Utzon: inspiration vision architecture. . - Singular Achievement - book review

Architectural Review, The, July, 2002 by Raymund Ryan

By Richard Weston. Hellerup: Edition Blondal. 2002, DK1000 (approx US$120) German edition also available.

One doesn't have to entirely concur with Richard Weston's espousal of Jorn Utzon as 'the last major architect of the twentieth century' to welcome wholeheartedly this compendious monograph on the work of a remarkable and pragmatic talent. Utzon is of course almost universally known for the Sydney Opera House, the beauty of its form and the saga of its construction. Before now, Richard Weston has written intelligently about that slightly older Nordic master Alvar Aalto. But this book is also indebted to its Danish publisher, Torsten Blondal. How many other publishers could have produced, today, such an ambitious high-quality artefact?

Sydney is understandably the centrepiece of the Utzon story (the competition was launched in 1955, the building finally inaugurated in 1973). However chapters dedicated to the Kingo and Fredensborg courtyard houses north of Copenhagen, to the coolly emotional Bagsverd church, to the not fully convincing Kuwaiti National Assembly, and then -- with powerful phenomenological description -- to Utzon's two late villas on Mallorca, present a life's work of singular achievement. One wonders where the Pritzker and RIBA Gold Medal juries have been hiding.

The author writes with extensive knowledge. He alludes to influences from the work of specific Modern masters (Aalto, Le Corbusier, Wright, Asplund) and -- perhaps more essential to the true spirit of Utzon -- from pre-Modern cultures that the Danish architect explored from an early age (Morocco, Iran, China, ancient Mexico). This is a personal story seasoned with such anecdotes as Mies's snubbing of Utzon in Chicago and then, during a chance meeting in an airport somewhere, Kahn and Utzon's spontaneous exchange of neckties. Neither the work nor Weston's critique is abstractly theoretical. From his youth, the son of a yacht designer, Utzon has engaged with the world.

Weston's exegesis of Utzon's tribulations but ultimate triumph at Sydney includes an examination of his development of the vast podium in collaboration with the Ove Arup practice; some finger-pointing at the conservative Minister of Public Works, Davis Hughes; Utzon's proposed red/gold and silver/blue colour schemes for the Major and Minor Halls respectively; and, finally, his provocative but unrealized intention to extrude plywood sections as a kind of interior furniture landscape. Weston follows this Sydney chapter with one devoted (the word is intentional) to Utzon's idea to build a museum at Silkeborg, in Jutland, for COBRA artist Asger Jorn -- a radical underground cavern like some troglodytic inversion of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp chapel.

Measuring 300x340x40 mm, the book is weighty. In places lavishly illustrated, it is punctuated by several of its subject's own matter-of-fact yet inspirational texts, from 'The Innermost Being of Architecture' (shades of Heidegger) to 'Dear Aarhus Eleven' (a taped address to students). In the latter, Utzon characteristically mixes the prosaic with the poetic. On a beach in Hawaii, but envisaging Bagsvaerd, be 'discovered that the clouds could be the ceiling'. From the fringes of corporate architectural culture, Utzon's legacy is in his response to nature, to topography and to constructed relationships between the individual and the communal.