Jørn Utzon is most widely known as the architect responsible for the Sydney Opera House and the church Bagsværd Kirke in Copenhagen. The Danish Architectural Press and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art now want to open the Pritzker Prize winner’s other, lesser-known buildings to the public in a real ‘Tour de Force’: before 2007, Utzon’s extensive archive comprising 25,000 drawings will be sifted through and his designs will be published in a complete edition.
Utzon’s own houses form the prelude to his works catalogue. The very personally coloured strip on the title page was designed collaboratively by declared Utzon connoisseurs, such as Tobias Faber and Christian Norberg-Schulz, who died in 2000. However, this is not the only reason that the book is easy to handle. It shows how Utzon, spending time working in his office, started with examples such as Wright, Asplund and Aalto and with great constructive clarity developed an architecture of his own. At the end of the 1960s, he lost his interest in industrialised buildings and developed his own timber construction system for residential premises, which he christened ‘Espansiva’. However, his buildings always remained committed to people and their requirements. His basic themes were the original purposes of house building: a place for people to congregate around a fireplace, a retreat into the protective grotto and a design that allowed sunlight to be cast into the building.
Utzon’s approach to the origins of architecture becomes particularly clear in his Mallorca houses, which take up a great deal of space in this book. With them he reverted to regional construction techniques so skilfully that a native architect later wrote Utzon had taught him to look at his own homeland in a new way.
Utzon’s houses always developed directly from the building process. In the introduction to the book, Kim Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Martin Keiding sum up his attitude entirely, “The construction is the architecture, everything else is lipstick”. Characteristically, in 1952, he only drew up the plans for his first house in Hellebæk after it was completed. Utzon’s houses are examples of architecture that requires a second glance: except for his opera house design, they are not eye-catching due to their concise shaping, but due to the use of space, perspective, light and attention to detail. The book’s readership is drawn in by numerous detailed drawings and excellent, in print however somewhat lifeless, colour photographs by Søren Kuhn and Tobias Faber. Further findings from the archive research also rouse curiosity.