Jørn Utzon
Jørn Utzon won the competition for the Sydney Opera House at 38 and left before it was finished. His architecture is built on platforms and light roofs, inspired by everything from Mayan temples to Chinese timber buildings. He also designed Bagsværd Church in Denmark.
Jørn Utzon was born in 1918 in Copenhagen and grew up in Aalborg, where his father was a naval engineer and yacht designer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and during the war fled to Stockholm, where he worked for Hakon Ahlberg and got to know the work of Gunnar Asplund. After the war he worked briefly for Alvar Aalto in Helsinki. He travelled in Morocco, Mexico, the United States, China and Japan, where he studied platforms, temples and timber houses.
In 1957 Utzon won the competition for the opera house in Sydney with an entry that was only sketches. Together with the engineers at Ove Arup he solved the construction of the shells. After conflicts with the new government of New South Wales he left the project in 1966. In Denmark he built the Kingo Houses in Helsingør and the Fredensborg Houses, with courtyard houses in yellow brick, and Bagsværd Church, whose ceiling billows inside like clouds. He built two houses for himself on Mallorca, Can Lis and Can Feliz, and the National Assembly in Kuwait.
Utzon received the Pritzker Prize in 2003 and died in Copenhagen in 2008. He never saw the Sydney Opera House finished, but at the end of his life he was engaged to draw up principles for future changes. The opera house became a World Heritage Site in 2007 while he was still alive. His idea of additive architecture, in which buildings are assembled from repeated parts, and his feeling for landscape have influenced Nordic architects. The Kingo Houses are one of Denmark’s most admired housing areas.