jørn
utzon logbook
vol.IV prefab
K u wa i t 2 0 0 0 A D / K a r n a k 2 0 0 0 B C
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How would you describe the most fundamental change that has taken place in your professional views over the past few decades? Jørn Utzon: In my professional view a significant change has been the rediscovery of the open spaces between buildings, such as squares, courtyards, streets and gardens, in contrast to the previously prevailing view held, for instance, by Le Corbusier. There was a concentration on the house itself as an isolated, detached building in a park, something you could walk around. In reality Aalto was quite without such prejudice. Numerous times in his projects he has shown us the relation between buildings, squares and open spaces. He often built complexes around an inner patio, around an open courtyard. Our present complicated building assignments are so much more easily and naturally managed by building complexes which are divided up into smaller entities, instead of enclosing the different functions in a box-life building. This allows for individual expression in the various rooms and their function, and this conglomerate of buildings surrounds open spaces such as courtyards, squares, streets and gardens. If these ‘in-between’ spaces are treated as an inseparable part of the whole concept, the experience provided by the architecture is greatly enriched.
elements in the way of life
interview with jørn utzon / markku komonen arkkitehti ( finland ), february 1988
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k a s b a h , d a d é s va l l e y, m o r o cc o f o l l o w i n g pa g e s / o u a r z a z at é , m o r o cc o
I signed on on a boat belonging to DFDS and had a free trip because my father used to repair ships for that company. One of my painter friends – Poul Schrøder – was the brother-inlaw of a wealthy man who had a job for me in Casablanca. When I arrived, he took me to one side and said that nothing was going to come of it. The franc had been devalued. It was only worth half as much. I could always try to get a job, of course, but it turned into a study journey along the foot of the Atlas Mountains. From valley to valley, tribe to tribe, in a wonderful countryside where they were building huge houses up to eight storeys high with tall towers along those fruitful valleys that ran out into nothing – out into the sand. I slept under the open sky, at least when I could shake off all the children in the town. Met a king, hospitality and a life that was simple and straightforward. All the houses were the same colour as the ground we stood on, and yet full of nuances. And when they were building – they were almost always doing that somewhere or other – they sang. Always in time with the way in which they stamped the clay in oblong moulds about three or four metres long and about seventy-five centimetres
high. Always accompanied by singing. The façades turned out to be beautiful and around the window areas they were decorated with white and the furnishings made and carved in fine wood. The houses were so beautifully placed, not like a Danish or Swedish detached house or inflexible residential housing – they stood there just as though placed there just as I like to place them in relation to each other and in relation to the rises in the terrain. If you look at some of my projects – building projects – there is no doubt that they are marked by that relationship to each other and the place. The first thing I got out of the trip. And then the simple way of living with the food just outside the door, and where the dog stood nothing could grow. I was profoundly inspired by this way of building in natural surroundings like in the proposal for a paper works, a hall where the machines stand between two end walls under some concrete elements as a roof. As simple as that. Making use of the slope in the terrain to achieve the necessary pressure on the water. But it was mainly the houses in the natural surroundings and the way in which people lived and got their food to eat everywhere.
morocco on foot 1948 jørn utzon december 2007
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J ø r n U t z o n 1 9 71
competition brief june 1971
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L e t t e r f r o m J ø r n U t z o n t o Ok tay N ay m a n 1 9 71
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As for the subject, I have very few things to add to the chapter in the Utzon book (Richard Weston 2002). Your text in the book is quite comprehensive and correct. Extra c t f r o m R ichard Weston: UTZON , p. 3 0 2
– in late 1969 an invitation to compete for the commission was sent to Utzon at Hellebæk. Fortunately his son Jan was living there with his young family and forwarded it to Honolulu, where his father was teaching at the University of Hawaii. Utzon in turn contacted Oktay Nayman, who was then on the vast British Library project. Nayman agreed to make the drawings whilst Jan, working independently in Denmark from the same sketches, would make several models for the presentation. It was an unlikely arrangement to design a major building and in the days before fax machines, let alone document exchanges via email and the internet, one potentially fraught with pitfalls. It was several weeks before Utzon air-mailed his sketches to
London, and unlike most of his early studies, they have survived. Several key sheets – many of which were redrawn by Lis Utzon – are reproduced on p. 306 to give an insight into his working methods. They need little commentary, but what is immediately striking is the rigour and clarity of the spatial and structural organisation: if ever a demonstration of Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘architecture is organisation: you are an organiser not a drawing-board artist’ were needed, here it is. To those familiar with Utzon’s thought-processes the sketches contained almost all that was needed to make the competition submission, and when Jan eventually received Nayman’s drawings he had to make only a few minor amendments to bring them into line with his less easily altered model. The competition programme allowed time for one or two exchanges of letters, and along the way Oktay Nayman – whom Utzon describes as “a worthy disciple of Sinan” who “drew the sharpest lines I ever saw” – suggesteed various
Competition scheme Oktay nayman
letter to richard weston 2004
changes, some formal, others practical. Most were rejected by the master and, never one to bothe with formalities, Utzon simply annotated the letters in bold capitals and returned them: NO! ON NO ACCOUNT / FOLLOW MY SKETCHES PRECISELY / THIS HAS BEEN STUDIED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS. As Jan observed, the complete building existed in Utzon’s mind . Oktay Nayman con t i n u e d :
I think one incident is worth mentioning about the competition stage. In early 1971 Jørn was invited by Leslie Martin to Cambridge. I was then working with Sandy Wilson whose office was also in Cambridge at the time. I met Jørn at Heathrow Airport and drove him to Leslie Martins famous watermill estate. Apparantly Sir Leslie, ever a cautious administrator, wanted to sound out Jørn about the pending competition in Kuwait. Jørn’s response was of course affirmative. (It was during this visit that he gave me a set of drawings of his stunning new scheme for the Silkeborg Museum.) So, it was Leslie Martin, having always a very high regard for Jørn, who was instrumental for Jørn being included in the invitation list of the competition, possibly to give him another chance after the Opera House debacle. He was also one of the three members of the jury (the other two being Franco Albini and one Omar Azzam).
It took about six months after the Cambridge meeting for the brief to arrive to Hellebæk by which time Jørn, forced by financial conditions, was away teaching in Hawaii. Hence the funny logistics of the competition. A s m a l l fa c t ual correction:
Jan was not making the model simultaneously to my preparing the drawings. That would have been impossible and very risky. As soon as I had completed the underlay drawings (the drawings to be traced over, as we called them) I sent him and Jørn a set of them and he started the model. There were a few modifications after that which really did not affect the model all that much. As a personal note concerning the competition scheme: I was not very happy about the rather pastiche-like, two dimensional arches. But time was very pressing and the overall concept of the scheme was a winner. So I held my tongue about it knowing that Jørn would change them all afterwards if the competition was won which I was sure it would be. As long as I knew him he had never entertained this sort of pastiche. And my anticipation was proven right. When I saw the final scheme in Zürich for the first time (revisions were already done in Hellebæk) I was very happy to see that the master had de monstrated his true touch and boundless inventiveness once more as I had expected.
revised competition scheme introduction of cylinder geometry 1973
In the small sketches, you can right from the start see the big wall and how you fill the various sections, for I wanted to express the various sections with their dimensions, their lighting and with their dependence on each other by arranging them in side streets going out from the central street. That is to say that in fact it turned into a jigsaw puzzle for the client, who could himself choose whether he wanted this or that and arrange the sections just as clearly as a tree expressed itself – trunk and branches, and the leaves and the fruit, so that at any time it was possible to move things around and build on. And that happened of course over the many years we worked on it and then it developed in different ways. And this is one of the stages. At one time we reached the final project, the blue book. And then they could always add on, of course. JØRN UTZON D e c . 2 0 0 7
During his time teaching at the University of Hawaii, Utzon became fascinated by the possibility of harnessing the unidirectional Trade Winds to provide passive cooling for buildings. This interest in working with the climate is equally apparent in Kuwait, from the great canopy that provides the building’s public front, to the clustering of offices around small shaded courts. Utzon’s solution to the necessary air conditioning was similarly foresighted, and stemmed from his memory of the individual units that peppered the elevations of Mies van der Rohe’s celebrated apartments at 860 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Rather than use a then conventional centralised air conditioning system, with its attendant network of large ducts, Utzon opted to provide a small, independent system to each cluster of offices – an approach which, twenty years later, would become the norm. richard weston 2007
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The project possesses a simple, well-defined geometry consisting of plane surfaces and cylindrical sections; there are no double curvature surfaces. The combination of these simple shapes in the enormous columns provides maximum strength with a minimal use of materials while the architectonic power can be compared to that of the Egyptian temples. The development to this stage from the more two-dimensional architecture of the competition project took place during the work on the blue book (1973). Plane sections in semi-cylinders created two very different types of column: Central Street has sections, parallel to the row of columns, whereby the column supports the beam as though on two raised arms; while the section in the two halls is at right angles to the row of columns, and the connection between two roof elements rests on a single plane. The roof above Central Street consists of semi-cylinders turning up and down respectively thus reflecting the tension and pressure zones of the construction (a reference to the roof over the Schau spielhaus in Zürich, which was never built). These semi-cylinders are connected by means of vertical surfaces that form the striking eye motif above the street.
geometry børge nissen august 2004
In front of the ceremonial areas overlooking the sea and at the entrance to Central Street, elements providing shade have been erected, the openings in which at first sight resemble traditional Islamic pointed arches. In reality, they consist of two straightforward quarter-cylinders assembled around a 45° section. The roofs above the two halls are formed from short, semi-cylindrical elements gathered around the radii in a huge circle. At one time during the planning, the window frames were conceived as quarter-cylinders of metal, the interior convex side providing a soft shaded area and the exterior concave leading to a powerful shadow effect between concrete and window. Columns and beams in the office area are right-angled and are all of a width of 50 cm, leaving room for the building of double walls and for abutments for floor slab panels from two sides. Floor slab panels are a good metre in height; they are open below and allow room for distributing all installations without colliding with the supporting column/beam construction. The free-standing mosque, which was not built, was planned with the elements that had already been developed for the rest of the complex; no special elements were designed.
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A Tube on End
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The idea of the column came to us when we were looking at the windmills on Mallorca. A shape that makes you want to lean against it. The shape is simple. And incredibly strong. You can test it for yourself by rolling a piece of paper to form a tube and standing it on end. You can test the strength by putting a porcelain cup on top. We had really done something like this with the dome in Bagsværd, where – keeping to the same image – we figuratively speaking folded the same piece of paper horizontally across the paper’s machine direction. Remember that the ceiling in Bagsværd is only 12 cm thick with a free span of 20 metres. So if you take a column, it has to be able to support the elements resting on it. I took some beer bottles and put them up on a table. That was here in Hellebæk. It was suddenly quite obvious. If you take a column that is to support the large projection, you have the problem of the link to the next column in the row. It must be able to support the elements resting on it. Be suitably rigid, have a buttress on either side, and then a column. Walt had already discovered that we hardly needed foundations because the ground was extremely hard , what is known as desert pack. And the shape of the columns created space in itself and the light had free play across the curved surfaces that came to a point above. In principle, the bits were quite small corrections cast in the same shape from top to toe. And where the cross braces were superfluous, steel reinforcements were put in the mould. Everything cast. In making the elements, we avoided the troublesome work of shaping and shuttering. When you are building a house of concrete, you are in reality building two houses, pouring a bit of concrete in between and then you pull the houses down again. It’s crazy really. We hadn’t seen that before. So we made those columns that were to end up naturally on the surface that was to support the column in the arm of the anchor. Shaped like an anchor, isn’t it? That’s what an anchor looks like. Seen vertically, you have a ‘stem’ and four arms. If you make a cross section, you get a column in which the stem is of such a dimension that it can support two of the arms, and then you get a buttress that can meet the other buttress in a transverse element set sideways. That’s the entire mystery. That’s how it was made. And a very simple story indeed. You go from a large ground plan on a constructive element and continue upwards and end in the smallest imaginable and necessary thickness and at the same time with a lateral rigidity in connection with the neighbouring element, and the weight of the roof – the roof elements – is optimally distributed; and the fact that the column is 4 metres means that in a way it isn’t experienced as a real column. If you go to a mill or something of the same dimension, it has a fantastic effect on your personality. ‘Small’ people passing huge columns experience the light coming in from above curling round the columns and giving rise to an internal sense of space of niches, of the weight of the building. There’s something about them. Isn’t this what Reitzel means by having a bit of a shock. Hey, what’s going on? And then it really happened by my arranging some beer bottles in a row because I thought it would be great instead of a simple flat plane that couldn’t be distinguished from a piece of paper cut out here and there and the roof here. We rejected that on the spot, all those fine designs, and started all over again with an ordinary beer bottle. Everyone was wildly enthusiastic. And prefabricated, of course. That was already decided. JØRN UTZON D e c . 2 0 0 7
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Bits here and there and all over the place. Lovely. Not a shutterboard. For the project in June 1974 we delivered an enormous manual – where the bits are drawn in 1:20 with measurements added. If you look at it with the eyes of a builder there’s no hanky-panky about it. It’s not a fine piece of handiwork. The moulds were drawn by Walt – it was his daughter Heidi who drew all the steel moulds made by the British firm Stelmo International. Perhaps not the big ones, I don’t remember. You can see the joints, amazing, isn’t it. In one picture you really have a feeling of the size. I’ve often thought about what sort of effect the old buildings have on the body. When you go around in a Gothic cathedral. You become very, very small and if you go over to a column you are drawn by the
upward movement, almost raised up. It’s things like this that are not only common, but splendid; there are shapes. What happens is something that makes you happy when the overall impression absolutely shows part of a symphony. It’s very beautiful. You can see that the shape is in fact built up of those elements, so they’re not decorative joints. They’re quarter cylinders placed one beside the other. What happens to the things here is logic. No building rubble, in sharp contrast to the case with a lot of buildings. As I often said to my students at Hawaii University, “Comrades, drive out to a building site, there are plenty of them, and ask whether you may borrow the school’s big lorry to collect free building rubble, and then build a house. Are we agreed?” And so they did. And for something like USD 25 or thereabouts.
no building rubble! jørn utzon december 2007
Precast Building
In reality you can draw a parallel to Fa Shi, where they produced a specific part, a building element, a corner, a beam, a column or whatever for a government building that in practice could be taken down and put together as needed. In different sizes, spans and dimensions. But with exactly the same elements. Quite fascinating like when I walked around Isfahan studying the Islamic Arab building elements. And the factory was an existing element factory in Kuwait that was given the job by the main contractor on the basis of the moulds that came from England. They cast the elements, transported them to the building site and lined them up there. Productivity was high. Unfortunately, the fine concrete suffered during the war between Iraq and Kuwait, so that it was subsequently necessary to paint the Assembly Building white, so that it now stands as a painted surface instead of the finest concrete. But the main impression is pretty powerful after all. They couldn’t alter that. JĂ˜RN UTZON D e c . 2 0 0 7
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reinforcement
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c o o r d i n at i o n f o r i n s ta l l at i o n s & c e i l i n g s o f f i t, b a s e m e n t, a p r i l & a u g u s t 1 9 7 5
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first floor ceiling soffit & scheme section and measures, august 1975
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