The architect's universe

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

An ambitious exhibition on the work of Danish architect Jorn Utzon has opened at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, providing the first major retrospective of the career of this reticent giant of Modernism. Utzon's collaboration with this project, and the assistance of his architect son Jan, have resulted in an exhibition which has an unusually personal character for its subject: for Utzon's great age--he is now in his mid-eighties--has allowed him the satisfaction, shared perhaps only with Oscar Niemeyer, of seeing his own work come back into fashion again with people some fifty years younger than himself.

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The exhibition is ambitious because it is arranged thematically around a number of ideas, not necessarily related to one another, which Utzon has chosen himself: his interest in platforms and floating roofs, inspired by the built plateaux of the Maya people; the modular and the additive; the organic; and what curator Kjeld Kjeldsen calls 'human architecture', which in fact is the architecture of the effects of light described and reinterpreted through the eye of the architect as a very human and touchingly humble observer. In each section a project or two is presented to exemplify a particular idea or approach. Considerable space is devoted to the Sydney Opera House, including some reference to the 'Design Principles' that Utzon has prepared for the future life of the building following his rapprochement over the last five years with the current regime there. Tying all these together is 'Clouds', Pi Michael's filmed interview with Utzon made for Danish television in 1994, which is screened throughout the exhibition.

This approach is not without its problems: the lack of any chronology in the arrangement of the projects (which begin with Utzon's Majorcan houses and end with the Opera House), and the almost total absence of any plans, is sometimes disconcerting and is liable to throw up surprises, such as when an astonishingly organic competition project for a crematorium of 1945 suddenly crops up towards the end. A visit requires considerable concentration on the part of the visitor, and yet, of course, that is no bad thing in itself. Utzon, the son of a North Jutland shipwright and married into a religious family, is a complicated character and deserves both time and effort from the rest of us. His compatriots seem sometimes to have been puzzled by the emotional character of his designs which are so far from the 'Danish' orthogonalisms of an Arne Jacobsen: views of the undulating roof of his Bagsvaerd church are presented here beside his ecstatic exclamation inspired by a sudden opening of the clouds above a Hawaiian beach: Tak for alt hvad du har givet, 'thank you for all you have given'.

Rather than a catalogue, articles from the Louisiana Magasin and a special edition of the Louisiana Revy accompany the exhibition: there is in the latter a gnomic piece of outstanding density by Kenneth Frampton, but also useful contributions by others, including Merete Ahnfeldt-Mollerup, Richard Weston, Michael Asgaard Andersen, and Francoise Fromonot.

Jorn Utzon. The Architect's Universe, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 2 April-29 August 2004