Jørn Utzon’s father was director of a shipyard
in Alborg, Denmark, and was a brilliant naval architect, many
of whose yacht designs are still in production today.
Several family members were excellent yachtsmen, and the young
Jørn, who was born in 1918, became a good sailor himself.
Until about the age of 18, he considered a career as a naval
officer. It was about this time, while still in secondary
school, that he began helping his father at the shipyard, studying
new designs, drawing up plans and making models. This activity
opened another possibility — that of training to be a
naval architect like his father.
However, yet further influences were introduced during
summer holidays with his grandparents. There he met
two artists, Paul Schrøder and Carl Kyberg, who introduced
him to art. One of his father’s cousins, Einar
Utzon-Frank, who was a sculptor as well as a professor at
the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, provided additional inspiration.
Jørn took an interest in sculpting. At one point,
he indicated he might want to be an artist, but was ultimately
convinced that architectural school would be the best career
path. Even though his final marks in secondary school, particularly
mathematics, were poor, his excellent freehand drawing talents
were strong enough to win his admission to the Royal Academy
of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He was soon recognized as
having extraordinary architectural gifts.
When he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1942,
because of World War II, he, like many architects of that
time, fled to neutral Sweden where he was employed in the
Stockholm office of Hakon Ahlberg for the duration of the
war. Following that he went to Finland to work with
Alvar Aalto. He had begun to admire the ideas of Gunnar
Asplund, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright while still in school.
Utzon acknowledges that Aalto, Asplund and Wright were all
major influences. Over the next decade, he traveled
extensively, visiting Morocco, Mexico, the United States,
China, Japan, India, and Australia, the latter destined to
become a major factor in his life.
All of the trips had significance, and Utzon himself
describes the importance of just one: “As an architectonic
element, the platform is fascinating. I lost my heart to it
on a trip to Mexico in 1949, where I found a rich variety
of both size and idea, and where many platforms stand alone,
surrounded by nothing but untouched nature. All the platforms
in Mexico are placed very sensitively in the landscape, always
the creations of a brilliant idea. They radiate a huge force.
You feel the firm ground beneath you, as when standing on
a great cliff. Let me give you an example of the power in
this idea. Yucatan is a flat lowland area covered by an impenetrable
jungle which everywhere attains a certain height. The Maya
people used to live in this jungle in villages surrounded
by small cultivated clearings. On all sides, and also above,
there was the hot, humid, green jungle. No great views, no
vertical movements. But by building up the platform on a level
with the roof of the jungle, these people had suddenly conquered
a new dimension that was a worthy place for the worship of
their gods. They built their temples on these high platforms,
which can be as much as a hundred metres long. From here,
they had the sky, the clouds and the breeze, and suddenly
the roof of the jungle was transformed into a great, open
plain. By means of this architectonic device they had completely
transformed the landscape and presented their eyes with a
grandeur that corresponded to the grandeur of their gods.
The wonderful experience of going from the denseness of the
jungle to the vast openness above the platform is still there
today. It is like the liberation you feel up here in the Nordic
lands when, after weeks of rain, cloud and darkness, you suddenly
emerge into the sunlight again.”
The idea of the platform would manifest itself in many
of Utzon’s designs over the years, including that of
the Sydney Opera House, where he described it as follows:
“...the idea has been to let the platform cut through
like a knife and separate primary and secondary functions
completely. On top of the platform the spectators receive
the completed work of art and beneath the platform every preparation
for it takes place.”
Utzon continued, “To express the platform and avoid
destroying it is a very important thing, when you start building
on top of it. A flat roof does not express the flatness of
the platform...in the schemes for the Sydney Opera House...you
can see the roofs, curved forms, hanging higher or lower over
the plateau. The contrast of forms and the constantly changing
heights between these two elements result in spaces of great
architectural force made possible by the modern structural
approach to concrete construction, which has given so many
beautiful tools into the hands of the architect.”
The saga of the opera house actually began in 1957, when,
at the age of 38, Jørn Utzon was still a relatively
unknown architect with a practice in Denmark near where Shakespeare
had located Hamlet’s castle. He was living in
a small seaside town with his wife and three childen —
one son, Kim, born that year; another son Jan, born in 1944,
and a daughter, Lin, born in 1946 — all three would
follow in their father’s footsteps and become architects.
Their home was a house in Hellebæk that he had built
just five years before, one of the few designs that he had
actually realized since opening his studio in 1945.
He had just entered an anonymous competition for an opera
house to be built in Australia on a point of land jutting
into Sydney harbor. Out of some 230 entries from
over thirty countries, his concept was selected — described
by the media at the time as “three shell-like concrete
vaults covered with white tiles.”
It has become the most famous, certainly the most photographed,
building of the 20th century. It is now hailed as a masterpiece
— Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece.
The Sydney Opera House is actually a complex of theatres
and halls all linked together beneath its famous shells. Since
its opening in 1973, it has become the busiest performing
arts centre in the world, averaging some 3000 events a year
with audiences totaling some two million, operating 24 hours
a day, seven days a week closing only on Christmas and
Good Friday.
Books have been written, and films made chronicling the
sixteen years it took to complete the Sydney Opera House.
One such book is by Françoise Fromonot, Jørn
Utzon - The Sydney Opera House. Utzon, who is described
as being an intensely private person was unwittingly entangled
in political intrigues and besieged by a hostile press, which
eventually forced him out of the project before it was completed.
But he was able to accomplish the basic structure, leaving
just the interiors to be finished by others.
As Pritzker Laureate and Juror Frank Gehry puts it, “Utzon
made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available
technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious
publicity and negative criticism to build a building that
changed the image of an entire country. It is the first time
in our lifetime that an epic piece of architecture has gained
such universal presence.”
In the last year, plans were announced to refurbish the
interiors, and Utzon, now 84, has high hopes that the interior
will be full of color rather than a black hole. His son Jan
is part of the new design team as Jørn Utzon’s
representative.
Their firm, Utzon Architects, has an agreement with the
Sydney Opera House Trust and indirectly with the Australian
government to work toward future development and renovation
of the building. One aspect is to develop a Design Principles
document, which will take a reader through the building explaining
the underlying principles for the design decisions that produced
the end results. The document will serve as a manual or guideline
for future generations when alterations or modifications to
the building are contemplated. Another aspect is to
provide actual designs for a number of changes and modifications
which are presently needed if the building is to comply to
today’s expectations. Current work is concentrating
on some of the interior spaces and access to the western foyer
from the western boardwalk.
Jørn Utzon has stated recently, “It is my
hope that the building shall be a lively and ever-changing
venue for the arts. Future generations should have the freedom
to develop the building to contemporary use.”
But Jørn Utzon has contributed far more than one
masterpiece in his lifetime. As noted architectural author
and critic Ada Louise Huxtable points out in her Pritzker
Jury comments, “In a forty year practice, each commission
displays a continuing development of ideas both subtle and
bold, true to the teaching of early pioneers of a ‘new’
architecture, but that cohere in a prescient way, most visible
now, to push the boundaries of architecture toward the present.
This has produced a range of work from the sculptural abstraction
of the Sydney Opera House that foreshadowed the avant garde
expression of our time, and is widely considered to be the
most notable monument of the 20th century, to handsome, humane
housing and a church that remains a masterwork today.”
She refers to the Utzon’s church in Bagsværd,
a community just north of Copenhagen, where in the 16th century,
the King of Denmark allowed an exisiting church to be pulled
down to provide bricks for the restoration of a building for
the university. The town was without a church building for
400 years, until their pastor happened to see some of Utzon’s
work.
“At an exhibition of my works, including the Sydney
Opera House,” says Utzon, “there was also a drawing
of a small church in the centre of a town. Two ministers representing
a congregation that had been saving for 25 years to build
a new church, saw it and asked me if I would be the architect
for their church. There I stood, and was offered the finest
task an architect can have — a magnificent time when
it was the light from above that showed us the way.”
The genesis of the design according to Utzon, went back
to a time when he was teaching at the University of Hawaii
where he spent time on the beaches. One evening, he was struck
by the regular passage of clouds thinking they could be the
basis for the ceiling of a church. His early sketches
showed groups of people on the beach with clouds overhead.
His sketches evolved with the people framed by columns on
each side and billowing vaults above, and moving toward a
cross.
It’s not surprising that the end result provoked
this comment from another Pritzker Juror, Carlos Jimenez who
is an architect and teacher himself: “...each work startles
with with its irrepressible creativity. How else to explain
the lineage binding those indelible ceramic sails on the Tasmanian
Sea, the fertile optimism of the housing at Fredensborg, or
those sublime undulations of the ceilings at Bagsværd,
to name just three of Utzon’s timeless works.”
Both jurors Jimenez and Huxtable singled out “housing”
in their comments. There are two courtyard-style housing
estates in Denmark designed by Jørn Utzon: the
Kingo Houses in Helsingør and the houses in Fredensborg.
His interest in courtyard-style housing was first shown in
a competition for Skåne, Sweden in 1953. He based
his designs on his own experiences. His family home in Ålborg
had a nursery garden in front. The neighbors all had huts,
sheds or some kind of shelters for a variety of activities
— raising rabbits, boat-building, or simply storing
items for family activities. Traditional Danish farmhouses
had four sheltering sections set around a central courtyard.
Further, Utzon had studied Chinese architecture which described
their farm houses as being completely closed to the outside,
but opening onto a central court. And he learned of a Turkish
building regulation that allowed no one to block the view
of existing houses. Designing with these tenets in mind, he
won the Swedish competition, but the project was never realized.
Not long after that, he took his Swedish plans to the
Mayor of Helsingør along with a study he had done on
a poorly designed and executed housing development that had
been built in Denmark. He was able to convince the Mayor
that he could provide his Swedish design for the same cost
as the poorly done one. The Mayor put a tract of nine acres
of land with a pond and rolling hills at his disposal for
his housing plan. Utzon commissioned a show house from a firm
of builders. The house was a success and eventually 63 houses
were built within cost restrictions set up by the government
to keep the costs below a certain level for low income workers.
The 63 houses were built in rows following the undulations
of the site, providing a specific view for each house, as
well as the best situation possible for sunlight and shelter
from the wind. Utzon likes to describe the arrangement of
the houses as “like flowers on the branch of cherry
tree, each turning toward the sun.”
The individual houses are L-shaped with a living room
and study in one section, and the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom
in the other. Walls of varying heights closed the remaining
open sides of the L.
The success of these houses at Helsingør led to
another for the Dansk Samvirke, a support organization for
Danish citizens who have worked for long periods abroad in
business or the foreign service. They wanted a development
for retirees who had returned to Denmark and could live in
a community and share their experiences.
Utzon accepted the task of conceiving the program and
designing the houses, even though no site had been found,
and without fee if the project was not built. He helped
find the site in Fredensborg, North Zealand, and developed
a plan that allowed each house to have a view of and direct
access to a green slope. Since there was no comparable society
as this anywhere, Utzon had to invent the details of the project
and make them conform to his idea for the individual houses.
One of the things the committee wanted was a centre where
the residents could meet, along with a dining room and kitchen,
a communal lounge and party area. Some office space was needed
as well as several guest rooms for the residents’ guests,
which in effect became a small hotel.
In the end, the Fredensborg development was designed with
47 courtyard and 30 terraced houses. The terraced houses
were grouped around a square in staggered blocks of three,
with all entrances from the square. A detailed account
of this project is available in a book titled Jørn
Utzon - Houses in Fredensborg by Tobias Faber with photographs
by Jens Frederiksen.
In addition to these projects in Denmark and Australia,
Utzon has accomplished exceptional projects in Kuwait and
Iran. In the former country, he designed the building
to house the National Assembly.
The invitation to compete for Kuwait National Assembly
reached Utzon in 1969 while he was teaching at the University
of Hawaii. There were few constraints to the project. The
site was along the ocean front, with “haze and white
light and an untidy town behind,” as Utzon describes
it.
As a result of his travels, Utzon had developed an affinity
for Islamic architecture. In the definitive book by Richard
Weston titled simply, Utzon, the project is described as follows:
“The complex was conceived as an evolving fabric
with, initially, ragged edges but of uniform height save for
the representative spaces — the covered square, parliamentary
chamber, large conference hall and mosque—which would
rise as visually dominant group. These four major elements
formed the corners of an incomplete but clearly implied rectangle,
and the highest surfaces of their distinctive roofs —
as specified in a three-dimensional sketch — were to
lie in the same plane to create a ‘firm strong grouping’
to ‘hold the rest of the complex (which in its nature
is irregular as it grows) together. Dominate it’ as
Utzon explained in a note next to the sketch. The mosque was
flat-roofed and anchored one corner of this spatial core —
it would later be angled slightly toward Mecca — and
its autonomy was stressed by making it independent of the
office grid. The other roofs were sag curves, reflecting Utzons’s
interest in fabric as a metaphor for concrete — we may
recall it was shortly before this time that he had explored
the Bagsværd Church’s cloud-vaults with
fabric models.”
It should be noted that in February of 1991, Iraqui troops,
retreating before the international alliance, set fire to
the building. Since, a 70 million dollar restoration
was undertaken resulting in a number of departures from Utzon’s
original design.
Back in 1947 when Utzon was still a struggling young architect,
a relative offered him an opportunity to supplement his meagre
income by going to work in Morocco preparing designs for factories
there. The few months he spent there provided his first experience
with Islamic architecture, which, just as the trip to Mexico
had done, became another decisive influence on his work.
In 1958, he was approached to design a branch of the Iran
National Bank in the university area of Teheran. Utzon was
delighted to take the job because of his intense interest
in Islamic architecture.
The client wanted the bank to stand out from its neighbors
so, as described by Richard Weston in his book, Utzon, “Utzon
decided to set it back on a raised platform framed by boldly
projecting flank walls, thick enough to contain services.
To one side the flank wall was doubled to form a servant zone
to accommodate an office, private interview rooms and other
support spaces; two additional administrative floors spanned
between the outer walls above the entrance. The raised platform
made for a dramatic entrance sequence: visitors pass through
a low dark space, roofed by V-shaped beams, and then enter
the open banking hall which expands dramatically both up and
down, affording a sight of the whole interior.”
In 1985, Utzon’s practice included his two sons,
Jan and Kim. Ole Paustian, who headed one Denmark’s
leading furniture companies, asked them to design a new showroom
in a waterfront area of Copenhagen Harbor that would be an
extension of one of Paustian’s existing warehouses.
Utzon designed the showroom and an adjacent restaurant with
sketches and sent them to his two sons who executed the final
drawings and plans. Much later in 2000, Kim Utzon completed
the complex with an adjacent office building and yacht club.
Currently, Jørn Utzon lives in retirement with
his wife Lis, on the island of Majorca, where they originally
began building a home in 1971 and completed it two years later.
It was almost twenty years later, that the Utzons decided
to build another house on Majorca, nestled on the side of
a mountain. The decision to build there was prompted by several
reasons: the glare from the sea became very tiring for eyes
weakened by a lifetime of close work with drawings; the pounding
surf became more of a disturbance than a comfort; and there
were more and more intrusions by architecture buffs seeking
to wander the site.
The design of Can Feliz, as the new home is named in a
site called “Paradise,” harks back to Utzon’s
love of the platform concept. The house has been described
as a miniature acropolis.
Jørn Utzon is an artist and architect whose response
not only to ancient cultures of Islam and the Mayans, as well
as the Japanese and Chinese, but also his affinity for nature,
and the use of natural materials, places him in a firmament
populated by only the most gifted of all the ages.
One unrealized project bears mentioning here — the
Silkeborg Museum of Fine Arts. A Danish artist named Asger
Jørgensen (who later changed his name to Asger Jorn)
approached Utzon in 1961 to build an addition to the Silkeborg
Museum where a collection of his art work could be housed.
He even volunteered to pay the architect’s fees because
he could not see anyone other than Utzon designing the addition.
The following is a portion of Utzon’s own description
of the project, which provides a closer look at the architect’s
thought processes:
“The musuem, which lies in an old, well-stocked
garden with a wing divided into bays, is designed so that
it does not disturb the surroundings, but concentrates 100%
on the interior.
“A building of several storeys above the ground
would be like a bull in a china shop, and the respect for
the existing calm wing of the museum calls for a solution
that will not dominate the surroundings on account of its
size.
“It feels natural to bury the museum in the ground
to a depth corresponding to the height of a three-storeyed
building and only to allow the upper part - the roof lights
taking up one storey - to appear above the ground level.
“The design of this buried museum has a character
rather like a cave or an oven. Because they are a direct continuation
of the walls of the museum, the visible one-storey roof lights
suggest this cave-like character and clearly demonstrate the
reason for their special design.
“In contrast to a square room, a cave has a distinct
enclosed effect thanks to its natural shape without right
angles. Continuous shapes such as we have in the museum express
and emphasise the quadrilateral canvases and objects in the
same powerful way that a cyclorama on a stage emphasises the
individual characters and the flats.
“The floor, too, has been included in this continuous
movement, and these dramatic shapes also correspond well with
the idea of digging the museum out underground.
“The inspiration for the design of the museum comes
from many different experiences -including my visit to the
caves in Tatung, west of Peking, where hundreds of Buddha
sculptures and other figures are carved in caves in the rocks
by the bank of the river. These sculptures appear in all shapes
in contrast to or in harmony with the surrounding space. The
caves are all of varying sizes and shapes and with varying
illumination. The old Chinese sculptors have experimented
with all possibilities, and the most fantastic thing is a
cave that is almost filled with a Buddha figure with c.7-metre-high
face. Three platforms linked by ladders give the visitor
the possibility of walking around and coming to close quarters
with this gigantic figure.
“Here, in this museum, it is possible to exhibit
paintings and sculptures the size of a three-storeyed building
so that it is possible to walk around the objects on all levels
on the system of ramps, and perhaps the possibility of this
kind of exhibition leads to a new line of development in decorative
art in place of the ordinary form in public buildings today,
which are merely easel paintings on a gigantic scale.
“The various works of art can also be exhibited
individually or in groups in every conceivable manner. It
will also be possible in one of the large ovens to isolate
a single large painting or sculpture that must be viewed on
its own.
“The continuous space in the museum provides surprising
background effects with varied light for paintings and sculpture
- a background effect of the same infinite character as a
cyclorama on a stage.
“The chimneys give the museum a clean, but varied
roof light. The amount of light can be varied by means of
blinds, and if it is so desired the roof light in the chimneys
can be replaced with direct spotlight directed on a single
object. The mullions supporting the roof lights are provided
with suspension points so that they act like rigging loft
in a theatre, so there will be the possibility of placing
an object anywhere in the room.
“The light mainly falls in along the walls and on
the floors without disturbing shadow effects at the corners,
and the irritation element from the direct light from above
is avoided.
“It will be with a sense of surprise and a desire
to penetrate down into the building that the visitor for the
first time sees the three-storeyed building open beneath him.
Unconcerned - stairs and corridors which normally disturb
- the viewer will glide almost effortlessly down into the
museum via the ramp, taking him through the space.
“Strict geometry will form the basis for a simple
constructional shape. The visible curved external surfaces
are to be clad with ceramics in strong colours so that the
parts of the building emerge like shining ceramic sculptures,
and inside the museum will be kept in white.
“In the work with the curved shapes in the opera
house, I have developed a great desire to go further with
free architectural shapes, but at the same time to control
the free shape with a geometry that makes it possible to construct
the building from mass produced components. I am quite aware
of the danger in the curved shapes in contrast to the relative
safety of quadrilateral shapes. But the world of the curved
form can give something that cannot ever be achieved by means
of rectanglular architecture. The hulls of ships, caves and
sculpture demonstrate this.”
While Jørn Utzon has retired with his wife to one
of the houses he designed on Majorca, his sons, Jan who is
58 and has been working with his father since 1970, and Kim,
who is 46, both carry on with Utzon Architects. A daughter,
Lin, who is an artist of giant porcelain murals and other
decorative media, works closely with architects. A third generation
of Utzon’s, a son and daughter of Jan, have both received
their architecture degrees.
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