Villains and Myths at the Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House’s very existence depended on deception and betrayal. The internationally renowned engineering firm of Ove Arup & Partners had been directly appointed to the job by Joe Cahill’s New South Wales Labor government to protect its interests because it would not entrust sole responsibility for this huge project to an inexperienced architect, Joern Utzon, a serial architectural competition entrant who had never before actually been called on to build anything of substance. Instead, in a (welcome) betrayal of their client and with Ove Arup himself in the lead, Arups entered a conspiracy of silence to hide what it knew to be open-ended unpredictable construction costs and “chaos” in the architect’s office. And he joined in keeping the government ignorant of the reality that its objectives, as stated in its brief, particularly for a main hall holding between 3000 and 3500 seats, would be relegated behind the vastly different agenda of the architect: the one paying the bills wanted the main focus to be on function, the other who spent it, on form.

What finally emerged was neither Utzon’s prize-winning sketch nor the government’s required auditoria—but nevertheless the twentieth century’s finest building. And the government contribution to this plethora of deception was to order work to begin on the foundations and base or concourse (which later had to be altered at considerable cost) despite no working plans yet existing for the building itself, in order to make it difficult for any subsequent government to cancel the project. In this case, the end justified these dubious means.

Forty years after its official opening, fifty years after it was supposed to be opened and almost sixty years after its design won the competition for a Sydney Opera House on Bennelong Point, the myriad myths surrounding the controversial departure of its architect, Joern Utzon, need to be demolished. Daryl Dellora’s recent proselytising Penguin pamphlet Utzon and the Sydney Opera House, purporting to be a myth-buster, is really only a rehash of the myth-laden emotional clap-trap of the 1960s and 1970s. It pushes the line that Utzon could have finished the Opera House cheaper, quicker and better had he not been forced to resign, and that his untested structural plywood interior scheme would have worked despite engineering advice to the contrary.

Like last November’s extraordinary official celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of its opening, which airbrushed everyone except Utzon out of the history of its construction, Dellora’s pamphlet fans the embers of the heated verbal attacks on all those so-called philistines who helped drive Utzon from office in February 1966. These extend beyond the Askin government which, in “a triumph of base politics over art”, forced him to resign, to those whose collaboration with and support for Utzon had been essential for his sketchy concept to become the reality that earned him the greatest architectural accolades the world can bestow, but who had become disillusioned with him.

Unless support for Utzon was unequivocal, admiration unquestioning and adoration unlimited, these participants in this great building could receive no acknowledgment at the recent celebrations—but they do get the villain (or at best inconsequential) roles in Dellora’s version. It was Utzon alone who “solved” all the key problems created by his unbuildable winning sketch; engineering consultant Ove Arup & Partners only get mentions for being late with drawings and for their “humiliation, both financial and professional” for their “failed attempts to make Utzon’s original concrete shell concept work”. And ultimately, on the plywood interior, “Utzon felt he had been betrayed by Arup’s firm”. Dellora, with no pretence of objectivity, has no doubt about where the blame lies for the breakdown on the Utzon–Arup close working partnership that led, inevitably, to Utzon’s departure seven years before the completion of his building that he would never see in its finished state.

Yet without Ove Arup and Partners, there would be no Sydney Opera House. This is not only because of Ove Arup’s central role in converting Utzon’s unbuildable sketch of thin low-slung concrete shells resembling Saarinen’s seminal TWA at New York’s JFK airport into vastly different towering Gothic arches six feet thick. Standing much more upright (and adding more “shells” for stability) and looking more like spinnakers in a blow, even Dellora admits that it is “not a shell structure at all … a concrete shell structure was physically incapable of supporting the weight”. So Utzon’s shell-roofed competition entry has not been built; the world-renowned structure that emerged from the combined efforts of Utzon the architect, Arup the engineer, and Corbett Gore of Hornibrooks the builder, is not solely Utzon’s; excluding them from acknowledgment is an absurd element of the Utzon myth.The only basis on which the New South Wales government was prepared to give Utzon the contract to build his competition-winning imaginative sketch (so inadequate it broke many of the competition rules—and the boundaries of the site!) was for him to accept the overwhelmingly supportive British-born ethnic Dane, Ove Arup, as structural engineer in the most unusual role of being directly responsible to the government rather than to the architect. The panel of international architects (including Saarinen) who, in 1957, adjudged Utzon the winner of the competition to design an opera house for Bennelong Point warned the Cahill government (which had bravely initiated the project when political priorities were for more housing and hospitals) that Utzon would “need help on the management and financial side … and with the technical problem of calculating and later building the very complicated shell vault system … he should work with a firm of the standing of Ove Arup and Partners …”

Arup’s appointment provided the professional substance that enabled the project to proceed. Arup himself was so entranced by the challenge, as he told Utzon, of creating “a building which will be of great liberating importance to today’s architecture” by ensuring “that your idea is realised in the fullest sense and for it still to be economically viable”, that he gave respectability to Utzon’s first priority that the building should have “integrity”. But this meant that Arup betrayed his specific responsibility to the client to maximise function and “economic viability”, both of which became subservient. In effect he conspired with Utzon to keep from the client (the government’s dysfunctional Opera House Executive Committee) the unknown and unlimited costs that would be involved in their pursuit of the “integrity” of an unprecedented self-supporting concrete construction rather than the far cheaper conventional steel frame to which cladding is attached that was the basis on which the government was advised by a quantity surveyor that the likely cost would be only $7 million. While this absurdly low figure was politically essential in order to get the project under way, the Labor government and Utzon both bore the political burden of cost blow-outs from this ludicrously small base. It was only after Utzon’s departure that Arup admitted to his biographer, Peter Jones (author of Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century, 2006), that it had been a mistake to have kept the client ignorant of the technical challenges they had faced and of their scepticism about the cost estimates.

And it was only then that Arup confessed to his client that the partnership that built the first two stages (the podium and the sails) had begun to break down three years earlier, putting the project at risk. “The emerging conflict with Utzon … should have been brought into the open; alongside Utzon’s leitmotif that ‘everything was solved’, Arup realised ‘with a growing sense of foreboding of doom’ that no drawings were forthcoming”, according to Jones. Arup also regretted as “a profound mistake” that in late 1964 Utzon had talked him out of resigning from the project at the end of Stage Two as it would have cleared the air, whether or not it would have been accepted by the client. But even this offer, with its clear implications of the effective breakdown of the close relationship on which the project depended, was kept from the client until after Utzon’s departure in 1966.

Arup was so blinded by his love affair with the Utzon concept of form over function that he even stoutly defended Utzon’s user-unfriendly absence of escalators, installation of which would have been “an act of vandalism”—until an ageing Arup grumbled when he had to walk up the six storeys of building steps himself. In 1963, six years into the project, Arup was still seeking to protect Utzon from criticism about delays and cost rises, writing to the Premier that the building required “the subordination of every detail to the overriding architectural or aesthetic conception … aesthetic control and striving for perfection is of the essence of the job … in the never-ending search for the correct solution” and that as a designer Utzon was “probably the best of any I have come across. The Opera House could become the world’s foremost contemporary masterpiece if Utzon is given his head.” Even at the end of the affair, Arup was telling the government: “He is a genius. Only he can finish the Opera House as it should be finished … this masterpiece must be saved for humanity”. Arup’s continued defence to the government of Utzon’s delays and lack of working drawings gave Utzon a false belief that he could search for his view of perfection whatever the cost and however long the delays. But successive Labor governments grew increasingly impatient and critical; the Coalition government elected in 1965 drew the line.

Evidence of the depth of Arup’s emotional dedication to Utzon’s concept is in the three fruitless and expensive years searching for a way to build his geometrically undefined self-supporting shells. According to Peter Jones, the resolution of the roof problems with huge interlocking ribs (refined by Utzon’s imaginative change from his original free-form shells to the regularity of segments of a sphere) “secured Arup a place in architectural and engineering history”.

It was not until May 1965 in a report to the Renshaw Labor government’s Works Minister Norman Ryan (in response to his questioning “the stability of the shell roofs, the novel design and the very great cost involved”), that Arup admitted that eight years earlier they had discussed with Utzon “solutions that were structurally simpler” for the “free shapes with no geometric definition” in his competition entry, but it was decided that “any major deviation from the architect’s proposals would completely wreck the scheme … where the best architectural form is not the best structural form … We agreed with the architect that the design as he conceived it should go forward.” The client remained ignorant of this expensive decision, for which he would pay.

After years of trying to be true to the Utzon shell concept, Arup’s senior partner, Ronald Jenkins, had had enough and withdrew from the project in “considerable bitterness” in 1961 when Arup’s had a “thorough reappraisal of the whole structure”. As Arup wrote to Ashworth late that year:

We had often discussed the possibility of using such a method [repetition of precast units] with Utzon but the fact that all the shells were different seemed to preclude this. However, in the course of our discussion, Utzon came up with the idea of making all the curves of a uniform curvature throughout in both directions—in other words they are all cut out of the same sphere. This would mean that every segment of the shell was identical.

This emerged from Utzon not only eventually agreeing to Arup’s recommendation of imposing a geometry on the shells (from parabolas to ellipsoids and spheres) but also to accepting that his concrete shells “sculpture” could not be built and that what resulted instead was a huge structure of 28,000 tons supported by 2100 tons of steel.

But a consequence of this dramatic change in the shape and nature of the roof was such a significant reduction in the space available for the interiors that, as Jones shows, the volumes could never meet the government’s stated requirements: “the inside would be what was left after the outside was finished” rather than what the client asked for. Utzon is quoted in Arup’s biography saying that in these circumstances the acoustics didn’t matter and the number of seats didn’t matter provided audiences were overcome by the beauty of the building. Tensions that developed between the two offices over Arup’s expensive three-year attempt to find a way of building a shell whose shape Utzon had now happily abandoned and rival claims for parentage of what was clearly a joint solution of the roof problem, then became more intense, with Utzon shocking his engineering colleagues by saying of it: “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care what scandal it causes. That is what I want.” Jones goes on: “Utzon’s cavalier approach to costs was to cause endless friction [between them] … The building could no doubt have been built in other ways, possibly more cheaply, while maintaining essentially the same appearance.”

If the roof issue had damaged the Utzon–Arup united front, then Utzon’s determination to proceed with another untested theory of using plywood as a structural member in the building’s interior, finally destroyed it. Once again, the Dellora dogma states that Arups “suggested that the plywood [50 foot sheets] would be too heavy to be fully supported by the shells and equally would not be strong enough to be self-supporting” and that a second opinion from a local engineer, Peter Miller, approved Utzon’s plan, leading Utzon to become “convinced that the engineers were against him, and the relationship grew poisonous”. The plywood ceiling saga began with Utzon’s 1964 request to Minister Ryan for approval for Ralph Symonds Ltd to build prototypes even before the acoustic consultants had advised on the required thickness of the plywood which would affect the weight and therefore impact on the capacity of the engineers to establish its structural capability. None of these were forthcoming and by September 1965, after David Hughes became the minister, he wrote to Utzon basically saying that if the plywood was required for acoustic reasons he wanted an acoustician’s report in support, and if for structural reasons, he wanted a structural engineer’s report. He got neither.

It was this conflict between form and function that destroyed Utzon. While he focused his attention on, and gave priority to, the sculptural forms, the client wanted him to cater for the functions he had been commissioned to provide. Arup’s ultimate (and formal) responsibility to the client to provide a functional building meant inevitable conflict. The Arup biography notes:

The challenges created by inaccessibility for the aged or infirm, moderate acoustics, reduced seating provisions, innate inflexibility, inadequate facilities backstage—none of these factors is resolved by public acclaim of the sculptural forms. Nevertheless the failings of the Opera House have not redounded to the discredit of the architect. And the superb engineering has not been credited to the engineer.

Shortly after Utzon belatedly transferred his team from Denmark to the site in 1963, relations between the architect and the engineer had deteriorated so badly that Utzon bricked up the connecting door between their on-site offices. Arup lamented in 1966: “Since Utzon moved to Australia three years ago there has hardly been any fruitful collaboration between our two firms”—but he didn’t tell the client until after Utzon’s departure.

The political context of an approaching state election was catching up on Utzon. The death of Cahill in 1959 left the problems of massively escalating costs and a long delay in completion time at the Opera House with his successors Bob Heffron (until 1964) and Jack Renshaw. Facing the prospect of defeat in 1965, Renshaw tried to restrain the rising cost of the Opera House by reminding Utzon that “the expenditure of public moneys and cost is of the utmost importance”, and in a significant move for fiscal control, directed that: “decisions involving expenditure will be made by the Minister for Public Works” not the Opera House Executive Committee.

One of Dellora’s Utzonite myths is to pretend that everything was fine for Utzon under Labor’s “supportive” Works Minister, Norman Ryan, “who always showed enormous confidence in Utzon’s ideas and his practicality” and it was only the advent of the philistines Askin and Hughes that ruined everything. But the evidence of Labor governments’ mounting concerns and Ryan’s loss of patience with Utzon’s delays is unequivocal: after having to insist several times that Utzon recognise that Ryan (rather than the “advisory” Opera House Executive Committee) was now the client and that his departmental head, Mr Wood, was, despite Utzon’s objections, to have full access, on Ryan’s behalf, to Utzon’s office, Ryan wrote in January 1965 to Utzon: “The full and detailed description of what is being done and what is proposed to be done which was asked for by the cabinet sub-committee over four months ago should be submitted without further delay.” He added that replies were outstanding to many departmental letters that required prompt attention.

He asked Utzon to advise him “whether and how the building will be built, when and at what cost and whether it will work”; these queries were never directly answered. So relations with the Labor government soured as cost rises and delays continued, especially when it became apparent that, contrary to assurances to the client, Utzon had spent “a good deal of time” in 1963 working on his winning competition entry for the new Zurich Theatre and then for the National Opera in Madrid, instead of attending to the design problems in Sydney.

Renshaw’s 1965 election loss, which brought the strongly critical Davis Hughes as the new minister, hastened Utzon’s inevitable end. Utzon was no longer prepared to work co-operatively with Arups which, in a curious inversion of reality, he accused of “non-collaboration with the architect on various aspects of planning”. In fact, Arup had suggested to Utzon when these tensions first emerged in 1963 that Arups would resign from Stage Three (the interiors), and leave it all to Utzon, who, aware of the implications of such an event, then persuaded Arup to stay on. But the lack of co-operation continued and Hughes was astounded when Utzon “wanted a fee for himself as engineer advising himself as architect”. Arup wrote to Utzon:

I wonder whether you really are master of the situation and can manage without help except for sycophantic admirers. I have often said that I think you are wonderful, but are you all that wonderful? You will probably dismiss my doubts with contempt. You have clearly indicated that our role is to do what we are told and leave you to manage your affairs. And believe me that suits me … You have killed the joy of collaboration—but I want to see the job finished all the same.

One of Dellora’s myths is that Hughes “starved’ the architect of fees rightly due to him, so that by February 1966 he was personally owed $300,000, forcing his resignation; Utzon’s resignation letter spoke of £51,000, and there was subsequent litigation about which the Crown Solicitor advised the minister in December 1967 that Utzon was not in a position “to provide full working drawings for a tenderer, nor, in fact, to provide the client of his proposals for completing the construction of the building according to the terms of his engagement”. There was no doubt that the “blank cheque from the government on absolutely every aspect of design”, which Arup’s local partner Mick Lewis told his partners that Utzon had been insisting on for a long time, had come to an end.

After hearing of Utzon’s threats to resign if he did not get his way with Hughes, Arup made this desperate plea:

If you resign, all is lost … If you want just to use it as a threat, first you must be quite sure that it will not be accepted. And can you be so absolutely sure? … You can blame others as much as you like … The only way to get over any trouble with the client is for us to stand together. United we are strong. But we must be just and see the client’s point of view … let’s scrap this nonsense about … secrecy and suspicion … Let’s think about the job and pull it through.

Utzon ignored Arup. His next threat to resign resulted in Davis Hughes responding: “I accept your resignation. Thank you very much. Goodbye.” Arup then wrote to Utzon:

How can you leave this child of yours to be messed up by other people? … I am in the best position to bring about a compromise solution … even if it does not satisfy you completely … Is it not the most important thing that the Opera House be saved? … A little humility is needed on your part if there shall be any hope of moving the government from their position.

Arup unsuccessfully proposed in May 1966 that Utzon be brought back as architect but working with a full-time program panel representing the client. Utzon’s response that he could only continue if he were solely in charge prompted Arup’s partner Jack Zunz to write to him:

One wonders whether you really want to finish the job—whether you’ve lost faith in your own ability to meet the high standards you have set and whether you have built up the wall of half-truths and fantasies to make excuses for your withdrawal.

Peter Jones says:

The charm with which Utzon seduced most of his listeners was a device to get his own way; ultimately it deceived himself as much as his victims. His poor academic background, hampered by dyslexia, arguably contributed to his vilification of even mundane requests for discussion as revealing a philistine failure to perceive his transcendent artistic vision. At the outset he was well aware he knew nothing about opera houses and even less about acoustics, nothing about Australia and less about its history or political contexts.

The Sydney Opera House (a misnomer, as it was always to be primarily a concert hall, even when the abandoned dual-purpose plan existed) is Utzon’s lasting monument, thanks in large part to those who shared in its creation—as Utzon himself graciously acknowledged: “My successors who completed the building did a tremendous job.”

So now there is another ghost over the building—the unfairly reviled and tragic Peter Hall, the brilliant Australian architect who led the team that completed the building in a way that Utzonites allege “destroyed” Utzon’s masterpiece. Yet it is this Utzon–Arup–Gore–Hall building, not Utzon’s competition-winning unbuilt shells, whose merit is such that it is on the World Heritage List. It is regrettable that the roles of everyone else other than Utzon have been denigrated or ignored in the partisan rewriting of what really happened at Bennelong Point.

After forty years there are now multi-million dollar proposals to upgrade the Sydney Opera House, to try to make the building more user-friendly, largely to offset the problems created by Utzon’s focus on form over function, of sculpture over utility, of artistic “perfection” over meeting the user requirements of the client. Understanding that story is not helped by the Dellora diatribe.