Although Jorn Utzon, winner of the 2003 Pritzker Prize, created one of the most famous buildings in the word, both the Sydney Opera House and Utzon himself have remained elusive. Throughout his career, Utzon has closely guarded his privacy and declined offers to collaborate on monographs. However, after Richard Weston completed much fo the legwork for this volume, Utzon agreed to contribute to it. The result is a gorgeous, intimate monograph that overflows with images, anecdotes and Weston’s admiration for the Danish architect.
Weston focuses on the architect’s design process and his personal relationship to architecture. In providing sketches and stories about the genesis of many projects, the author emphasizes Utzon’s sources of inspiration, the influences on him, and early design stages of his work. In addition to hundreds of images—documenting his pure but relatively slim body of work from the 1962 Kingo Housing in Helsingor, Denmark, to the 1994 Utzon house in Majorca the monograph includes many writings by Utzon that delineate his vision of modern architecture are harmonizing with nature and contemporary society. The writings reveal an earnest and dedicated personality.Utzon’s character becomes particularly relevant in Weston’s re-evaluation of the Sydney Opera House controversy. Although the building was completed 30 years ago, the literature on Utzon is largely restricted to that project, the most recent volume being Jorn Utzon, Architect of the Sydney Opera House by Francoise Fromonot (Ginko Press, 2002). Weston recounts the well-known saga—how Utzon spent nearly a decade in Australia, beleagured by engineering difficulties and backroom bickering, only to withdraw from the project in 1966—and reconsiders allegations that Utzon was to blame for the difficulties. To support his claim that Utzon’s reputation was unfairly tarnished, Weston cites the different perspectives and approaches of the architects, the engineers, and the politicians involved. He concedes that a few of Utzon’s ideas were misguided, but points out that modern technology would have resolved the conflicts between the architect and the building’s engineers.
Publicly seen as a failure after leaving Sydney, Utzon continued to develop his style and grow as an architect. Weston follows Utzon’s signature architectural element, the platform, as it reappears throughout his career, most notably in competition designs from the 1960s. The author also applauds Utzon’s exploration of new techniques, such as “additive architecture,” an approach to prefabrication characterized by building with a kit of parts and repeating a limited number of architecture elements.
Weston writes unashamedly out of love for Utzon’s architecture, and the author’s enthusiasm for it is infectious.