Jørn Utzon

Jrn Utzon was an architect from Denmark. He was born on 9th Apr 1918. One of his famous works is the Sydney Opera House which is in Australia. He did courses in architecture from Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts when he was just 19 years old.

In the year 1950, Utzon started his own office in Copenhagen, the place where he was born. It was in the year 1957 when he got the project to design the Opera House in Australia. It was actually a surprise for him since he wasn’t expecting to be the winner of the project. Unexpectedly he got elected as the winner and got the offer to design the Opera House. It was the first project that he got outside Denmark. Before getting elected, he had to submit some drawings regarding his plans about the project. After seeing the samples, Eero Saarinen, one of the judges was more than impressed and praised him saying that it’s a genius design!

The engineers of those days couldn’t solve the puzzle behind the shells of the Opera House. So, they weren’t able to move further along with the project until Utzon came to Australia and made it right. He did such a design with the peels of an orange in mind – and using the same fact he provided a solution to advance the project. It was similar to the complex sections of a sphere – and he proved by saying that it would be possible to form a complete sphere using the 14 shells of the building!

Utzon was pretty interested in doing interior designing as well. But he couldn’t since Robert Askin, the newly elected head of government didn’t like his ideas and thoughts. He didn’t have any faith in Robert Utzon’s works. He was against his works and projects even before getting elected. Things were getting tough for Utzon’s and soon he had to resign from project. Because of that, the project cost had risen to almost 1400 percent.

Utzon died at the age of 90 due to a heart attack. But he couldn’t see the completed Opera House since he wasn’t feeling well enough to travel to Australia from Denmark.