Can Lis, Jørn Utzon

In Sydney, Jørn Utzon made an early—and largely unknown—sketch of the life he wanted to create. 

The paper is covered in vivid scenes of sprawling terraces and the soaring roofs of a home on sloping terrain, backed by a rugged coastal landscape. Soft pencil lines are full of thoughts that grow like reeds and grass in new directions, but a small drawing at the edge of the paper nurtures something more elemental. 

Utzon has depicted himself and his wife, Lis, naked under a sky full of the intense southern sun. Like Poseidon and Aphrodite, they are eating grapes and playing music on an open terrace. Is this paradise?  

Back in his native Denmark, Utzon had already built a remarkable home surrounded by forest for himself and his family. As the country’s first open-plan house, the Hellebæk House (1952) was received as something of a revelation, and yet the home was clearly inundated with an intuitive, crafty, and unpedigreed approach to modern building in line with Utzon’s personal manner. However, when he moved to Australia in 1962 to oversee the construction of the Sydney Opera House, he started planning something that appears more deliberately fundamental, as if bent on elevating a quiet life in nature to a nearly religious experience.

A NEW ARCHITECTURE

Plans for the Australian home, now referred to as the Bayview House (1962–66), were scrapped when political pressure from the government of New South Wales prompted Utzon to leave Australia abruptly in 1966. For several years, the family moved around—perhaps a little rootlessly—between Denmark, Sweden, and Hawaii, but the intention to settle by the sea lived on. When the chance for a more permanent residence came along, the Bayview sketch offered a preliminary concept for Can Lis (1971–73), widely recognised as one of the most important homes of late-20th century architecture.  

In Utzon’s view, the meditative and organic character of Can Lis can be linked to an instinct for humanist ideals that emerged in the aftermath of two World Wars. ‘We were optimistic because the war was over’, Utzon recalled, but the terror of the war also resulted in a widely shared impulse to begin again, to find restoration in nature, and to push the discourse of modern architecture beyond the ‘Corbusier-defined white boxes’ that now seemed so reductive and sterile. Utzon and his Nordic fellows had seen ‘Dresden bombed flat during the Second World War’. His mentor, Alvar Aalto, had witnessed the destruction of towns and cities in Finland. ‘He saw them all burn, saw his Finnish friends in the ultimate distress’, Utzon wrote. ‘He had seen them seek shelter under sheets of corrugated iron’.

While modern architecture in Europe had evolved with a reverence for functionalism and the technocratic possibilities of industrialisation, Utzon and other pioneers of a distinctly Nordic approach to modernism began considering the importance of ‘a poetic superstructure’, as the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund put it. That structure included a pragmatic responsiveness towards local traditions and materials, forging a sense of place, reintroducing sculptural qualities, and a richness of details and symbolic qualities. These architects travelled extensively for inspiration, hoping to restore an existential foothold for architecture, a sense of belonging in contemporary building. While earlier generations had entertained the idea of breaking away from history completely, Utzon came to understand himself as part of a historical continuum—a modern approach that insisted on something as timeless as creating spaces that nurture the soul.
 

SAND, SEA, SUN 

When an architect designs and builds for himself, he has the opportunity to go to the edge of his own imagination. This is especially true when it comes to Can Lis, which feels both ‘new’ and timeless, more closely linked to Utzon’s deep affinity for topographical villages in Morocco, Mexico’s platform temples, and monasteries in Japan than most of his other buildings.  

According to popular lore, the Utzons found the cliffside where Can Lis rests on a drive along small country roads. Lis, who had a flair for languages, asked some local farmers if there was any land for sale in the area. Out of three available plots, the couple bought two, including a rocky outcropping on a cliffside that overlooks the endlessness of the Mediterranean Sea 20 metres below. From the road, Can Lis doesn’t attract much attention. The architect has deliberately hidden his sanctuary behind high, sandy walls, but when a small gate opens and your gaze is fixed on la media luna, the crescent moon, you know immediately that this a place for dwelling poetically. 

Sprawling in two directions, Can Lis is a single compound made up of smaller, detached structures built from stone blocks cut directly from the rock on which the house stands. All the functions of home are divided into separate domains: a kitchen with an adjoining courtyard, a living room, a dormitory, and a small atrium appear as individual houses in a village-like complex linked by small terraces, plateaus, and paths. The scale is surprisingly small, almost intimate. Beds are recessed into walls. There is a small pantry, a dining area, and a space for cooking, which is arguably spartan. There is no TV room, no pool area, no heating other than a single fireplace. It is in many ways a challenging house where certain modern comforts are purposefully omitted. Can Lis is a place to delight in the little things: the golden light that gives the porous walls visual depth, the changing seasons, swimming in the sea, watching a sunrise. The architecture is down-to-earth and unpretentious, yet a cosmic feeling emphasises that this is not a house: It’s a temple.  

‘HAPPINESS IS COUNTED IN SECONDS’

A mysterious mix, Can Lis is both grounded and sublime. There’s a classic order here, and you sense how elemental forces linger in everything. The house’s anchor, the living room, is perhaps the best example of this duality, a space that could easily be compared to both caves and chapels.  

Its entrance is located in a shaded courtyard under a covered walkway, like a portico, that is supported by a row of columns. The portico creates a small compression of space before entering the living room, which opens upwards and outwards: Upwards towards a white, vaulted ceiling, and outwards towards the horizon, framed by a wraparound sandstone wall penetrated by five deep, frameless window niches.   

Utzon described how, when he designed the living room, he would visit a grotto that lies directly beneath the house where he could sit and enjoy the tension between the introspection of the cave and the endlessness of the horizon. This memory is relived in Can Lis’ interior, where everything is orientated towards the sea, framed by telescopic windows. At the centre of the living room, where guests are most palpably surrounded by the landscape and the stone world of the Mediterranean, a large half–moon-shaped sofa invites you to rest. There is the smell of earth, stone, and soot from the fireplace, and a complete silence resonates until, through a small window perched high up on the western wall, a ray of sun suddenly creates a fiery streak across the wall. This play of light happens every day, a small piece of theatre that stages the earth’s orbit for a few, cosmic minutes. Utzon considered the house to be a kind of timekeeper that could hold on to a moment and remind us that ‘happiness is counted in seconds’. 

AFTERLIFE

For a quarter of a century, Can Lis was the permanent centre of Jørn and Lis’ life, but when the architect’s eyes became sensitive to the intense light by the sea, the family decided to build Can Feliz (1992–94), the House of Happiness, further inland on a mountainside by S’Horta.  

When Utzon succumbed to a heart attack in 2008, all of his houses—the Hellebæk House, Can Lis, and Can Feliz—were passed on to his three children. Can Lis, his most recognised masterpiece, was acquired by the Utzon Foundation in 2011 to preserve the architect’s work for generations to come. Today, the house serves as an endowed residence and has become a pilgrimage site for architects and artists from around the world.    

While both of Utzon’s Mallorcan homes reflect a propensity towards nature, there is no mention of words like ‘sustainability’, ‘off-grid’, or ‘simple living’ in his private archive. More than a reflection of postwar idealism, Utzon’s nod to paradise is an early and particularly fine example of a new thoughtfulness in architecture, one inspired by place. With Can Lis, the architect has gone to great lengths not just to inhabit nature, but to create a space where a more authentic way of living can step into the light and flourish.