Jørn Utzon – The Logbooks

At a time when the market is drowning in a host of indifferent picture books on architecture and design, it is an incredibly liberating experience to come across a project with a more comprehensive objective than merely showing some beautiful pictures of architecture. Such a project is “Jørn Utzon – The Logbooks”.
It is Torsten Bløndal’s publishing house that is behind the publication of Richard Weston’s great monograph on Jørn Utzon, which he has supplemented with the publication of the Logbooks, four of which have appeared, while a fifth is on the way. The editorial board consists of Jørn Utzon, Torsten Bløndal and Richard Weston.
The title “Logbooks” refers to the idea of Jørn Utzon as the captain on voyages with different crews and with different objectives. It also suggests that what we are watching is the actual process all the way to the final result.
In contrast to most publications on architecture, which concentrate solely on what the works look like, these are books that lift the veil on what interests architects most of all: How was this produced. How was it created?
So, with its vast amount of project materials, constructional drawings, sketches, references and documentation of the actual building process, the series constitutes an archive or a tool box of “open systems” that is generously placed at the disposal of those who are concerned with the actual genesis of architecture.

The first logbook entitled THE COURTYARD HOUSES, which appeared in 2004, has Mogens Prip-Buus as co-editor. The focus is on is these epoch-making buildings of Danish modernism: the Kingo Houses and the Fredensborg Houses.
We follow the way in which these developments fit into the development of Utzon’s work with the courtyard house as a type; from the winning submission in the competition for Scanian House Types from 1953, via the Swedish developments in Bjuv and Lund to the Espansiva building system from 1968.
The books shows Utzon as a rejuvenator of the Danish tradition we know for instance from Århus University with yellow brick walls which without the use of a base unite the buildings directly with the terrain and green common areas.
What Utzon adds to this tradition is crucially new: a shift in focus from the individual block of buildings to the open space between the blocks. Utzon himself considers this the essential change in the development of modern architecture. In a Danish perspective, Utzon’s courtyard houses thus open the way for the later development of the “dense and low movement”, which is today an integral part of Danish modernism.

The second logbook, which appeared in 2005, is entitled BAGSVÆRD and is about the church in Bagsværd. In its graphic presentation, this book stands as the most pleasing in the series. Th first part consists of six so-called suites of photos and drawings, while the second part of the book is devoted to interviews, descriptions and analyses.
The first suite consists of Richard Weston’s detailed photographs of the church, with their focus on the materials.
The second suite, entitled “Zodiac”, focuses on the geometry of circles behind the ceiling in the Minor Hall in the Sidney Opera House. The third suite illustrates the work on the building site. The fourth shows Utzon’s sketches. The fifth and sixth suites consist of Ole Meyer’s outstanding analytical photographs of the interior and exterior respectively.
The suites make clear two essential links between the Sidney Opera House and Bagsværd Church. The first concerns the way in which the materials receive and reflect light. The second is concerned with the geometry of circles, which not only forms the light in the church space, but also modulates the acoustic qualities.
The second part of the book shows how a constructive dialogue with the congregation and clergy and the introduction of Lin Utzon as a participant in the work on the interior have together helped to protect the church against any officious desire to add decorations, which often spoil the experience of a magnificent architectonic space.

The third logbook entitled TWO HOUSES ON MAJORCA, which appeared in 2004, is about Utzon’s own houses on Majorca, Can Lis and Can Feliz.
For Utzon, as for any other architect, his own house claims a special status. This is where the architect has time to explore, to carry out experiments on a one-to-one basis, make mistakes – and correct them.
With expert guidance from John Pardey, the two houses are inscribed in historical references to Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Sigurd Lewerentz and Alvar Aalto. But primarily, the book’s analyses establish an internal dialogue between the two houses and Utzon’s unfulfilled project for the house to be called Bayview in Sidney.

The fourth logbook, which appeared in 2008 with Børge Nissen as co-editor, is written in English and bears the title of KUWAIT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY – prefab.
It is a project which, in its monumental scale and its national symbolical significance, can be compared with the corresponding projects by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn in Chandigarh and Dacca respectively.
Utzon organises the site like a town modulated over a square mesh network of covered streets framing the two-storey administration buildings, each of which encloses a square courtyard.
The structure is intersected by a main axis providing access to the great Assembly Hall and Reception Hall and ending in the gigantic loggia called Covered Square, where the complex opens out towards the sea.
The project material shows Utzon’s lifelong interest in additive systems and prefabricated building elements. As in all of Utzon’s projects there are open systems in which the serial and the unique are not each other’s antitheses, but where the individual quality on the other hand is revealed precisely within the repetition.
In the vast amount of material on the project, we can also follow the process, from the original plan in which the constructive elements in the monumental rooms in the complex are still pictured in two-dimensional geometry, to the breakthrough in 1973, when the roof and columns of the main axis, the Assembly Hall and the curved roof and columns of the Covered Square are all brought together by means of cylinder geometry, the fashioning of which derives inspiration in the image of cut bamboo and blades of grass.
What Utzon here creates is a new order of columns, which in its perfection stands comparison with the Parthenon, and in its origins points back to the temples in Karnak.
As in the spherical segments in the Sidney Opera house, here it is the geometry of the circle that leads to a meeting between Heaven and Earth.

This September 40 years ago Jørn Utzon introduced his building system Espansiva. As Utzon often said "it may take about 40 years for an idea to be understood" quoting Alvar Allto, and of course with a smile.
40 years have gone!
And noticing the architect's vanishing influence on architecture Jørn Utzon felt that the Utzon Logbook series would be of value to people interested in the architect's role and its importance in society.
Based on his own experience and a carefully edited selection of drawings from his archives, the Logbooks offer a unique access to the process of working out architecture in the interest of the wellbeing of people.
Jørn Utzon Logbook Vol. V Additive Architecture no doubt documents the sustainability of timeless architecture and is the last volume of Jørn Utzon Logbook series

By reading the logbooks, we become aware of how Utzon’s geometry follows the ancient Chinese wisdom: Heaven is round, the Earth is square. The courtyard houses, the constructional systems, the bazaar and the city’s network of squares demonstrate how people arrange things on earth. The spheres and the geometry of the circles tell us how human beings experience heaven, light, the acoustic and the ethereal.
From the earliest times, great architecture has been such navigation between the heavenly and the earthly.
One can be amazed at how late the final solution to these circular geometries appears in Utzon’s great projects such as the Sidney Opera house and the Kuwait National Assembly. But perhaps it is precisely related to what makes his works so unique in the architecture of the twentieth century. To reach such a position demands more than great talent and enormous experience. It requires the will to challenge the limits of the possible, the faith that a solution will reveal itself during the process and the courage to launch oneself out into the journey into the unknown.

Erik Werner Petersen, Professor at the School of Architecture in Aarhus.