In designing the Sydney Opera House the architect Jørn Utzon created a building that would become as iconic of Australia as koala bears and kangaroos. His humanity, originality and understanding of landscape — essential for the making of great architecture — are dramatically displayed at the opera house, whose billowing bouquet of concrete shells make it one of the world’s most recognisable buildings. It is also one of the most important modern buildings because, in designing it, Utzon pioneered the use of complex geometric forms so prevalent today in the work of architects such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.

Jørn Utzon was born in Copenhagen in 1918, the son of a shipping engineer, and went to school at Aalborg Katedralskole, after which, in 1937, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, qualifying in 1942. With Denmark occupied during the war Utzon managed to get away to Sweden, and there, between 1942 and 1945, he worked for the internationally renowned architect Gunnar Asplund. In 1946 he went to Helsinki to work for the famous Modernist Alvar Aalto. Three years later he went on to work for another, Frank Lloyd Wright, at Taliesin West, Wright’s Arizona desert camp. In addition, between 1947 and 1949, Utzon made architectural studies of Europe, North Africa, the US and Mexico. He set up his own practice in Copenhagen in 1950.

His architectural formation under the two Modernists who were known for having a more organic approach than Le Corbusier directed him towards forms of architecture predetermined by the nature of the place; in other words, such forms existed to be revealed by the architect. His first project, a housing scheme at the port of Elsinore in Denmark, which comprised 64 single-storey, L-shaped houses and garden courtyards — their placing determined by views, contours and orientation — created a closely woven community.

The plans evolved according to what Utzon came to call his “additive method”. Explaining this approach, he said that “in this way a design can grow like a tree. If it grows naturally, the architecture will look after itself.”

Such an approach led to his conception of the soaring parabolic concrete shells over five performance spaces for the proposed Sydney Opera House. Winning the Sydney design competition in 1957 thrust the 38-year-old Utzon on to the world stage as a rising star. The building was opened in 1973 by the Queen and a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but the construction process was far from harmonious, and Utzon resigned from the project seven years before it opened.

The Australian Government, fearing that public opinion could turn against the project if it dithered over construction, insisted that work started on the podium in 1958 before proper construction drawings had been produced. Consequently the podium columns were not strong enough to support the roof structure and it had to be rebuilt.

On top of that, such a complex configuration of geometric forms had not been attempted before. Structural analysis by the engineer Ove Arup found that, among other things, the formwork for pouring concrete in situ would have been too expensive. Twelve iterations of the design were produced by Utzon and Arup over the next six years. They made pioneeering use of computers to help with the design.

The eventual solution agreed by Utzon and Arup was to deconstruct a sphere into segments to form the swooping, sail-like shells — a solution much simpler mathematically than Utzon’s original concept of parabolas of random proportions. The solution saved the project, and disagreement still rages as to who had the “eureka moment”, with some claiming it was Utzon and others Arup.

The sphere solution was made affordable by precasting the 2,400 concrete ribs that would hold the structure — such prefabrication of much of the structure precluded the need for expensive formwork.

Bruised but unbowed, Utzon had successfully negotiated the first construction phase of the podium. He moved his office to Sydney in 1963, and the job was predicted to finish by 1965. But in 1966, during phase two of the project, the delivery of the roof structures, he resigned, after eight years on site.

Utzon argued that the specifications for the acoustics set by the client were inadequate for the size of the spaces planned. By this point there was also the added sore of Utzon’s claim that design fees had not been paid. By 1964 tensions between Utzon and his client were so bad that all first names had been dropped in correspondence between the two parties with letters being addressed as “Dear Sir”.

In 1966, after Utzon’s demand that the plywood manufacturer Ralph Symonds be used as one of the suppliers for the roof structure was refused, he resigned from the job, closed his Sydney office and vowed never to return to Australia.