Spaces for People

We dropped into the Utzon Center on the campus of the University of Aalborg today. That visit may have changed my life.

As a boy Jorn Utzon developed a love of simple, curved open spaces in his father’s boatbuilding shop. Getting jobs as a carpenter as a teen-ager also gave him an appreciation of building techniques. Admitted to the school of architecture at the University of Copenhagen just before World War II, Utzon honed his skills as a designer. However, he was always more interested in daydreaming than studying. He fell in with a crowd of musicians and artists at the university, and for a time seriously thought about becoming a sculptor. Utzon later said that the thing he loved about art and music is that there were no rules to follow. Every work of art and every piece of music sets its own rules, and the creator essentially follows the rules that his piece dictates to him. His grandfather persuaded him to stay in architecture, but Utzon never really could say whether architecture was an art or a craft for him. That ambiguity turned out to be a blessing because for the rest of his life Jorn Utzon designed buildings that were sculpture.

His sculpted buildings were not complex just for the sake of art, however. On the contrary, some of his structures are simple—primitively simple. His own home, which he built in 1952 in Hellebaek, Denmark was essentially a box made of concrete block and plywood, with a few supporting steel beams. Yet, the overarching theme of his designs is reflected in the axiom “buildings should be spaces for people.” By this it seems he meant that a home, for example, should be a place that has what a family needs, with nothing that the family does not need. If walls and separate rooms are not absolutely necessary, then they should not be in the design of a house. His homes have large, open multifunctional spaces, not boxy, individual rooms. In fact, the only area with a definite purpose is the kitchen, and even it is not separated from the spacious living area. The south wall of his Hellebaek House consists of sliding glass window-walls so that the inside and the outside merge into one living space. Later homes, including “Can Lis,” his retirement home in Mallorca, continue this simple theme.

All of this is not to say, however, that Utzon could not build a complex building. His experience as a boatbuilder wedded him to notions of curves, swells, and depressions in a building’s fabric. Despite his apparent love of simplicity, Utzon was often heard to say that an architect must live on the very edge of the impossible. Perhaps his best known design is the Sidney Opera House. Yet despite the complexities of its construction, its glass walls facing the water make it open to the outside, and it contains everything that is needed, and nothing that is not.

Before his death in 2008 he created a foundation which funds the Utzon Center, a nexus for architectural education and a think-tank for architectural design. Its customers include children, tourists, architectural students, and professional architects from all over the world. Our visit there today led us to permanent exhibits recalling the life of Jorn Utzon and the development of his ideas. A temporary exhibit shows a number of very simple holiday houses. Architects at the university are using Utzon’s ideas and designs to make small, affordable, cozy vacation homes. These contrast sharply with the mega-mansions that many families now build for their beach houses or their getaway homes. In some cases, the getaway homes are larger and more opulent than the owners’ permanent residences.

So how did today’s visit change me? I’m at the place where I may need to begin thinking about the next chapter of my life. The notion of downsizing is certainly something I may need to consider in the years to come. Jorn Utzon the theologian believed that ordinary space is sacred. Jorn Utzon the prophet calls us back to a kind of simplicity, to a type of shelter that has everything one needs and nothing that one does not need. Jorn Utzon the architect calls us back to the notion that our buildings should simply be spaces for people. Nothing more. Nothing less.

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