Synopsis "Joy: Kim Utzon Architect"
- The first monograph by Kim Utzon, the son of Pritzker Prize-winning Danish architect J rn Utzon - Features a selection of twenty-five built and unbuilt institutional, commercial and residential projects developed throughout a thirty-five year practice - Provides a creative, spiritual and artistic overview of Kim Utzon's architectural journey, developed in partnership with longtime collaborator Torben Eskerod, an award-winning Danish photographer - The introduction by the art, architecture and design critic Aaron Betsky offers a comprehensive analysis of Utzon's architectural approach and achievements - Includes a foreword by the internationally renowned curator, critic and photography historian Gabriel Bauret in which he meditates on the connection between joy and the architectural experience while architecture writer James Moore McCown explores Kim Utzon Arkitekten's richly layered work in a wide-ranging interview that covers the firm's history from its founding to the present day. Kim Utzon can do without the drama. The white worlds he has created in Denmark and southern Sweden over the last few decades are stage sets for the ordered appearance of rational and reasonable human beings at work, at home, or at play. Clear in their composition, sequence, and scale, sensuous in their responseto light, and conducive to rest and reason more than anything else, theare a refinement of the Scandinavian Modern tradition in which he works. Combining sparse and light-filled rooms surrounded or defined by open grids with expressive roofs or objects, Utzon's work is able to make sense out of complex programs and create relaxed and continuous spaces. Bringing together the experiences he had traveling the world with his father, Jorn Utzon, the particular form of modernism that developed in the late 20th century in Denmark, and the American Postmodernism of architects such as Charles Moore, Kim Utzon has created refined modernist forms fully appropriate to the early 21st century.
