//Udgivelser

That the quality of these books is worthy of Utzon and that, conversely, Utzon’s achievements measure up to the ambitious scope of the books is beyond all doubt. So we can now take pleasure in the availability of a series of books placing before us Utzon’s genius in all its fantastic breadth. Whereas the first book, Utzon – Inspiration, Vision, Architecture, written by the English architect Richard Weston, provided us with an overall view of Utzon’s oeuvre, the first four books in the logbook series delve deeper into individual works such as the courtyard houses, Bagsværd Church, the Mallorca houses and the Assembly Building in Kuwait. The latest and last logbook, which has just appeared, differs from these in that it is concerned with a concept, or more correctly a method, that is to say the additive concept, which is perhaps Utzon’s most important motif.

In this book, Utzon’s most trusted colleague, Mogens Prip-Buus, tells about a defining event in the drawing office in Sidney one sunny day in 1965. During a conversation with Utzon, Prip-Buus suddenly said something that Utzon asked him to repeat. The conversation had been about the difference between the British pyramidal social structure and the Danish, more equal form of society. Utzon leapt up from his chair and in large letters wrote on the wall “ADDITIVE ARCHITECTURE”, commenting that now they had broken through the sound barrier. For that is what it had been about all the time: additive architecture for an additive world, which in both natural and cultural forms was organised according to additive systems and hierarchies. Systems which, as Utzon saw them, were fundamentally architecture. That sunny day in Sidney in 1965, Utzon realised what his work was fundamentally about: adding and subtracting and ensuring that the transitions, like the growth principles in nature or the transitions in primitive societies between family, village and the surrounding world, were organically linked, not with erased or fused links, but with visible links that clearly spoke of differences, relations and distances.

There are echoes of this preoccupation with systematics and connections far back in Utzon’s life. In this book, his friend Ole Schultz tells of a sketch that Utzon made as a boy on the inside of a porridge oat packet. The sketch was of a landscape from Vejlerne near the Lim Fjord with ditches and a row of fencing posts and with drifting clouds that clearly indicated the direction of the westerly wind. Beneath the sketch, the young Jørn had added a small calculation showing that 40 fencing posts corresponded to 200 metres. Thus, in the relationship between the dynamic of the clouds and the regular measuring of the landscape represented by the fencing posts, there already lay the seeds of the architect’s most important methodical tool. For to Utzon, the additive was not merely about repetition. The idea of identical prefabricated structure was far from him. The additive on the other hand was about relations and differences.

Utzon was a man who observed. When he returned to the drawing office after his visit to China in 1958, he gave a lively account of how the Chinese did not use overcoats, but merely put on more or fewer layers of identical clothing according to the weather. He found the same principle confirmed in the Chinese temples, in which the stacked timber structures are fundamentally identical, but are increased or reduced in number according to the size of the temple. When he visited the food shops in his favourite town of Kyoto, he was at least as interested in the way in which the beans were piled up side by side, red, green, white, brown, as he was in the additive principles of construction as used in the Japanese architectural tradition. At home once more in everyday life, something as straightforward as the arrangement of a Danish lunch table, or a group of deer on the edge of a forest, or the goods wagons in a shunting yard or of the pebbles on the beach could confirm him in the belief that buildings ought to be organised more freely and not to be limited by identical box shapes divided by partition walls, as he writes in his splendid manifesto “Additive Architecture” from 1970. Whereas this little text formulates precisely what Utzon understands by additive architecture in an industrial context, his first manifesto from 1948, the English translation of which was given the poetical title of “The Innermost Being of Architecture”, was more fundamental.

“Something of the naturalness found in the growth principle in nature ought to be a fundamental idea in works of architecture,” Utzon maintains in this essay. He goes on to write: “An urge to create well-being must be fundamental to all architecture if harmony is to be achieved between the rooms created and what is to be undertaken in them,” continuing with yet another metaphor taken from nature: “Nature knows no compromise. It accepts all difficulties, not as difficulties, but as new factors which without conflict grow into a whole.” Well, on the basis of our post-modern culture we might call this naive and idealised, but anyone who has been in the reception area in the Paustian building must be able to see the meaning in it. For here, Utzon has succeeded in catering for a very complex functional programme with a space that is exceptionally pleasant to spend time working in, and which has a both clear and basic architectonic expression that without visual noise reveals all constructions and installations. Cell by cell, element by element, the room rises with the same clarity as an Eastern temple or as the growth of a tree.

According to Mogens Prip-Buus, if we understand these two manifestos by Utzon, then we understand his method. Shortly before his death, Utzon said the following to Prip-Buus: “You must promise me that this book will not be filled with all kinds of people saying all kinds of things.” That was to be his last will and testament. Short, precise texts and carefully selected pictures. No muddy analyses. And the illustrations are fantastic. Whether they are from Mali, Iceland, India, Japan, Morocco, Greece, the Sahara, Sweden, Nepal, Algeria, Isfahan or the Danish island of Funen, they all confirm Utzon’s additive principles. Utzon’s stroke of genius has in general been seeing and translating all these riches into an industrial architectural idiom, which, irrespective of where in the world it is placed, is naturally woven into the local context.

It must be said that the editors have succeeded in imparting all this. This book is quite simply wonderful. It is a gift to every architect or otherwise interested personage who wants to get inside Jørn Utzon’s workshop and follow his incredible intuition.

Mention must finally be made of the fact that all six books in the series have been created by editorial collaboration between Torsten Bløndal, Richard Weston and Jørn Utzon himself, who was throughout an active sparring partner until his death on 29 November last year.

Although one might have wished for a logbook dedicated especially to the Sidney Opera House, Torsten Bløndal’s attitude has from the start been that the strength of the project lay in the close collaboration with Utzon and that its term must of necessity be limited by the time Utzon had to live. Fortunately, he lived to be 90. And he managed to put his stamp on the preparatory work for “Additive Architecture” so that this publication is marked by the reliability that is characteristic of the entire series.

Thomas Bo Jensen

Arkitekten
Vol 111, no. 14, November 2009