. "It's inspirational to work with a genius," says architect Johnson. What better time, then, to grapple with the sources of genius? "The Studio of Jørn Utzon: Creating the Sydney Opera House," an exhibition which opens this week at the Museum of Sydney, looks both forward and back to reveal an architect still stretching for the point of perfection. With Utzon, says the show's curator John Murphy, "the process is as fascinating as the end result."

While Murphy hasn't met Utzon, 76, who lives as a virtual recluse on the Spanish island of Majorca, he knows the architect inside out. Having catalogued the Utzon archive at the State Library of New South Wales, in 1994 he co-curated an exhibition of Utzon's proposed interiors (as breathtaking as the exterior, the two halls were to echo waves of sound with the world's longest sheets of plywood). Ten years on, the cleverly executed and conceived "Studio of Jørn Utzon" succeeds in getting inside the architect's head. "The Opera House is really the embodiment of his consciousness," Murphy says. Projected to the left of the entrance is black and white footage of Utzon in exile, walking through a snowy forest in Denmark; to the right is his last completed Opera House model, from 1966 - "so we have the two sides of his mind," the curator explains. "The free, poetic side, and also the very practical, analytical side." Once inside, the visitor is thrust before the architect's very eyes. As a young graduate from Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Arts, Utzon zoomed his home-movie lens on ancient world monuments, from the Mayan temples of Yucatan, to Chinese pagodas and Iranian mosques. Watching such footage in the show, one can see the steps of the Opera House forming, and its ceramic shells glittering in Utzon's mind.

At his small studio north of Copenhagen, Utzon drew on film footage of Sydney and, being the son of a naval architect, consulted admiralty charts of the harbor; he was struck by the similarity of Bennelong Point to the nearby Helsingør-Elsinore peninsula, where Shakespeare set Hamlet. What eventually crystallized in his drawings was a raised plateau and airborne structures not unlike sails. In his original plans, the podium would house the backstage business; upstairs, the public spectacle would unfurl. Utzon is often cast by his critics as a Hamlet-like figure, a daydreamer unable to carry out his plans. This exhibition shows quite the opposite. When the shells at first proved too irregular to cast from cement, Utzon drew on a 900-year-old Chinese treatise on architecture, Ying Zao Fa Shi, which taught the pure assembly of standardized elements. His solution was to construct the shells from prefabricated segments of the one sphere, so they could be self-supporting. Utzon had just standardized his plywood interiors, which were to be "assembled like a big jigsaw puzzle in space," when his relationship with the N.S.W. government broke down and he resigned. During the '70s, Utzon would go on to perfect his "additive architecture" with the box-like Bagsvaerd Church and the modular Kuwait National Assembly, though in recent years his design has become sparer. A building should be left "to be what it wants to be," he has said, echoing the words of American architect Louis Kahn.

Which is how Utzon finds himself back on the building he has found impossible to leave. During his 38-year absence, the Opera House has opened up, rather inelegantly, three new theatres along the western boardwalk. To integrate them better with the harbor, Utzon and his architects have turned once more to the Mayan temples of his youthful travels. Their $A6 million colonnade, due to open late next year, has been inspired by the Court of a Thousand Columns at Yucatan. In the meantime, we have the modest and lovely Utzon Room, which reveals his original vaulted ceiling, the bare bones of his genius. The room has also been designed to be viewed from outside, and at night Utzon's 14-m tapestry, inspired by Bach's Hamburg Symphonies, reads like a bejewelled sheet of music. It might not be the climax audiences were after; for this, they must wait for Utzon's upcoming plans for the Opera Theatre. But there's harmony at last.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Danish master Jørn Utzon finally returns to Sydney—in spirit, rather than in person