Kim Utzon started his small architectural practice, Kim Utzon Arkitekter, in Copenhagen in 1987, choosing to work primarily in Denmark and neighboring Sweden, to keep close ties with family and be able to reflect effectively on regional building traditions. Kim is the youngest son of Jørn Utzon (1918-2008), the Pritzker Prize-winning architect whose most celebrated buildings include the Sydney Opera House (1973), Bagsværd Church near Copenhagen (1976), and the Kuwait National Assembly Building (1982). Kim’s brother Jan Utzon is a practicing architect and his sister Lin Utzon is a ceramic artist.
Kim was six years old when his family settled in Australia where his father’s office was increasingly active in overseeing the construction of the Sydney Opera House, for which he won a major international competition in 1957, the year Kim was born. The project which was in construction since 1959 proved to be quite challenging to construct and it became a political target when the New South Wales government came into power in 1965, showing little sympathy toward the project. In 1966 Utzon was forced to resign, leaving the country with his family. Kim was nine at the time, and like his father, he never returned to Australia.
Utzon junior studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1976 to 1981. Before starting his own firm, he was a part of Utzon Architects. His distinctive built works include Henry Dunker Culture Center in Helsingborg, Sweden (2002); Dunkers Kulturhus (2002), and Harbor House II (2010), both in Copenhagen’s harbor. He collaborated with his father on the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark, the city where Jørn Utzon’s father, a naval engineer, grew up. The building was completed in 2008, the year the famous architect passed away. We spoke about growing up at his father’s house and building one for his own family the key lesson he learn from his father, animating his buildings with sunlight, avoiding things that are superfluous and not essential, the importance of repetition of simple elements, analyzing systems that exist in nature, and questioning all kinds of things to keep discovering new answers.
Vladimir Belogolovsky: How was it to grow up in the house that your father built?
KU: The original house was built in 1952. It was the very first house my father built. It was a very small, open-plan volume built of exposed brick. Originally, there were three bedrooms and an open living room anchored by a central fireplace and an open kitchen back to back. A bigger wing was added in 1962. The house was built in the middle of a forest in the small town of Hellebæk, the northern suburb of Copenhagen and near Kronborg Castle in Elsinore where Prince Hamlet once ruled Denmark. The house was the first modernist house built in Denmark after World War II. It is very strict and Danish in terms of the use of space and brick. It is also based on such models as the Japanese house and projects by Frank Lloyd Wright.
There is a long tradition in our family – if you have a particular interest you should try and develop it. During my upbringing, I tried sailing, sports, and of course, art and architecture. As kids, we were pushed to draw and make things. For example, we were not allowed to buy gifts for our parents. We had to make something.
VB: Could you touch on collaborating professionally with your father?
KU: Well, early on I wanted to get out of my father’s shadow and tried to be independent by working for other architects, but fortunately, I was asked both by my father and brother to work with them on a furniture showroom project. They were working on a large pier development and were very busy. So, for one summer we worked together with my father. It was a great collaboration, not as a father and son but rather as an older experienced architect and a younger architect. By that time my father was 65 and in the winter my parents lived in Mallorca, Spain. So, we corresponded through letters because he had no fax machine. It was a good experience because had my father been sitting next to me, he would have taken the pencil out of my hand and said, “Let’s do this.” But because we were far away it gave me time to think through my own solutions before he could respond by mail. And many of the choices I had to make on my own because some decisions had to be made urgently. While still working on this project I started my own practice. My first project was the house for my family.
VB: Building your own house is also part of your family’s tradition, right?
KU: Yes, both my father and brother have built their houses with their own hands and so did I. While working on the house I was approached by a client to build several houses. Suddenly I was busy, but by the early 1990s there was no more work and I accepted a teaching position in Australia. My family was ready to move there. Then just one month before leaving I got a call from Germany. Earlier that year I entered a competition just to keep myself busy and right before leaving the country I learned that I won it! So, I canceled my contract in Australia and started working on a new project, a Baptist church for a theological seminary outside of Berlin. That was a three-year project and it got built. Then other jobs followed.
VB: How would you describe your father’s approach to architecture?
KU: Right after the War there was a very active and interesting time when many Scandinavian architects knew each other well and inspired each other. My father was educated in a Danish school which was very strict and pragmatic but working abroad he encountered a whole other playful language and was preconditioned to see many things more acutely than his Danish contemporaries. Another inspiration came from nature, which is wild in Sweden and Norway and very different from Denmark where everything is flat and mainly cultivated by man, similar to Holland. Another major influence was the actual construction techniques, which my father learned from his father, and the idea that you can build anything. Anything is possible – that optimism was a major part of his work. Most importantly, he believed that anything that gets built should enhance what is already there. If you can understand the site and the people who are going to live in your building you should be able to come up with sensitive architecture, which is so much more than what the client actually needs or can even imagine. It is the job of the architect to use the power of imagination. We, as architects, have a torrent of references that we need to know how to use sensitively based on specific situations and projects.
VB: What is the main lesson that you learned from your father as an architect?
KU: We are all individuals. It is these individual choices that give your particular architecture a unique voice. In a way, there is nothing new under the sun. All houses are filled with references because architects who have designed them have seen many other houses before. But the strength of my father was that in search of inspiration he looked at everything. He was not limited just to modernism. For example, he was interested in architecture that was not necessarily done by architects. That is very liberating for any architect. When I look at projects by talented architects I am less interested in the actual result. Instead, I am interested in what the architect looked at for inspiration and references. I want to get down to the roots of things, to the very source of an idea. For example, Classicism died out because it was following certain stylistic tricks. The same with Post-Modernism – there were similar attitudes, references, color schemes, and so on. But there are many ways of looking at architecture. Personally, I try to uncover what is beyond the surface and style. Often, I work totally out of reference to what is happening at the moment and what is published in current magazines. Some people told me that my work is not contemporary, and I am very flattered by that because being in fashion may get completely outdated in just a few years.
VB: What kind of references do you typically turn to?
KU: All sorts of things – plants, materials, minerals, ice formations, old architecture, anything, really. I am more interested in what the source may be. When I shared my inspiration for one of my projects with my father he said – these are someone else’s solutions, but it is you and only you who made these particular choices. So, we all have many references, but it is the individual choices that we make that determine our individuality as architects. It is hard to try to see the root. It is much easier to copy what has been done before. But if you copy what someone else has done you will always be 5-10 years behind because that’s how long it takes to build a project. So, I prefer to look back as far as possible and in many directions. I try to learn from many sources, going back to the Egyptians and even before. I like to travel to France, Spain, or Israel. There are many great ideas in the use of materials, details, the play of light and shadow, and so on. Many of these references were pointed to me and to my brother and sister by my father, but we are all individuals and each of us has unique handwriting.
VB: Can you give any examples?
KU: It is very important to me to consider how the house meets the sky. In a way, I am a functionalist because there is always a functional reason that manifests itself in a particular form. For example, the Dunker's Cultural Center I’ve done in Helsingborg, Sweden in 2002, has a multitude of roofs and they all respond to a particular function they house within. The center incorporates an art museum, a music school, a concert hall, a theater, a library, and another volume for administration. The skylights over the exhibition spaces look a certain way because they admit light from the north, which is the ideal light for exhibitions coming in indirectly. So, the skylights there are sculptural and functional at the same time. And the curving roof over the concert hall is used to enhance the sound reverberation. The complex is designed like a small city. And over the restaurant we could have any kind of roof so we invented a reason for an interesting form – we came up with a sundial with vertical openings and various side blinders which are placed around a circular tower to follow the sun’s path to capture the light to create a radiating pattern on the floor, which over the course of the day gradually fills the space with light. Throughout the day the space is animated by sunlight. The idea of animation with the light came first and the sculptural roof was designed to make it possible and not the other way around.
VB: The composition of this complex is very reminiscent of your father’s work.
KU: Yes, instead of making a box-like building and subdividing it, the project has been sorted out into different rooms, each with a unique character. The idea of having each space a different character was a direct influence of my father. That led to leaving all the structures exposed to show how the building is put together. Also, various materials were chosen based on the form of each space. Everything in this project or other of my projects is no more precise to build than what anyone can do in their garage. Before asking carpenters to do something for one of my projects I ask myself – could I do this myself? If I can do something on my own, then anyone could do it. I want to be expressive by making choices that are not very complicated to achieve.
VB: Your father paid much attention to prefabrication systems, which was evident even in such sculptural forms as the Sydney Opera House. Do you continue to explore this theme in your own work?
KU: Absolutely. I try to avoid building complex shapes by dissecting them into smaller, repetitive parts with logic in their construction. I avoid things that are superfluous and not essential. I find a great deal of pleasure in finding a way to create something that looks complex and beautiful but is based on a repetition of very simple elements. Many great examples are found in nature where complex structures are based on such principles. We, as architects, are not using these ingenious systems enough. Architects now are using computers to invent completely new shapes, but it would be much more interesting to use them to analyze systems that exist in nature. I like questioning things. If you keep doing that you will for sure get new answers.
VB: There is a view that the Sydney Opera House could only happen in Australia. Why do you think that is?
KU: Before the late 1950s Australia was a British colony with no attempts to cultivate its own identity. Suddenly there was this improbable opportunity to show the entire world what this new nation was capable of. Of course, there was an incredible set of circumstances. My father didn’t even meet the requirements, he did not submit all required plans, but it was Eero Saarinen, an American architect who came late for the jury and saw the project in the rejects pile. He loved it and made an effort to convince everyone that it was the winner.
