Beyond the Opera House: Jørn Utzon’s other buildings

Own house, Hellebæk (1952)

Like many young architects, Jørn Utzon threw all his creative wherewithal at the first house he designed for his family. Set in a glade on the edge of a protected beech forest in Hellebæk, Denmark, and made from a quintessential Danish building material, bricks, the house references Chinese and Japanese architecture, the modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, and the ancient ways of living that Utzon had seen in the Atlas Mountains and in Mexico.

Utzon ­synthesised all these references, along with an artist’s sensibility to nature, into an original expression that came to represent the definitive modern house of mid-20th century Denmark. It was that country’s first open-plan house, pioneering the underfloor heating required to warm such open spaces, and its large ­double-paned windows. It had ­sliding doors and ­moveable walls in untreated Oregon pine, and a flat roof in aluminium sheeting with ­skylights that Utzon made himself, using an oven at the local bakery to mould the plastic.

Reached by an unsealed road through the forest, the house is first viewed as one long unbroken wall of slim whitish-yellow bricks. On the other side of this closed wall the house is completely open to the south-southwest, sitting on a low brick platform and looking out over rolling ground to the forest. Although experimental and unorthodox, the house was more than liveable, in tune with and in nature. Utzon called it a lair, peaceful and quiet, a private space for wife Lis and their children. “At the time I was already aware that what­ever rules and theories and references a house might follow, it must never eclipse the principal rule: to provide scope for the inhabitants to express themselves,” he said.

Hugely influential on a generation of architects, and larger than its original 130 square metres after an ­extension in the early 1960s, the house remains a standard-bearer: honest and simple, a limited palette of humble materials, wooden joint and visible construction as the only ornamentation, making the most of a small floor space and dissolving the boundaries ­between inside and out, something that fascinated Utzon throughout his working life.

Kingo or Roman houses (1957-59)

The year Jørn Utzon won the competition to ­design the Sydney Opera House, he also won the commission to build 60 houses on an undulating site with a small pond in Helsingør, in eastern Denmark. The two projects could not be more different: one of soaring ambitions and country-defining consequences, the other low-cost homes for shipbuilders and school teachers, financed by a government loan scheme that specified a maximum size of 104 square metres and a skimpy budget. Yet the two ­projects shared many of Utzon’s ideals: the sense of place and embracing of nature, an encyclopaedia of references from ancient cultures to innovative techniques, and a system of repeating few and similar ­elements that he later called additive architecture.

Initially named after the Kingo Building Society which administered them, they became known as Romerhusene, or the Roman houses, because their ­almost unbroken buff-coloured brick perimeter walls and distinctive chimneys were reminiscent of the ­atrium houses of ancient Rome. They were the first of Utzon’s courtyard houses, an L-shaped building ­sitting on a 15-metre by 15-metre square-fenced plot, that could be ­repeated in a chain adapted to the terrain and ­varied organically to make the most of the sun while providing privacy. By keeping the houses small, Utzon was able to create a large common area for free-growing nature. Over 60 years the residents have maintained that ­common area collectively, so the houses are unusual in sociological terms, private and yet communal in character.

To British architecture critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, they are evidence that “no other Western architect has more convincingly demonstrated the landscape-preserving and social virtues of this form of settlement”. Long-term resident Birte Bech puts it more succinctly: “My house makes me happy,” she says in a book written by her husband, Jørgen Jørgensen, about the joy of living in a Roman house, which the couple has done for 25 years. “I was happy to have an opportunity to tell that to Utzon before he died,” says Jørgensen, an architect who knew the houses from their inception.

Unbuilt glass pagoda (1953)

On the northern harbour of Copenhagen, not far from the city’s Little Mermaid statue, is a glass and steel modernist box that is a stark reminder of what might have been erected on Bennelong Point had Jørn Utzon’s design for the Sydney Opera House been rejected. It’s the building Danes got when Utzon’s visionary design for Copenhagen was passed over. Rather banal and better known for the PH Artichoke lamps designed for the interior than for the architecture, the existing Langelinie Pavilion is a building that 99 out of 100 architects would have designed in 1953, writes Holger Dahl in his book about unfinished ­architectural projects, Copenhagen of Dreams. That one ­outlier, Utzon, went vertical instead of horizontal, ­proposing a 10-storey tower that looks like a spiral, spinning, glass-walled organism. “Utzon’s proposal was and is a stroke of genius, one of the first projects that could be called typically Utzon,” says Dahl, who deems it Copenhagen’s “most published, most famous and most regrettably unbuilt project”.

Utzon had climbed the rig of a barque on the harbour and worked out the tower had to stand higher than the five storey-rooftops of the city in order to see its historical spires in the round and, in turn, make its mark on the entire city and not just that piece of waterfront. Anticipating his design for the Opera House, he put all the non-public spaces into a single-floor podium, with restaurants stacked “tier upon diminishing tier in a glass pagoda”, as British architect and author Richard Weston writes. Topped by a flared viewing platform, the pavilion was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower, which Utzon had seen, but clearly ­referenced Chinese pagodas, fungi and trees. Utzon even included in his entry a photograph by the German ­photographer Karl Blossfeldt of the cross-section of a stem of a horsetail plant and a wooden spiral model.

Utzon was, however, short on detail on how to build the glass façade and deal with its heating and cooling.

A critique in the architectural press, while noting the popular ­appeal, suggested the proposal had insufficient regard to “what is usable, what is constructive and to the ­climatic conditions”. Nevertheless, Dahl believes the technical issues could have been resolved with 1950s know-how – and Copenhagen would have got the landmark equivalent of Sydney’s shells.

Bagsværd Church (1968-76)

For Jørn Utzon, designing a building was a way of clarifying his relationship to nature. “The breadth of the sky and the hanging clouds inspired me to design Bagsværd Church with powerful tension in the concrete vaulting,” Utzon said of the church in the suburb of the same name in Copenhagen, where he used light as a material of architecture, creating what he called cloud vaults in concrete cast on site.

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The parishioners had been saving for a new church for 25 years when they approached Utzon in 1968, knowing the architect was short of work. The budget was tight, so he suggested concrete could be beautiful. “It was easy to bring out something that was pure and healthy and straightforward. And that was the light.”

The church board and preachers gave him the freedom to design everything, using mostly local materials: four different kinds of concrete, some with marble added and smoothed, standard blocks bare or painted, oiled Swedish pine for the pews. When the cost estimate came in over budget, Utzon shrunk the plans by 10 per cent, a volumetric change that was barely ­noticeable once his assistant Oktay Nayman adjusted door heights and the like.

From the outside, on its unprepossessing site ­surrounded by busy roads, it looks more like a factory or a barn than a church, an intentional contrast that amplifies the effect of its interior. The church space is intimate, with a wide and shallow nave, above which the 18-metre span of white-painted reinforced concrete cascades like the billowing clouds Utzon had seen in Hawaii. The diffuse light, with no obvious source, envelops the congregation. A church organist describes the sensation as like looking into infinity.

Nayman believes the church is Utzon’s most complete building. Daughter Lin wove textiles for the altar and vestments; Utzon even planted a stand of birch trees as a shield outside. “It is the only building that Jørn built as he wanted in every respect: the ­planning, the structure, choice of material, the details, everything,” says Nayman.

Can Lis (1971-73)

One way to view architecture is to evaluate a ­building purely from the sensation of joy it gives you, Jørn Utzon once said. Can Lis, his first home on Mallorca, near Porto Petro on the south-eastern coast, is the ultimate architectonic representation of this ­belief. Stripped bare and seemingly hewn out of the sandstone cliff it stands on, the house is a unity of place and view, challenging in some respects because of its exposure to the elements. It is a house experienced through your senses, intuitively moving between inside and out, seeking sun and shade, shelter and enclosure, observing the vastness of the sea to the horizon or the intimacy of views framed through deep window bays, which one commentator calls viewing barrels.

Utzon described Can Lis as a “built expression ­placing man on the fringe of a landscape”, four main pavilions set off square among pines and acacias, on a cliff 20 metres above the Mediterranean facing due south to Africa. Each pavilion has a purpose – cooking and eating, living and relaxing, two for retreating and sleeping – and to get from one to the other you have to go outside. Before building them, which Utzon did using local stone masons, he climbed down the ledges of the cliff and sat in a cave and thought about the siting: “It’s all so simple, no more than the way birds know instinctively where to nest on a cliff-top. Nature was always the guide, like a small village in stone seems like it’s been there for centuries yet is also new.”

In the mid-afternoon, a shaft of light illuminates the stone block walls through a vertical opening high on the western wall of the living room – an effect Utzon called a “poetic illustration of the passing of time”.

Now owned by the Utzon Foundation, Can Lis was home for the Utzons for almost 20 years, then to ­daughter Lin for 10. Lin says whenever she walks in the front door to a covered porch, where a crescent moon cut out of the blocks offers a glimpse of the space beyond, she feels relieved, removed from the world. “It is as if you have left everything behind you and you are ­sitting at the edge of the universe, needing nothing. It is a very overwhelming and strong feeling that my ­father has achieved.”

Jeni Porter is an Australian journalist who has lived in Copenhagen for the past decade, where she edits the ­biannual design and architecture magazine, Ark Journal. She has visited all these buildings.

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