Jorn Utzon (1918 to 2008)

Folks in New England don't think of it often -- it is, after all, on the other side of the planet, and even farther away than that in terms of style and sensibility - -but one of the world's iconic works of 20th Century architecture is the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The sail-like forms of the building, silhouetted against Sydney Harbour, instantly signify its host city, even to people who have never been within two oceans of Australia.

Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect who was the out-of-nowhere winner in 1957 of the competition to design the Opera House, died on November 29. In the 36 years since the building's completion and Utzon's death, he never visited the Sydney Opera House -- not once.

Sixteen years between the end of the competition and the completion of the building -- that about says it all. The world will little note, nor long remember, the intra-Australian political nonsense, rife will allegations of nonfeasance and malfeasance about cost overruns, that led Utzon to resign the commission and leave Australia in 1966, leaving to others the task of designing most of the building's interior.

Utzon eventually won the global recognition he deserved for his world-changing design. In 2003, he received his profession's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, placing him in league with Frank Gehry (whose own iconic building, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, owes much to Utzon), Herzog and de Meuron (the Swiss guys who designed the bird's nest-like Olympic Stadium in Beijing), Tadao Ando (Japan's greatest architect) and Glenn Murcutt (Australia's greatest, known mostly for residences and certainly not for anything on the scale of Utzon's masterpiece). At this same juncture, 30 years after the Opera House's completion, Utzon was commissioned to design fixes to the mediocre interior completion of his original design.

It is all fodder for an Ayn Rand novel -- but, if written with anything like grace and subtlety this time, it would be a tale with a real moral: People and their willingness to exercise courage and integrity matter, when it comes to creating public architecture of any greatness.

Utzon would never have received the competition but for the intervention of competition juror Eero Saarinen, who championed this entry relentlessly and allegedly told his fellow jurors that he was not willing to support any other entry. Legends abound, about Saarinen plucking Utzon's drawings from the pile of rejected entries -- that sort of thing. Obviously, this was a key intervention on the part of the architect whose own work represents a catalog of great American icons: The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, the bird-like TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York, the sweeping curves of Dulles Airport in Virginia.

It ain't always thus, as anyone who has followed the tragicomedy of the World Trade Center site in New York well knows. It now appears that the only design of any real consequence to emerge from this greatest of architectural challenge-opportunities is the curvaceous and light-filled transit hub designed by Santiago Calatrava. Coincidentally, it is Calatrava, whose biomorphic designs are ever-striving for precisely the same effect that Utzon achieved in Sydney, who owes as much as any contemporary designer to the precedent set by the Opera House.

And as for the Australian politicians whose peevish infighting nearly killed this masterpiece: Well, their precedent has also been the recipient of much homage, as every mediocre and shoddily built piece of our dessicated public sphere grimly attests.