“The acoustical shape was absolutely clear, both in sound and in the way that you would observe it as an audience. The smallest auditorium, minor hall, had been tested in a laboratory, and when I asked the acoustical experts if we should change the shape of the acoustical ceiling further they say “No, no don't do that because it is perfect, actually it is almost too perfect. The hall was in its way in the same evolutionary process along similar lines for the multipurpose hall used as a concert hall and an opera theatre.

Around this time the break came with a new government and a new Minister for Public Works and I was pushed aside as architect for the job.

Luckily Ove Arup stayed on the job; otherwise it would never have been completed. But the two halls, as I had designed them, were scrapped by the new client and his architects. They had a new and different programme for the completion of the building, to the one I had been working on.”

THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

UTZON DOCUMENT, DATED 4 JUNE 2000