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For Jørn and Lis
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Special thanks to master builder of Can Lis Jaime Vidal, Santanyi master builder of Can Feliz JosĂŠ Monserrat, Felanitx and photographer Bent Ryberg
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TWO HOUSES ON MAJORCA JOHN PARDEY / EDITION BLØNDAL 2004 3
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In April 2001, in a small square in S’Horta on the island of Majorca, I met Jørn and Lis Utzon for the first time. The day before, I had watched the film ‘Il Postino’ which told the story of how a simple man had touched genius in the form of the poet Pablo Neruda and had been destroyed, as if burnt by the flame; a slight trepidation at meeting the architect I admired most in the world was quickly dispelled by the sheer humour and affability of the inseparable couple. As Lis was to say, ‘people expect so much from Jørn, but he is just a man’ – he is, but a man burdened with genius who has given the world several sublime buildings. This launched the personal quest to summarise the two houses the Utzons had built and occupied on the island, their adopted home, that has resulted in this book. It has been a labour of love, steered and encouraged by the publisher, a force of nature that is Torsten Bløndal, edited and ably guided by Richard Weston – my great thanks to both. Thanks to the architects Børge Nissen and Jesper Ravn in Denmark. It is perhaps fitting that an English architect working from a rural backwater should write about a Danish architect who won the 20 th century’s biggest architectural competition from a garage in a clearing, in a forest, north of Copenhagen – but this has only been possible due to the support of my wife Julie; my love and thanks, and sorry about all the late nights. Finally, I thank Jørn and Lis for their support, enthusiasm and friendship; for the memorable times we spent in Majorca and the telephone conversations, which I hope has helped make this book personal to them also.
John Pardey
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APRIL 2001 CAN LIS Jørn Utzon puts his arm around my shoulder to guide me into the living room of the house he occupied for nearly a quarter of a century. He seems almost anxious that it should meet with my approval. It was like walking into a cave looking out across the sea – ‘nothing until Africa’, he said – and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust after the strong Mediterranean sun outside. There are few spaces in modern architecture that grip you by the back of the neck, and even fewer that possess such an overwhelming sense of place. Here, this is linked to an explosive view out towards the horizon, balanced by a quality of glare-free light and reinforced by the earthy smell of stone and by a sudden silence that momentarily disorientates: time seemed to stop. The tension between deep enclosure and projected view combines in the sensation of being sucked out of the five large, deep apertures into the ocean; yet at the same time, the horizon seems to be pulled right into the room – an enthralling ebb and flow, like that of the ocean. Jørn sits on the crescent-shaped seat with Lis, his wife for over sixty years, as we watch the drama of a fishing boat chugging by, from one framed scene to the next, its voyage sliced into five separate journeys; time passing in five acts. Later, as mid-afternoon moves towards sunset, a small window placed high on the west wall of the room, begins to burn bright. This fire spreads slowly across the stone surface, becoming a fierce glow. Within five minutes, a gash of sun cuts across the suddenly living texture of the honey-coloured stone. This slice of sun, a daily cosmic revelation, becomes a kind of timepiece, marking out the progress of the earth in its orbit around the sun.
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APRIL 2003 CAN FELIZ Jørn Utzon sits opposite me at his large work table in the living room of his home on a mountainside above Cala d’Or, in the south-east corner of Majorca, sketching almost abstractedly whilst talking about how his father taught him the skills of the hunter. He explains that the hunter would not stalk deep in the forest, nor out in the open, but keep to the fringe – or the ‘eyebrow’, as it is expressed in Danish – where the trees meet the open landscape. Walking within the fringe of overhanging branches, the hunter has prospect and refuge in a place both commanding and safe. Utzon sees his house as a built expression of placing man on the fringe of landscape, with the main living space, perched above the horizon, as both cave and temple. The living room of Can Feliz works like a camera obscura, a telescope focused on the distant coastline. Its tall columns, flanking the invisibly glazed window, feel like the tree trunks the hunter must skirt. Light and airy, yet also deep and cave-like, it feels rooted to the hillside yet at the same time, like Can Lis, seems to project you out in to the landscape. There is no sundial in this room, rather the sense that the whole house is dedicated to nature and its daily cycle, echoing Utzon’s formative discovery of the Mayan temples in the Yucatan in 1949, where the great stone platforms emerge above the dense tree canopy to reveal a new and rarefied world. Here, nature provides the stone and the architect uses it to frame nature, establishing a reciprocal relationship between man and the elements.
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Visiting the house, you experience a continuous series of surprises, beginning with the enigmatic, self-effacing street frontage of blank walls. The road is scruffy, with houses scattered along one side amongst thick scrub, giving no hint of the dramatic cliff edge some twenty metres away, nor of the sea beyond. It is easy to miss Can Lis, and only the glazed tiled bench sitting beneath a rudimentary porch – with its blank, grainy wooden door – hints at the domestic world within. Beyond the door, another covered outdoor space awaits. Here, a crescent-shaped incision in the facing wall offers a tantalising glimpse of the sea, and you get a first sight of the open spaces that await to either side. Framed in dark blue and white glazed geometric tiles, the crescent points left – but you are drawn to the right, into the light-filled, stoa-like courtyard opening out to the sea.
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Hiroshige: The Bow Moon
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The courtyard is small, but its intimacy is juxtaposed against the vastness of sea, sky and horizon. Sitting square to the cliff-face, some 30 degrees east of due south, it anchors the house to the site. The colonnades and empty structures of ancient Greece are immediately invoked, but it also feels like an echo in miniature of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute addressing the Pacific half a world away. And like Kahn’s homage to the setting sun, it leaves no doubt that the house is dedicated to Nature – an elemental celebration of the sun’s path across the sky, above the sea. To the rear of the court lies the kitchen. Occupying two square bays, it is divided into pantry and cooking areas, with the furniture built in thin stone slabs with white tiled surfaces. Shuttered windows face the street, whilst a small servery window – part of a bookshelf-like storage unit – opens into the court. A further two bays form the dining space, with its built-in pine bench around a large table and two large window bays projecting out beneath the colonnade roof. A final bay forms a small store. Each space is modest and possesses a raw domestic quality, suggesting an earthy natural life – no formica, stainless steel or kitchen gadgets here. The only hint of sophistication is the aluminium light fitting that runs across the back wall of the dining space – but this is brought down to earth by the bare light bulbs, plugged in like rivets.
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The courtyard appears regular and highly ordered, a quality reinforced by the absolute unity of stone on floor and wall surfaces, with concrete ‘I’ beams and curved tiled vaults. Gradually, however, subtle irregularities and asymmetries become apparent. The inner corner columns are paired to form piers that align towards the sea (a miniature version of Renaissance architects’ struggle with the corner problem, perhaps?). The eastern side of the colonnade is filled in: the columns still appear in the wall, but the emphasis is subtly shifted towards due south, and here the colonnade contains a built-in bench and dining table, made of stone and glazed tiles. Two steps across the court drop towards the cliff edge, marked by a low stone wall, and a single slab of stone lies like a segment of a fallen column: it suggests a further low enclosure within the courtyard and is tiled to invite use as a table. Around the colonnade, metal rods project at high level awaiting the vines that would have blurred the meeting between building and sky (as things turned out, the vines were not planted). This transition was originally a stark juxtaposition of stone and sky, but this had to be modulated by pantile copings, added to deal with slow penetration of damp. The elemental quality Utzon sought is apparent in the way the door frames are visibly fixed on the faces of the stone apertures, and the stone jambs carved out with elliptical incisions to allow space to operate the door handles – rudimentary though it is, the detail brings to mind Michelangelo’s incised handrails for the Laurentian Library stair in Rome. The doors themselves are made of boards held in place by neat rows of exposed nail heads, and this determination to show how things are made is extended to the whole courtyard, which lays bare the constructional language of the house. Stone blocks provide the basic units of 40x40cm (cut slabs, 80cm long, are used in the walls), whilst the roof structure and lintels are made with precast standard ‘I’ beams which support Catalan terracotta curved tiles or bovedillas. These stones and beams were all sourced locally from builders’ merchants, and Utzon’s inventiveness in using these everyday materials is part of the magic of Can Lis and consistent with all his work, where a kit of parts – the elements of what he calls an ‘Additive Architecture’ – combine to make forms as diverse as a bench or a shell roofing the Opera House.
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Bayview 1, 1964
It now seems hard to imagine why the Utzons should leave this house, yet gradually their other site, ‘paradise’, high up the mountainside behind the coastline, called. In 1994 they moved to their new home, Can Feliz, leaving Can Lis to their now grown-up family. If Can Lis is reclusive, then Can Feliz is little more than a mirage shimmering on its mountainside, for so few have visited this house that it barely registers in the world of architecture. Such isolation is ideal for Utzon, and this eerie perched high up on the dark green slope is a wonderfully warm and domestic place. Comparison to the former house is inevitable: Can Lis is the more purely architectural, primal and uncompromised, but the quieter Can Feliz is arguably more assured, a refinement of the language of forms developed on the cliff-top some twenty years earlier. 42
Can Feliz is reached by turning off the coast road a few kilometres inland from Can Lis. A small road winds between fields and stone walls, rising slowly up the rugged terrain. Agaves and cacti begin to cluster against what soon becomes a track, and eventually, as the road threatens to run out and the trees close in, the house suddenly appears and a view to the distant coastline unfolds. The plan returns again to the Bayview designs, but whereas Can Lis perhaps relates most clearly to the third Bayview scheme, Can Feliz seems more directly connected to the first two, where three co-joined blocks were staggered but connected at their corners. Here, three blocks containing living, dining and bedroom spaces, are set side by side, slightly shifted each to the other. The living room is a one-and-a-half bay structure, the central dining block has three bays, and the bedroom block two; half-bays link the blocks, and throughout walls run front to back with only columns traversing the spaces, lending a highly directional quality to the plan and aligning it with the view down towards the coast. The plan’s somewhat casual appearance belies the subtly stated order upon which it is based: episodic when experienced at ground level, the rectangular enclosure formed by platform and walls is clearly revealed when seen from above. On the cliff-top, nature provided a ledge that formed the platform to the house, but here on the mountainside Utzon builds his own in three stepping layers, following the existing rock formation.
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The tapered stone eyes of Can Lis are replaced by three deep bays: formed by columns rather than walls, they become temple-like. The central bay frames a window of over 3x3 metres, with no visible frames, which are again fixed to the outer faces of the reveals. This is flanked by two tall, narrow window openings; externally these shelter beneath a portico four-and-a-half metres high, with 40x40 cm columns that, in the gothic tradition, stretch stone to a seemingly implausible slenderness. The stones are in fact hollow, with a strong mortar core, poured as the masons built the structure to give added strength. Two smaller bays occur on each flank wall, and looking up from the hillside below feels like discovering an ancient Greek temple. From within, the directional intensity of the tapering apertures has mellowed into an embrace with the horizon, punctuated by the layers of columns that frame and invite the landscape into the room. The light is bright but tempered by the porticos, which negate glare and render the glass separating inside from outside all but invisible. The feeling of being on the edge is palpable, with an imminent danger of falling out, down the hillside: it is like standing in the temple of Apollo above Delphi.
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Horizontal structure is founded on the ubiquitous pre-cast concrete ‘I’ beams that can span up to about five metres. Used singly as supports for roof structures and doubled up as lintels for wall supports, these beams are 20 cm high by 10 cm wide, with the characteristic ‘I’ section forming ledges each side for supporting intermediate elements. These were originally envisaged as flat terracotta tiles, readily available in the local builders’ merchants, but Utzon noticed the arched clay tiles in a local baker’s shop one morning and knew that was what the roofs at Can Lis, then under construction, had to be. These arched clay tiles, ‘bovedillas’, were once common in the region but had gone out of production some years earlier. Utzon’s master builder knew where they used to be made so they returned to the works, found the original wooden curved moulds and set about producing them. The tiles are made from flat clay slabs: placed wet onto the mould, they quickly slump and assume the curved profile; this is then slid off to rest on its edge and dry in the sun. In this way, Utzon rediscovered and revived a fragment of Majorcan vernacular: the tiles are still in manufacture today.
Each bovedilla is placed between the flanges of the spanning ‘I’ beam, covered with flat clay tiles and finished in waterproof quarry tiles. The resulting mini-vaults are so appropriate to an architect who so frequently sees the roof as a cloud floating above space – from the rolling clouds of Bagsværd Church to the vaults in Sydney – the Majorcan houses possess the same idea in an understated, yet still powerful way. Similarly, the simplicity of the trabeated construction – stone, beam and vault – adds power to the architecture and makes the houses consistent within Utzon’s work. From the Chinese building manual (Ying Tsao Fa Shi), discovered as a student at the Danish Academy and later used as a ‘metaphor’ in the Sydney office, to the recommended reading for new staff – D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form – Utzon engaged in a lifelong search to ground architecture in simple ways of building that reflected the way nature grows. ‘A tree has all it needs, nothing is missing’. Jørn Utzon.
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