Utzonian houses.

Jorn Utzon's two houses, built on Majorca for himself and his family, have acquired almost mythic status among architects, for they have been seen by so few and the tales they have brought back have been so enthusiastic. Here they are set in the context of twentieth-century architecture in general, and the work of Utzon in particular.

Here are two houses facing the Mediterranean, completed in 1972 and 1994. Both speak of an enduring attitude toward design. They are responsive to use, their sites, climate and local building materials, and ignore both conceptual and post-modern debates. They were built by Jorn Utzon the celebrated architect of the Sydney Opera House and the Parliament Building, Kuwait, which together marked the period, 1950-70, of the general apogee of modernism.

Utzon has a deep attachment to the island of Majorca, and has known it for much of his life. Built for his family's use outside the village of Puerto Petro -- which is built around a natural harbour and lies some 1.5 kilometres away -- the first house, Can Lis, is set among indigenous myrtle and pine trees on the seaward side of a clifftop road, the coastline below is spectacular and highly indented. The building consists of five detached volumes linked by a wall: all are built of local piedra mares, a hard sandstone which varies from gold to pink in colour.(1) It is sawn quite regularly, and at first sight appears to be the most beautiful concrete block. When used in an exposed position, or kept damp, as in paving or planters, its colour becomes a pronounced rose, even iron-red, and the lime mortar is a similar hue. All copings are finished with traditional Roman pantiles. Apart from its flat roofs and lack of a yard, the house could be mistaken for a small farm in the locality.

The plan is generated by function and climate. The loosely-linked pavilions bedrooms, sitting room, dining and an enclosed court -- form a wall to the road, broken by the entry porch. It is necessary to go outside to bedrooms, and eating can take place on a terrace, under loggias, or inside. Together, the pavilions chug like a train along their headland, each individually adjusting to its specific, fractional, alignment with the escarpment. Three low shards of field stone separate the building from untouched limestone karst. The view of the sea, the sounds of the pines above, and waves booming in the undercut cliff below reach everywhere.

The sitting room is the tallest pavilion, some 4 metres square; it derives a sacramental quality from its `function', contemplation of the sea. This is stated by the immovable crescent-shaped sofa, of polished stone like the floor, finished with white upholstery, and by the canting of the windows toward this one spot. The fire, placed as it is above the sea, roots the room to the rock. Like the windows, seemingly cut into the thickness of the stone,(2) the monastic, hewn quality of the masonry and the vaults above, suggest not just a place of great specificity, somewhere Balearic, but a cave, a place of profound withdrawal. The crescent-seat is aligned north-south, as is the semi-circular table in the west court, to receive the sun: a `compass' by the sea's horizon. The living room is the positive to the negative of the dining court. Flanking loggias, cooking and winter eating areas are disposed, cloister-like, on three sides of this platform. Its roof is the sky and its floor is scarred by the movement of furniture, the memory of summer days, open to that blue horizon.

Offered the choice of three sites, `beautiful, wonderful and paradise'(3) and feeling the occasional high humidity of their clifftop, Jorn and Lis Utzon handed Can Lis to their children and grandchildren, and took up the challenge of a mountainside. Can Feliz (pp53-55) surveys south-western Majorca like a lion. The house is reached from a small, fertile valley, winding up from the east to the north; a tapestry of small farms and glittering cisterna, threaded on one track. This zigzags finally over the shoulder of the mountain, into a wilder territory of rock, holm-oak, pine, myrtle and prickly pear, open to the distant sea.

Utzon's eyrie is a surprise, set within a surprise. There is a brief vista along the entrance facade, before the visitor's attention is held by a small court, glimpsed through an opening in the stone walls. A shaded pergola twists to the door; it is all low-key and small scale. The viewless, 2 m high hall closes down the scale and announces high stakes; the stonework is immaculate, walls if anything more bucolic than at Puerto Petro, floors certainly finer, white mortar joints separating hard cream limestone, vertically-boarded joinery, sparely detailed. This room then leads to two contrasting spaces.

To the left is a tall living room with pitched roof revealed and floor following the slope to the staggering view beyond. To the right is a more domestic and horizontal domain of kitchen, dining room and private sitting room, all under a dropped ceiling and linked to a majestic loggia or verandah. The living room is deep and theatrical, the upper work area having the air of a gallery to the lower stalls: the proscenium being undoubtedly the portico with its wonderful view. The arms of the mountain slope south, embracing a softer landscape of almond groves far below, a pueblo to the right, the sea beyond that: all is caught within one apparently unglazed opening. The eating area, a more open zone, presides over a smaller prospect: a play of terraces set with plants.

Below is the pool, its water held up to the sky and the distant sea. Beneath the level of its water is a terminal terrace built directly over a ruin, which was formerly on the site, the spot is marked by a chair. Movement along the contour is stopped internally by the bedrooms, and externally by a walled herb garden. Beyond to the west is untouched Mediterranean hillside.

The materials used by Utzon differ little from Majorcan vernacular. Load-bearing stone supports tiled roofs, extensive paving being also in stone. It is cut in blocks, 400 x 200 mm long, 100 or 200 mm thick. It can be laid up with a cavity and construction is simple. The face bears circular saw marks, a semicircle from each side, testament to the method by which it was won, and these catch the light.(4) Traditional timber beams and lintels are replaced by precise, precast concrete I-beams. These are ubiquitous throughout the island, supporting fencing, vine trellises, and small industrial sheds and barns. Between them span 600 mm curved Catalan tiles. These in turn support flat tiles, benched in concrete and flat-tiled in the first house, sloping roofs in the second. Double beams support parapets; they can be left open to conceal split cane blinds, or joined by flat terracotta tiles, and these, only, are left unpainted. Overflows are detailed from half-tiles to discharge via traditional tiled downpipes to cisterna, water conservation being a feature of Majorca.

The construction is left to speak for itself, the only modification being that concrete beams and undersides of pink Catalan tiles are painted white. Its eloquence is enhanced by a number of details. Windows are undivided sheets of glass, set within timber frames on to, rather than within, openings; seen from inside they do not register visually. At Puerto Petro the pyramidal stone kitchen ventilator is an Utzon touch, but the chimney caps in concrete emulate the local detail of inclined slabs of limestone: local not just to the southeast part of the island, but to the immediate area around Santanyi. In all parts of the house, tables and benches are made of concrete, shaped for comfort, and tiled, in blue or brown-and-white, simultaneously alluding to Gaudi and Arabic pattern. Their use becomes a secondary theme, or left motif, throughout the design, `furnishing' the terrace with dresser and table, expressing temporality (moon-shaped openings), or acting as a symbol of welcome; the street name is Cala Media Luna.

Where the first house made use of such canonic modernist features as flat roofs, and walls as clear planes, Utzon has replaced them in the new house with very Majorcan pitches, stepped gables and heavily-projecting Roman tile copings. The design loses none of its poetic power, but it takes on a light, Moorish, quality. Utzon seems to be saying that if it works, why must we reinvent it? Its pitches result however from spatial intentions.

It is clear that the construction is tuned, in thermal mass, plan form, and ease of cross-ventilation, to the Mediterranean seasons. Both houses are ground-coupled, in fact joined to bed rock, and this, together with heavy mass, helps create a thermal flywheel. Both living rooms can be opened by shutters to the north through their great enveloping walls, aiding the natural air movement from below. Utzon works with the intense light also, avoiding glare by eliminating fenestration and always placing glass in an interstitial zone. This grades light down across reveals or glowing verandahs. Above all, he frets the monumental quality of his masonry to become striated, to turn into columns, and these mediate between the sheltered interiors and the horizon of sea or landscape. He creates layers, so that a lyrical edge of dancing light and half-masked, intense strips of the place are found, between full exterior and protected in-dwelling.

Utzon wrote of the Mexican rock-like feeling of the plateau in an important essay, `Platforms and Plateaus' in Zodiac 10 in 1962. He experienced Mayan pyramids immediately after meeting Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in 1949. He also visited what are now called Anasazi mesa-pueblos in the American Southwest. As a sailor and son of a naval architect, he would have reacted strongly to their layered unshaped timbers and the tilting canvas sails set upon the mighty prow of Taliesin West.(5) It is clear that here was the genesis not just for the great platform and white vaults of Sydney, but the powerful sculpted bases for the Kingo courtyard houses, near Elsinore (1956), and those at Fredensborg (1962-63). Although apparently low-key, the houses are in fact major interventions, with some courts being held up some 3 m above the green sward which seemingly breaks against their flanks.

A similar sensibility informs the Majorcan work, reinforced perhaps by the Carthuja, or Carthusian Monastery at Valldemosa, where Chopin and George Sands stayed in 1820. The entire monastery is built out from the contours, ending at a 6 m retaining wall, giving the gardens of the former monks' cells a majestic prospect of mountains and almond groves.

Utzon also quotes from his own work in the second house. The section of the living room recalls a projected apartment tower, at Elineberg, Halsingborg (1954), where higher floor levels were increasingly stepped to provide a downward view of the sea, rather than a horizontal prospect of glaring sky. Lastly, in its strong terraces Can Feliz also invokes his very first house in the wilds of North Zealand (Hellebaek, 1952), with its pool held up to the view; a theme traceable to both Wright and Barragan.(6) Ultimately,Utzon locates the play of dwelling by the Mediterranean upon these immense platforms, the one a received 20 m high rock, the other a worked terrace, a stage on the contours. It is this, under the sky, inscribed with the patterns of the encircling stone and roof shelter above, that gives the work its simultaneously archaic yet minimally modern timelessness.

Notes

(1) The principal working quarry is between Campos and Santanyi, 15 km away. In the former, me entire old fabric is of piedra mares, seemingly hewn from me solid, like an Indian cave temple. Here, it has a pink colour, grey where copings are unprotected. At Santanyi, and especially the church, the colour is a full orange-gold.

(2) The impression of a setting for ecclesiastical ritual and fortress-like wall thickness is given by the internal ambulatory, and the windows and fire being placed outside the volume. The latter are ingeniously accommodated within a porch or colonnade.

(3) Conversation of author with Jorn Utzon, April 1996. His knowledge of the island is intimate and eye for the site, sure. The land was bought in 1971, so the plan to build and design was long contemplated.

(4) The quarry is as precise a cut hole as the blocks which are taken from it. The working bed, absolutely level, is cut, cries-cross, by moving jig, like the pattern of Utzon's floors, along 400 and 200 mm centres, and each stratum drilled and split off horizontally. Blocks are available riven or dressed, ie circular-sawn from each face. The first house was built bye Fellanitz contractor, the second by masons from Estramadura, who worked with great and commitment.

(5) See Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1995. Chapter 8, `Jorn Utzon: Transcultural Form and the Tectonic Metaphor'; and John Sergeant, `MA: Composition and reflex in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright', ARQ, London, No 4: Vol 1, 1996, pp38-50.

(6) The obvious references are the Jester house project, Palos Verdes, California, 1938, and Horse Ranch, Mexico City, 1966-68.