Utzon Center – Architecture that Sets Sails
Danish architect Jørn Utzon is famous for the Sydney Opera House that billows like sails in the harbor. But there’s another building that perhaps was closer to Utzon’s heart. Utzon Center was the last building that he designed in the city where he grew up on the northern tip of Jutland. And just as the opera in Sydney, the building in Aalborg is also inspired by the sailing ships that used to fill the harbor on the Limfjord. It was completed in 20018 together with his son Kim Utzon and houses temporary exhibitions on design and architecture and the Utzon Archives.
Jørn Utzon (1918 – 2008) was born in Copenhagen but grew up in Aalborg. His father was a naval architect and he thought about a career in the navy but luckily for us he ended up at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen and went on to work with Gunnar Asplund in Stockholm. He had a keen interest in architecture from all over the world and met many key American figures in Modernist architecture and design such as Ray and Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright but also travelled and studied the architecture of India, Mexico, Morocco and China. Utzon’s designs are organic, expressive and sculptural and of the Nordic architects Alvar Aalto was perhaps the one that was most important to him.
“I like to be on the edge of the possible,” – Jørn Utzon
In 1950 he set up his own studio in Copenhagen. In 1957 he won the competition for the new Opera House in Sydney and where he kept a studio until 1966 when he walked away from the project. However troubled it was, it cemented his international reputation and led to a string of projects all over the world. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, an honor for a living architect that he shared with Oscar Niemayer and received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2003. But perhaps Utzon Center was the most important building for him, the one that closed the loop and looked to the future. It wasn’t planned as a museum over the most famous Danish architect but as a center for architecture and design of the future to be encountered, explored and discussed. (Image: Utzon Center in Aalborg. Photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj.)
Utzon Center, Aalborg, Denmark
https://utzoncenter.dk/en