My father has always found inspiration in nature. When we walked through the forest around my childhood home my father would often point out certain trees and say
"Jan, go and check the distance between those trees, those would be nice. That seems to be a pleasant distance for columns." or they had the right size or he said, "look at how the sun shines through a hole in the forest canopy onto the forest floor."
In nature you find leaves and branches and lots of elements that are all little structures of big structures in their own right and those structures have been a great source of inspiration for my father.

At one stage when the lake had frozen over and there was a slight covering of snow, my father took all his architect employees on a tour on the ice creating foot steps in the snow forming lines trying to mark out the Sydney Opera House floor plan in full scale just to see what it would feel like and how big it really was. Something you can not really grasp when you sit working on a piece of paper with a pencil.

- Jan Utzon

My father's idea for the Opera House was based on the fact that the site was in the middle of the city set on a peninsular in the harbour. He felt that it was similar in nature to his native Kronborg Castle in Denmark. The castle is on a peninsular jutting out from the coast of Denmark.
When you sail around it you see it from all sides and for him it was a sculpture so to speak.
It changes its shape, its colours and its expression throughout the day and according to which angle you look at it. So he felt that the Sydney Opera House had to be something of the same nature;
A sculpture in the centre of the city.
When my father first received the competition brief he went to the naval chart dealer in Denmark and bought some naval charts of Sydney. On those charts, apart from the plan of the city and the harbour of Sydney, he also got some profiles of the entrance to the Sydney Harbour framed by the huge headlands. Those sandstone headlands partly sparked his inspiration for the plateau which later was to carry the sails of The Opera House.

But he also had an inspiration in mind that he gathered from the Mayan Pyramids while traveling in Mexico. The step pyramids are leading up to a plateau and my father always felt that this was an extremely strong architectural feature that he would like to see repeated in a modern structure.

So using the Sydney Headlands as a feature and the step pyramids of the Mayan architecture combined with the sculptural sails set above the plateau, the sails that covered the auditoria and the stage tower, he felt he had a very strong architectural composition.
A sculpture set in the middle of the Sydney Harbour.
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- Jan Utzon

Some years ago I was walking with my father around the great Cathedral in Palma, Mallorca and we were admiring the construction space, the windows and the glazing and so on.
My father asked one of the custodians "when was this church commenced, when did they start building this church?" and the guy said eleven hundred and something and my father said "when did they complete the building?" completed the guy said
"oh, it hasn't been completed yet it's an ongoing process!"
After that my father turned to me and said "look this is why I think it has been a wonderful event in my life to have been allowed conceiving the idea of the Sydney Opera House, to have been allowed to work on the Opera House and with the Opera House for so many years. To know that it is continuing and that people are fond of the building and that it will be a centre for the arts for people in Australia for many years to come. It is because of that, I am not that sorry I wasn't there to complete the building as I envisaged. Because as you can see this church has been created by someone and other people have taken over after the initial architect and builders started the building and then that has been going on for centuries and we still have a wonderful building that everybody loves in the centre of the city."

- Jan Utzon