Sydney Opera House

Utzon, a thirty-eight-year-old working alone in Hellebæk, won the 1957 international competition for a Sydney opera house from a sketch so schematic that some judges initially rejected it; Eero Saarinen, arriving late to the jury, retrieved it from the discard pile and insisted it be the winner. Turning that sketch into a buildable roof took years: Utzon and the engineers of Ove Arup & Partners tried parabolas, ellipses and parabolic ellipsoids before Utzon realised, in 1961, that every shell could be cut from the surface of one 75.2-metre sphere, letting the precast ribs be cast from repeating moulds. Cost overruns and a change of state government turned the project political; the new minister, Davis Hughes, withheld Utzon's fees, and in February 1966 Utzon resigned and left Australia, never to return. Australian architects, led by Peter Hall, completed the interiors to designs substantially different from Utzon's own. He never saw the finished building before his death in 2008, five years after belatedly receiving the Pritzker Prize; it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.