Joern Utzon, architect of Sydney Opera House

Architect Joern Utzon stood in front of the impressionist Sydney Opera House during construction, circa 1965. (Keystone/Getty Images/File)

NEW YORK - Joern Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House only to abandon the project before its completion and never return to Australia, died yesterday. He was 90.

Mr. Utzon suffered heart failure in Copenhagen, said Adrian Carter, director of the Utzon Center, based in Aalborg, Denmark, in a telephone interview.

The architect's biggest project, the modernist, expressionistic opera house on Sydney Harbor, has become the city's landmark, with its iconic 14 triangular, vaulted shells resembling white sails. The house has "arguably become the most famous building in the world," the jury of the Pritzker Prize said when Mr. Utzon was awarded the honor in 2003.

The building, which opened to the public in 1973, has hosted performances by tenor Luciano Pavarotti, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, and speeches by former South African president Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.

The house, which Mr. Utzon spent more than 10 years designing, is among the UN's 878 World Heritage cultural and natural sites.

When the harborside edifice was added to the heritage list in June 2007, the UN called it a "great architectural work of the 20th century" that has had an "enduring influence." .

The building has five halls with some 5,500 seats combined. The structure is on a platform podium for which Mr. Utzon found inspiration in the Mayan building culture of present-day Mexico.

The roofs' jagged profiles were part of the logo for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Sydney Opera House is also one of just two major projects Mr. Utzon completed, after his reputation as an architect suffered following an early departure from Australia.

Mr. Utzon was born on April 9, 1918, in Copenhagen. The son of a naval engineer, he overcame dyslexia to graduate from high school and received his degree from the Royal Danish Academy of the Arts at age 24.

He hadn't built anything outside Denmark when 14 years later he submitted his opera house design after reading of the competition in a Swedish architecture magazine.

Construction proved more expensive and time-consuming than planned; the prefabricated concrete shells failed to match up properly. Total costs, financed through a lottery, exceeded $65 million, overrunning the budget 15 times.

Relations between Mr. Utzon and Australian government officials soured.

Davis Hughes, New South Wales minister for public works in 1965, denied Mr. Utzon permission in 1966 to construct plywood prototypes for the opera house's interior design.

Mr. Utzon resigned in anger, leaving Australia never to return. When Queen Elizabeth II opened the building after 14 years of construction, Mr. Utzon had taken a position teaching at the University of Hawaii.

"The overrun and the controversy it created kept Mr. Utzon from building more masterpieces," Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish professor of architecture said in a 2005 article in Harvard Design Magazine. "Instead of having a whole oeuvre to enjoy, we have just one main building."

Mr. Utzon's only other large international project was the National Assembly of Kuwait, where he drew on his love for Islamic architecture. The building was set on fire by Iraqi troops in 1991 as they retreated during the Gulf War.

Sydney Opera House Trust hired Mr. Utzon in 1999 to form a set of principles for any future architectural changes, and he was hired again in 2001 to reconstruct the interior, which had been completed by other architects after he left. He worked from his home in Mallorca, Spain, studying video recordings of the opera house and corresponding with Australian entrepreneurs via telephone and fax, refusing to return to see his work.

"No, I will not see it now," the Guardian cited him as saying in a 2005 interview. "Every day I wake up and think of the Opera House. It gives me such pleasure that the building means so much to the people of Sydney and Australia."

Mr. Utzon leaves his wife, Lis, and three children, all architects: sons Jan and Kim and daughter Lin.