JORN UTZON

The career of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon (Copenhagen, 1918) is founded upon two essential convictions: building structure and landscape. With the material tradition of the master builder, Utzon has created an architecture that reconciles the wisdom of vernacular architecture with the buildings of Antiquity, an architecture which has, in the visual eloquence of the Sydney Opera House, given us one of the 20th century's most important buildings. His professional itinerary kicks off with a period in which his projects have a progressive tendency towards their rapport with the landscape. His second phase is typified by the formal and constructional discoveries of massive platforms and lightweight roofs. Meanwhile, in his third period Utzon arrives, in his so-called additive architecture, at the synthesis of geometry, modulation and standardised production that, in the island refuges on Majorca, brings international recognition to a tenacious and lyrical trajectory.