UNFINISHED BUSINESS.(Jorn Utzon, architect, Sydney Opera House)(Interview)

Fifty years ago, the state government of New South Wales, in Australia, announced a competition for the design of an opera house to occupy a sandstone headland in Sydney Harbour. Two hundred and thirty-three entries were submitted, of which the most arresting was by a little-known thirty-eight-year-old architect from Denmark. Jorn Utzon worked out of a studio near a house he had designed for his young family in the small seaside township of Hellebaek. He had won several competitions but had built nothing larger than a pair of modest housing projects. The son of a naval architect, he studied the Sydney site from nautical charts purchased at a marine bookstore in Copenhagen, to get a feel for the action of winds and tides against the landform.

His design evoked sails, shells, and gull wings. Alone among the entrants, Utzon had recognized that the building would be seen from all perspectives; when looked down upon from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the buildings nearby, it would have, in effect, a "fifth facade." Eero Saarinen, the most distinguished of the competition judges, called the design "a work of genius." Utzon had disregarded competition rules, using gold on drawings that were supposed to be black and white, and neglecting to include a required perspective of the building in its harbor setting. Saarinen himself took up pastels and completed two large sketches to fill the gap. In the end, the judges' decision was unanimous, and Utzon began work on one of the most famous architectural designs of the twentieth century. The architect Louis I. Kahn remarked, "The sun did not know how beautiful its light was until it was reflected off this building."

Yet the Sydney Opera House, instead of making Utzon's career, almost ruined it. After he had worked for a decade and settled his family in Australia, conflict with the state government of New South Wales forced him to leave, with the project only two-thirds finished. The building was completed without regard for his intentions. Utzon went back to Denmark with his reputation tarnished. He became reclusive, declining to speak about his work. When the Opera House finally opened, in 1973, he refused an invitation to the ceremony. He has never returned to Sydney.

Last year, however, without fanfare a sign went up over construction scaffolding on the Opera House site. It read:

Western Loggia Project Architect Jorn Utzon Rifts between architects and their clients are commonplace. Reconciliation is rare. But, thanks to the building's need for a refurbishment and to intense lobbying by a group of dedicated supporters, Utzon, at the age of eighty-seven, is bringing his vision to bear on elements of the design that were changed or spoiled after he left.

Throughout the long estrangement, Utzon has said, he never stopped thinking about the Opera House for a single day: "I have the building in my head like a composer has his symphony." He has already remodelled the interior of one small reception room. Construction has started on revision of the building's foyers and on its loggia. Behind high hoardings, construction workers are punching large holes through the granite-faced podium walls, to bring light and views of the harbor into the previously dingy drama-theatre foyers. Utzon is also redesigning the interior of one of the two main halls, and has completed a set of design principles that will guide future alterations, long after he is gone, to an edifice likely to stand for centuries. Perhaps for the first time in history, an architect is designing spaces he will never see for a building in which he has never set foot.

Utzon is elusive. For decades, he has relied on his family to protect him from unwanted intrusions. His two sons, Jan and Kim, are architects. His daughter, Lin, is a ceramic and textile artist. All have collaborated with their father on projects and served as his public face. Those who knew the family made it clear to me that a meeting with Jorn Utzon was unlikely under any circumstances, and impossible without his children's approval. So I found myself, last winter, waiting to meet Lin Utzon under blossoming almond trees on the Spanish island of Majorca. Jorn Utzon and his wife, Lis, lived here from the nineteen-seventies until they returned to Denmark a couple of years ago. Behind me, the ruins of a Moorish fortress hugged a distant clifftop. I knew that somewhere just below, and echoing the lines of the ruin, was Can Feliz, one of two houses that Utzon had designed here. His daughter lives there now.