Opera House architect and Utzon's beach ball epiphany moment

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Opera House architect and Utzon's beach ball epiphany moment

YUZO MIKAMI: March 22, 1931 – August 27, 2020

Yuzo Mikami was a gifted Japanese architect who worked with Jorn Utzon on the Sydney Opera House project. He was later commissioned to design a convertible hall in Tokyo which could accommodate symphony concerts, opera and ballet.

Born in Tokyo, Yuzo Mikami was the youngest of four children of English teacher Setsuzo and wife Kanao – who was also a scholar of English. His schooling was interrupted in 1945 when he, along with thousands of other children, was sent to the countryside away from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo.

Yuzo Mikami who worked with Utzon on the Sydney Opera House.

Yuzo Mikami who worked with Utzon on the Sydney Opera House.

Upon completing high school, Mikami studied architecture at the Tokyo University of Fine Art and Music graduating in 1956. He soon found employment working with respected Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa on the design of the Japanese pavilion for Expo 58 at Brussels. The pavilion caught the eye of Danish architect Jorn Utzon, who, the previous year, had won an international design competition for an opera house in Sydney.

Utzon contacted Maekawa asking if any of his assistants on the Expo project were available to work with him. Maekawa responded that he had such a person. So it was that on a sunny day in July 1958, 27-year-old Yuzo Mikami knocked on the door of Jorn Utzon's house nestled in the beech forest near Hellebaek, Denmark.

Opera House plaque designed by Yuzo Mikami.

Opera House plaque designed by Yuzo Mikami.Credit: Michael Moy

Inside the house, by chance, Utzon was meeting with Ove Arup – the engineer selected to build his vision that was visiting from London. The door was soon opened and Mikami was invited into the centre of the world of the Sydney Opera House.

Mikami was thrilled to be able to work on the project and quickly developed a great respect for his new employer as an approachable visionary with a good sense of humour. He joined six other architects, four Danes and two Norwegians, in the design office: a small house Utzon had rented not far from his own home.

An early task Utzon assigned Mikami was to design the inaugural plaque to be placed at Bennelong Point by New South Wales Premier John Joseph Cahill to mark the start of construction. Utzon didn't want the normal rectangular plaque so often seen on the side of buildings. He asked Mikami to use his Japanese brain to come up with something different.

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At the time Mikami was working on a grid system for the plan of the whole building and saw a unique opportunity. The centre lines of the roofs of the two halls were angled 11.3° east and west of true north. When these lines were extended, they intersected with the first east-west grid line of the concourse. Mikami likened this location to the navel of a human body and designed the plaque to fit that concept.

It would be circular, cast in bronze, with lines to mark the point of intersection of the roof centre lines and the east-west grid line. Utzon loved the idea and commissioned the nearby Helsingor shipyard to carry out the work. Mikami's plaque consisted of a 61cm diameter cylinder which would be fixed in place with a large cylindrical centre screw. The screw had a special one-use screwdriver in the shape of a T, modified to resemble the outline of a Japanese doll's kimono, a nod to the nationality of the designer. The letter C for Cahill was cut out of the shape.

Yuzo Mikami at Utzon's design office in Denmark.

Yuzo Mikami at Utzon's design office in Denmark.

The 30kg plaque travelled to Sydney with Utzon and wife Lis, and on March 2, 1959 was fixed in place by Premier Cahill just eight months before his sudden death. The plaque can be seen on the Opera House steps today, the alignment with the roof centre lines clear to anyone standing there.

In February 1961 Mikami left Utzon's employ. A visit around that time to a cousin in Munich had an unexpected result: he fell in love with his cousin's housemate Karin, a pianist. They married and moved to London where Mikami took up a pre-arranged position with Ove Arup to continue work on the Opera House project.

The podium work well under way; the focus at Arup was the roof structure. Utzon's original competition entry was free-form and could not be built. Parabolic and ellipsoid shapes had been investigated and dismissed. A repetitive architectural solution was needed and Utzon eventually provided it.

The roofs would consist of precast concrete ribs all sections of a sphere of constant radius. Utzon gave Mikami an account of how the solution came to him when visiting Arup in 1962: burdened by worry about the roof structure, Utzon was stacking the shells of an early perspex model to make space in the design office. Placing one shell on top of another, he noticed that they fitted quite well, despite their different curvatures. 'An idea flashed into his head like a lightning in a dark sky,' Mikami recorded. 'If they were so similar, why couldn't they be cut out from a common surface?' A sphere!

Yuzo Mikami's drawing of construction sequence.

Yuzo Mikami's drawing of construction sequence.Credit: Arup/with permission of Sydney Opera House Trust.

Utzon rushed home, found one of his children's beach balls and partially immersed it in water in a bathtub. By rotating the ball, which changed appearance when wet, Utzon was able to produce a series of dry triangular shapes of various sizes, all, of course, with the same radius. The problem was solved. Mikami's first-hand account contradicts the popular story that the solution came to Utzon when he was peeling an orange.

Mikami was deeply saddened when events caused Utzon to leave the project in 1966 before the interiors were built. On visiting Sydney the following year he met with Peter Hall, the architect tasked with completing the job, and tried to convince him to retain Utzon's concept of a convertible major hall suitable for both opera and symphony concerts. It was to no avail. The decision had been made: the major hall would be for symphony concerts and the like; opera would be relegated to the minor hall.

Mikami returned to Japan in 1968 and, in 1973, set up his own practice: MIDI Architects. In 1984 he was commissioned to design a hall in Tokyo which could accommodate symphony concerts, opera and ballet – in other words, a convertible hall much like that originally intended for Sydney.

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The resulting Orchard Hall, opened in 1989, incorporates three large acoustic shells in the shape of portal frames mounted on wheels which, with the aid of electric motors, can be moved on rails under the stage. In the opera format these acoustic shells are nested, one inside the other, at the back of the performance space with its wings and stage tower. When the concert format is required, the shells are moved forward cutting off the vast space of the wings and stage tower and providing the necessary acoustic conditions for the orchestra. In Mikami's mind, the world now had the convertible hall envisioned by Utzon: not at Bennelong Point but in the Shibuya district of Tokyo.

Three decades after leaving the Opera House project, Mikami assembled his memories, thoughts and drawings into a book, Utzon's Sphere, Sydney Opera House – how it was designed and built published by Shokokusha of Tokyo. His perspective is unique as he is the only architect to have worked with both Utzon and Arup.

Yuzo passed away peacefully in an aged care home in the Mount Tateshina area of Nagano. His wife of 57 years, Karin, had died in January 2019. Yuzo and Karin are survived by two daughters, a son and eight grandchildren.

Michael Moy

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