Landscape in the house:
Performances of landscape in the courtyard house
John Roberts
School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle
Abstract
The courtyard house is a dwelling type as old as cities, open to sun, rain and
air, and containing landscape elements; interpretation of the courtyard type
challenges architectural methodology to embrace landscape ideas. The
courtyard is an architectural setting where landscape elements may be said to
‘perform’, compounding and enriching everyday experience for inhabitants.
This paper investigates how landscape ‘performs’ in the courtyard house in
order to affirm the value of landscape not only as architectural context but as
valuable and active content for architecture.
Ann Whiston Spirn in The Language of Landscape notes spatial concepts
from landscape discourse, such as territory, boundary, path, etc. which she
names ‘performance spaces’, essential to human habitats, and generated by
human agency. These and other performance spaces of landscape,
transposed into architecture, arguably tie together human action and
landscape within architectural methodology.
While Le Corbusier incorporated landscape elements in the composition of
the Villa Savoye, Alvar Aalto, in his 1926 essay ‘From Doorstep to Living
Room’, idealized ‘the unity of the room, the external wall and the garden’;
throughout his career Aalto involved landscape elements and strategies in his
architecture, revisiting and reworking the courtyard idea. Aalto’s architectural
landscape strategies in turn underlie Jørn Utzon’s designs for courtyard
houses embodying the performative capacities of landscape in architecture.
In recent architectural theory, Alexander observes principles or patterns of the
courtyard type; Rapoport reviews problems of enclosure and landscape in the
courtyard house; and Appleton’s notion of ‘foraging-ground’ provides a
framework of landscape symbolism relevant to the courtyard type.
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This paper suggests that an understanding of the performance of landscape
in courtyard house architecture expands an understanding of architectural
aesthetics. The inclusion of landscape within architectural thinking improves
understanding of architecture’s mediating role between human society and
the natural world.
Introduction: The courtyard house and landscape
The courtyard house is an architectural dwelling type of great antiquity, a domestic
accommodation incorporating one or more roofless rooms or courtyards, where
landscape elements are transplanted from the natural world.1 Housed inside architectural
space, these landscape elements from outside – light, moving air, water, plant materials –
can be said to ‘perform’ active roles inside the work of architecture. In the courtyard,
landscape elements act within architectural space, animating its stillness with motion,
illuminating its darkness, cooling its heated masses and volumes, and putting food and
other pleasures of vegetation within the domestic world.
Landscape architect Ann Whiston Spirn names numerous spatial concepts from
landscape discourse – ‘territory, boundary, path, gateway, meeting place, prospect,
refuge, source and sign’2 – as ‘performance spaces’, essential to human needs and
habitats, and generated by the biological, social and spiritual actions of people.3 The idea
of landscape’s performance aspects set within architecture not only ties human action
and landscape together in architectural discourse, but also reveals architecture’s task of
mediating between humankind and the natural world.
Spirn also links landscape design with the performative space of theatre: ‘Theatre is both
flight from reality and concentration of reality; in that paradox lies a particular parallel
between theatre and garden.’4 Landscape elements – garden, wall, vegetation, terrace,
pond, vistas, sky, etc. – set in architecture can be dramatic flights from architectural
ontology, dramatic condensations of landscape concepts and their natural-world origins,
within an architectural reality.
Spirn argues that the poetics of landscape materials and their sensuous qualities are
significant: ‘materials arouse senses, carry meaning, pose limits.’5 She proposes that
landscape elements (rock, air, water, fire, vegetation) intertwine with human senses to
carry meaning: ‘The meanings of materials are both inherent and invented, traditional and
potential.’6 The sensuous qualities of landscape materials would appear to hold
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significances generally beyond the scope of architecture, but of considerable value to the
aesthetics of architecture and the pleasure of its daily experience. The everyday domestic
setting of the courtyard house has implicit social significance: the house is the centre of
family living, across societies and eras.
This paper’s notion of the performance of landscape differs from David Leatherbarrow’s
idea of architectural ‘performance’ used in his essay ‘Unscripted Performances’.
Leatherbarrow argues that a building may act ‘to “house” activities and experiences’,
such as lectures, cooking, trials, etc.;7 yet he distances himself from these
‘anthropological predicates’, being more concerned with the performance of the
architectural object, ‘the reality of the building itself – especially that architectural reality
that exists regardless of my interests or yours.’8 This paper is concerned more with
human experience of landscape elements in the space of the courtyard house.
This argument is illuminated by Spirn’s sense that landscape performance spaces are
‘basic to human habitats’, and is informed by John Dixon Hunt’s suggestion that the
designed landscape needs ‘an addressee . . . a spectator, visitor, or inhabitant,
somebody to feel, to receive, to sense its existence and its qualities.’9 This ancient, pre-
urban drama of humankind encountering nature’s providence and ruthlessness –
performed and re-performed, or latent and waiting to be performed, in the courtyard
space – makes the courtyard house a valuable and interesting vehicle for studying
landscape connected with architecture, to enable and develop new understandings of
architectural history.10
History and the courtyard house
Norbert Schoenauer dismisses Abbé Laugier’s notion that ‘a man invented the primitive
rectangular hut’; he maintains that ‘the earliest huts were round and most likely built by
women’ – at least a quarter of a million years ago.11 Ten to twelve thousand years ago,
four alluvial regions – the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, the Nile, and the Hwang Ho
and Yangtze valleys – supported the earliest cities. Rather than round huts, angular
courtyard houses suited the first cities, for likely reasons: dwelling density; privacy and
security; a pleasing micro-climate of plants and water; and religious symbolism of
paradise.12 Ardalan and Bakhtiar observe that the Persian garden and courtyard are
concepts of paradise:13 the bagh, the open garden, is the royal park, ‘a supreme luxury’;14
its spatial complement is the hayat, the enclosed courtyard of the caravanserai, the
mosque and the family house. The courtyard comprises a ‘more feasible urban form,
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capable of providing that basic contact with nature’.15 The courtyard type is found in the
earliest settlements – Mohenjo-Daro, Cairo, Isfahan, Beijing – and later in Greece and the
Roman Empire. In the West the courtyard or atrium vanished from European house
architecture after the fall of Rome, and was succeeded in the Medieval era by outward-
looking individual dwellings that revealed, rather than concealed, wealth and status.16
Twentieth-century courtyard houses
In twentieth-century architecture the courtyard is found in some house architecture,
including Rudolf Schindler’s Schindler-Chase house (1921-22), Wright’s Los Angeles
houses of the 1920s, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929), and Mies van der Rohe’s
‘courtyard’ houses of the 1930s.17 The courtyard idea was developed significantly in the
1930s by Alvar Aalto and in the 1950s by Jørn Utzon, related to ideas of landscape and
nature. The work and ideas of Aalto and Utzon provide evidence to argue that the
courtyard house presents a model of appropriate scale and economy, adaptable for many
styles of living, and with aesthetic dividends connected with the natural world.
Utzon has outlined his interest in dealing with ‘the important zone’ between inside and
outside: ‘A very particular issue. All these transitions. From the sea to the house. From
nature to man-made. From the terrace to the sitting-room, from the public to the private.’18
Learning from both Le Corbusier’s freestanding boxes and Aalto’s courtyards, Utzon was
concerned with how ‘all these transitions’ might be included in the work of architecture.
Spatial transitions guide Le Corbusier’s description of his early visit to the Casa Del Noce,
a Pompeiian atrium house. Having entered ‘the little vestibule which frees your mind from
the street’, he finally attains the garden, ‘the climax of the journey.’19 The experience is
definitive: ‘At the far end is the brilliance of the garden seen through the peristyle which
spreads out this light with a large gesture . . . you have entered the house of a Roman . . .
you are conscious of Architecture.’20 The spaces are scenes in a promenade
architecturale, a dramatic narrative that has a garden, not a room, as its most heightened
experience.21
The flat roof with a garden was one of Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points of a New Architecture’:
the Villa Savoye is illustrated by Curtis as a building both set in a landscape (of
vegetation, paths and sun) and containing a landscape;22 its first floor, a piano nobile, is a
‘roof terrace, a sort of outdoor room concealed from the exterior’.23 Samuel finds ‘visual
confusion’ in this ‘hanging garden’, which is ‘a very strange space full of details that
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deceive the eye.’24 Yet its big window faces south, it contains greenery and furniture and
has views beyond to distant landscape: Le Corbusier recognized landscape in
architecture, and designed courtyard spaces within his architecture that contain
landscape elements; His legacy inspired both Aalto and Utzon.25
Alvar Aalto: doorstep, courtyard and living room
Alvar Aalto celebrated the ambiguity of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau
(1925) in his 1926 essay ‘From doorstep to living room’ – a manifesto that foreshadowed
later architectural strategies: ‘Is it a hall, beautifully open to the exterior and taking its
dominating character from the trees, or is it a garden built into the house, a garden
room?’26 Fresh from his Italian honeymoon, Aalto urged a new synthesis of indoors and
outdoors, gardens and rooms, to reinvent Finnish domestic architecture – by ‘fitting the
building into the landscape better’, and ensuring that ‘the interiors of the building open
outward’.27
Aalto chose as illustration a Fra Angelico Annunciation, ‘because of the harmony
between the figures and the forms of both the building and the garden.’28 He admired the
painting’s ideal unity of room, wall and garden, and the figures in the portico composed
‘so as to give the human figure prominence and express her state of mind.’29 Curtis
suggests that for Aalto, buildings were ‘intermediaries between human life and the natural
landscape’, and that the courtyard was a basic social archetype, a kind of ‘harbour’.30 In
three works, the Helsinki house (1937), the Villa Mairea (1939) and the Muuratsalo
summerhouse (1952), a partly enclosed courtyard space is interposed between an L of
relatively ordinary rooms – although the Villa Mairea has an extraordinary living area, ‘a
forest architecturally transformed’31 – and a landscape beyond. Each courtyard included
wholly different structures (respectively garden, pool, firepit), was dominated by different
materials (grass, water, brick) and enclosed by different boundary elements (wooden
rails, stone fence, brick wall); these courtyard spaces are animated with landscape
elements or fragments abstracted and concentrated from natural, urban and vernacular
sources.
Near Aalto’s Helsinki house, his Munkkiniemi studio (1955) contains an extraordinary
courtyard, conceived and made literally for performance – ‘available to all associates for
lectures, good fellowship and recreation.’32 The studio’s meeting room, physically seated
on a natural granite bench, looks through a large curved wall of windows to a miniature
Classical theatre with stone steps, surrounded on three sides by white buildings, open on
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its left flank to garden and trees, and taking advantage of the site’s south-facing slope.
Not only natural elements and seasonal changes, but also human performers – including
Aalto himself – were to animate the enclosed outdoor space.
Jørn Utzon: squares, courtyards, streets and gardens
Jørn Utzon spoke in 1988 of contrasting lessons about inside-outside spatiality learned
from Le Corbusier and Aalto:
A significant change has been the rediscovery of the open spaces between
buildings, such as squares, courtyards, streets and gardens, in contrast to the
previously prevailing view held, for instance, by Le Corbusier. There was a
concentration on the house itself as an isolated, detached building in a park,
something you could walk around.
In reality Aalto was quite without such prejudice. Numerous times in his
projects he has shown us the relation between buildings, squares and open
spaces. He often built complexes around an inner patio, around an open
courtyard . . . If these ‘in-between’ spaces are treated as an inseparable part
of the whole concept, the experience provided by the architecture is greatly
enriched.33
The opportunity for landscape performance in patios and open spaces was demonstrated
in Aalto’s house architecture, which influenced Utzon’s courtyard houses. Jaime Ferrer
Forès observes the connection between the two, noting that in Utzon’s work the courtyard
‘enhances the transition between the building and the landscape as a way of grounding
the building in the place.’34 Utzon wrote that ‘the courtyard is the centre of family life’;35 he
used the square courtyard plan to locate people in a particular place in two Danish
projects, the Kingo houses at Helsingør (1957-59) and the Fredensborg terraces
(1965).36 The Kingo houses engage with a propitious landscape of lake, slopes and
levelled ground; the Fredensborg development, a retirement community for Danish
expatriates, has a ‘green fingers’ site plan, with interlocking fingers of housing and green
space over a grassed slope. Preceding and underpinning these two projects are the
drawings and text for the unbuilt housing project for Skåne (1953), where Utzon used
narrative and drawings to sketch a community of characters whose lives and passions
were housed in versions of the square plan courtyard house.37
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Utzon described his design method to a group of Danish students:
. . . the most important thing of all, which is that you are able to imagine a life
lived by people before you begin to design the house . . . If I’m to design a
room or something or other, then I sit down and think that, first of all, in some
acceptable order, we have to arrange chairs where those people are to sit. If
they are to sit around a large round table, then you make sure there is
overhead light on them, and you open up a crack so they can look out over
the countryside on one side. In that way you can slowly form an idea of a
room or a house by always trying to see how the people who are to live in a
house work or sit together or alone.38
Utzon’s design process was to dream up people living in rooms, at tables in kitchens, in
trees, in sheds, in yards; he oriented their rooms and designed their windows for views
and for natural light. These design acts were fundamental to Utzon’s process of locating
people in the landscape.
Utzon’s Kingo houses
The Kingo houses appear plain, without architectural flamboyance; Rafael Moneo says
that ‘Utzon’s architecture cannot really be called theatrical. Yet it is a splendid framework
for us to live in and from which to observe the outside world.’39 Each compact house is a
vessel of modular rooms facing frontally into walled outdoor space. Oriented for light,
warmth and views, each house serves as a habitable sunny buttress from which to enjoy
and live in the garden and view the ‘borrowed scenery’ in the middle and far distance to
the south, seen over walls and through stepped breaks in the walls.40 House plans
demonstrate repeated basic modules (bedroom, kitchen), and improvised designs of
living spaces and bedrooms.41 This is an architectural design process which considers
and brings together ancient models, people’s lives, and natural site, to make settings for
contemporary life – rather than a ‘Nordic genius for the sensitive handling of locale,
landscape, light and natural materials’, as Curtis has hesitantly generalized.42
Entry is into the northeast or northwest elbow of each house (according to orientation),
with bath, heating, kitchen and entry hall efficiently occupying the corner of the L-plan
house; bedrooms extend along the east-facing wall, living areas open to the south. Room
forms and enclosure exploit the principles of Utzon’s own ‘Expansiva’ modular planning
and building system.43 Views and access extend through generous windows and doors. A
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replanted ‘wilderness’ landscape of grasses, shrubs and mature trees thrives just outside
courtyard walls.
The house acts as a vessel for living, a hull or protective ‘husk’ – deriving from the
Germanic etymology of hus, house.44 This compact ‘housing’ is embedded with spaces,
implements and machines for living; beyond its indoor zone, but within the house walls,
the drama of people, climate and vegetation is performed through days and seasons.
This zone can also be seen within Jay Appleton’s notion of foraging-ground, that ‘outer
zone of our habitat’ to which humans are attached, between house and landscape.45
The outward visual connection through the wall recalls both the Japanese garden’s trick
of shakkei or ‘borrowed landscape’, using neighbouring or distant trees as part of a vista,
or the Chinese garden’s element of ‘borrowed scenery’, jie jing, a view of a greater
landscape of water, forest or mountains, within or beyond walls.46 This outward view to
south, east or west, enabled by stepped plans and elevations, distinguishes Kingo from
traditional walled courtyard houses, closed to the outer world; it also sets Kingo apart
from Aalto’s singular examples, where the outer corner is built up as at Muuratsalo, or left
open for the viewer’s gaze to wander into the forest, as at the Villa Mairea.47 Utzon uses
(perhaps borrows) the physical matter of the built community as an asset for individual
experience: neighbouring high walls give shelter and privacy; when boundary walls are
cut away to frame views and access, the drama of landscape is multiplied, achieving
social openness and the aesthetic dividend of vistas of horizon and sky.
Chinese gardens are also characterized by walls – defining, enclosing and protecting the
garden, and differentiating it from the outside world.48 In prospect-refuge terms, Appleton
describes the garden wall as ‘the most potent refuge symbolism associated with the
garden’; real or imagined refuge is reinforced by a tall, solid garden wall.49 At the same
time, openings in a garden wall both symbolize and achieve good prospect: they appear
to have the potential to offer valuable outward views, and they also attract the eye
outward, framing a vista through the solid barrier of the wall.50
Utzon’s stepped wall openings were intensely and laboriously considered. Utzon worked
with Jørn Palle Schmidt, both inside each courtyard, considering planting, views,
orientation and exposure, and outside, estimating the form, heights and overall visual
effect of the walls in the landscape, designing each wall profile at Fredensborg.51 Weston
notes Utzon’s process: ‘courtyard walls were individually designed by sitting in each
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space and assessing its specific opportunities and constraints in terms of views, privacy,
protection from wind and exposure to sun’; the result of this direct participation, adds
Weston, ‘has an effortless ease and naturalness rarely encountered in housing designed
on a drawing-board.’52
On a topographically rich site, silhouettes and shapes of bounding walls are seen
together with house outlines, and with the cross walls, rooflines and chimneys of other
houses. Yellow-ochre bricks would help render light wall surfaces against dark trees and
rooms and mottled terra-cotta roofs, while shadows cast shapes on bounding walls.53The
controlled unity of this externally viewed composition recalls Utzon’s interest in Le
Corbusier’s ‘buildings to be walked around and looked at’, as well as his fascination with
the unified earth buildings of the Berber settlements of the High Atlas in Morocco.54
The Kingo dwellings are almost a kind of anti-house: the combination of square footprint,
L plan, limited materials, skillion roof, constrained area (15m by 15m square block, 102
m2 house), and external extravagance reduced to wall height and opening, entails an
external uniformity and an internal regularity of dwelling design. Faber notes Utzon’s
fascination with some ‘very simple and brief’ old Turkish building regulations: ‘in a hilly
country, no-one is allowed to block the view of existing houses’; in addition, ‘all family
houses should have a completely private courtyard that no-one else could look into.’55
Utzon anticipated that these two principles would offer character to the whole
development and safeguard individual houses. The development continues to be also
carefully regulated and monitored, in its overall form, wall cutouts and silhouette, and also
in terms of design, details, colour and planting maintenance.
Few Kingo house interiors are photographed in the literature, compared to the many
images showing children, animals, courtyard gardens, vegetation, lake and seasonal
changes. These houses offer low-key performances as objects – they are more a generic
hull, or a primordial genotype, resembling the Nubian courtyard houses or the Beijing
siheyuan which inspired Utzon for this project.56 The house embodies and realizes the
elemental purpose of sheltering people living in an accommodating place; the courtyard,
with landscape abstracted and performing inside, and glimpsed beyond, realizes Utzon’s
ideal of a ‘centre of family life’.
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Theory and the courtyard type: Rapoport, Alexander, Appleton
The courtyard house has also attracted occasional theoretical attention over recent
decades. Amos Rapoport considers problems of traditional and contemporary versions of
the courtyard type; Christopher Alexander describes ‘patterns’ or principles of the
courtyard type; while Jay Appleton considers the associated ideas of foraging-ground and
hortus conclusus related to house and courtyard spaces.
In a recent paper, Rapoport is interested in clarifying questions about the nature of
dwellings, and tries to define what is actually meant by ‘courtyard housing’; he reviews
the courtyard house type in terms of privacy, access, space use, and climatic
performance, and defines the type against the freestanding house, an emerging emblem
of individual wealth and status in developing countries.57 He argues that the sustainability
and performance of the courtyard house, and its future survival, are linked to culturally
specific variables, ‘a rigidly maintained set of rules (whether of behaviour, roles, space
use, organization of time, privacy, etc.) which make such systems work, but which may
be increasingly difficult to maintain today.’58 Rapoport, generally pessimistic about the
future of the courtyard house in a modernizing world, does not mention the courtyard
houses of Aalto or Utzon. And although landscape-related aesthetics are not within his
method, Rapoport praises the universality of the courtyard house across localities, social
settings and eras, and endorses the type’s potential as a model for dwelling: ‘I would
suggest that anyone could live in an ancient Greek house’.59 An unnamed Greek village
is depicted in Utzon’s Additive Architecture, where the whitewashed walls and courtyards
of its timeless courtyard dwellings repose with natural, vernacular and architectural
elements: with beach, hillside, horizon and sky; with paths, stairs and terraces; and with
the ruins of an ancient acropolis and temple on the hilltop above.60
Alexander, in A Pattern Language (1979), in the pattern ‘Courtyards Which Live’,
diagnoses shortcomings of contemporary courtyards: insufficient ambiguity, too few
doors, too much enclosure.61 He recommends certain courtyard principles: space for ‘the
many different positions one can take up in each courtyard, depending on mood and
climate’; courtyard edges and corners ‘ambiguous and richly textured’; and ‘in some
places the walls of the building open, and connect the courtyard with the inside of the
building, directly.’62 These landscape-related patterns, recalling the Fra Angelico
Annunciations, both suggest, and empathize with, human activity. Weston observes that
Utzon’s Can Lis house, Majorca (1971) ‘abounds in Alexander’s “patterns”’;63 in Utzon’s
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courtyard houses, patterns can also be found, performing and gaining aesthetic dividends
in domestic space.
Geographer Jay Appleton, connecting house architecture with landscape archetypes,
sees houses as ‘the nesting-places of our own species, the direct linear descendant of a
phenomenon of immense antiquity.’64 Adjacent landscape space is equivalent to the
foraging-ground, ‘that outer zone of our habitat with which we enjoy an equally important
if quite different relationship.’65 Appleton argues also that humans are attached to both
house and landscape ‘by deep bonds of association’ involving attraction, anxiety,
repulsion and other feelings’.66 This complex association with environment is exemplified
in the enclosed garden, the medieval hortus conclusus:
As hortus, ‘garden’, it belonged to the foraging-ground . . . it was still open to
the wind and the rain and its ceiling was the sky. As conclusus it shared the
property of ‘enclosure’ with the nesting-place. Screened from prying eyes it
provided a little theatre of privacy into which the domesticity of the house
could overflow without conceding its protected status.’67
In the ‘little theatre of privacy’ of the courtyard where human dramas play out in a place of
open security, where landscape elements extend into the house and connect the house
with the greater landscape, Appleton demonstrates complementary performances of
openness and privacy, a duality essential to the life and aesthetics of the courtyard
house.
Conclusion: Aalto and Utzon, landscape and architecture
The use of landscape discourse to investigate architectural history in relation to
performances of landscape in the courtyard house can expand understanding of the
aesthetics and significance of architecture. As Appleton has observed, ‘among the ideas
which are in urgent need of reappraisal those which concern the relationship between
architecture and landscape should be high on the list.’68
This paper has suggested that an understanding of performances of landscape in
courtyard house architecture expands an understanding of architectural aesthetics. The
courtyard houses of Aalto and Utzon provide models for further research into the value of
landscape within architectural thinking, and into architecture’s mediating role as a
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discourse for understanding and creating relationships between human society and the
natural world.
Endnotes
1
Norbert Schoenauer, 6000 Years of Housing, revd edn (New York: Norton, 2000/1981).
2
Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
p.121. For discussion of performance, space and meaning, see pp.121-132.
3
Spirn, The Language of Landscape, p.121.
4
Anne Whiston Spirn, quoted in Meto J. Vroom, Lexicon of Garden and Landscape Architecture
(Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), p.138.
5
Spirn, The Language of Landscape, p.101.
6
Spirn, The Language of Landscape, p.100.
7
David Leatherbarrow, ‘Unscripted Performances’, in Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p.45.
8
Leatherbarrow, ‘Unscripted Performances’, p.46.
9
John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p.218.
10
Hunt, Greater Perfections, p.218.
11
Schoenauer, 6000 Years of Housing, pp.10, 15.
12
Schoenauer, 6000 Years of Housing, p.98.
13
Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian
Architecture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p.68.
14
Ardalan and Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity, p.68.
15
Ardalan and Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity, p.68.
16
Schoenauer, 6000 Years of Housing, pp.217-29.
17
Beyond the immediate scope of this paper, it is noteworthy that enclosed courtyards appear in
the domestic work of significant Australian architects, including Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds, Harry
Seidler, Bill Lucas, Bruce Rickard, Ian McKay, Richard Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt. In Brisbane,
projects, buildings and writings by Karl Langer in the 1940s and, more recently, Donovan Hill,
present local versions of the type; see Karl Langer, Sub-tropical Housing (St Lucia, Brisbane: The
University of Queensland, 1944).
18
Jørn Utzon and Henrik Sten Møller, ‘Conversations’, in Henrik Sten Møller & Vibe Udsen, Jørn
Utzon Houses (Copenhagen: Living Architecture Publishing, nd), p.25.
19
Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade (Basel: Birkhauser, 2010), p.67.
20
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover,
1986/1931), pp.182-83.
21
Samuel adapts Gustav Freytag’s five-part dramatic arc (influenced by Aristotle), used by
playwrights, film makers and others for narrative structure, to interpret Le Corbusier’s promenades
architecturales. See Samuel, Architectural Promenade, pp.66-67.
22
William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, 3rd edn (Oxford: Phaidon, 1996/1982),
p.277.
23
Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p.278.
24
Samuel, Architectural Promenade, p.120.
25
See Alvar Aalto, ‘In Memoriam: Le Corbusier’, in Alvar Aalto in his own words, ed. Göran
Schildt, trans. Timothy Binham (Helsinki: Ottava, 1997), p.248. Weston outlines relations between
Utzon and Le Corbusier from 1958-1964, and describes Utzon’s affinity for Le Corbusier as ‘a
hitherto neglected key to understanding his work’, in Weston, Utzon, pp.28-30.
26
Alvar Aalto, ‘From doorstep to living room’ (1926), in Alvar Aalto in his own words, p.52.
27
Aalto, ‘From doorstep to living room’, p.50.
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28
Aalto, ‘From doorstep to living room’, p.50.
29
Aalto, ‘From doorstep to living room’, p.51.
30
Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, pp.298-99.
31
Marc Treib, ‘Aalto’s Nature’, in Peter Reed, ed., Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and
Materialism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p.54.
32
Alvar Aalto, Alvar Aalto: Volume I 1922-1962, ed. Karl Fleig (Basel: Birkhauser, 1963), p.248.
33
Jørn Utzon, ‘Elements in the way of life’, interview with Jørn Utzon by Markku Komonen,
Arkkitehti, Feb 1988, in Jørn Utzon, Prefab: Kuwait National Assembly, Jørn Utzon Logbook
Vol.IV, ed. Børge Nissen (Hellerup, DK: Editions Bløndal, 2008), p.8.
34
Jaime J. Ferrer Forres, ‘Utzon in Muuratsalo’, in Building Designing Thinking: 3rd International
Alvar Aalto Meeting on Modern Architecture, August 30-31, 2008, Jyväskylä, Finland, edited by
Kari Jormakka and Esa Laaksonen (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Academy / Alvar Aalto Foundation,
2008), p.23.
35
Ferrer Forés, ‘Utzon in Muuratsalo’, p.22.
36
Jørn Utzon, The Courtyard Houses: Jørn Utzon Logbook Vol.I, ed. Mogens Prip-Buus (Hellerup,
DK: Edition Bløndal, 2004). See also Jørn Utzon, Additive Architecture: Jørn Utzon Logbook
Vol.V, ed. Mogens Prip-Buus (Hellerup, DK: Edition Bløndal, 2009), pp.14-15.
37
Richard Weston, Utzon: Inspiration Vision Architecture (Hellerup, DK: Editions Blondal, 2002),
pp.84-85.
38
Weston, Utzon, p.411.
39
Rafael Moneo, ‘On Utzon’s Architecture: Some Cordial Observations’, in Jørn Utzon, The
Architect’s Universe, ed. Michael Juul Holm, Kjeld Kjeldsen and Mette Marcus (Humlebaek, DK:
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2004), p.89.
40
Utzon, The Courtyard Houses; Weston, Utzon, pp.90-93.
41
Two sets of plans are re-drawn in Henrik Sten Møller & Vibe Udsen, Jørn Utzon Houses
(Copenhagen: Living Architecture Publishing, nd), p.32.
42
Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p.454.
43
Jørn Utzon, ‘Expansiva, 1969’, in Utzon, Additive Architecture, text pp.132-36, illustrations
pp.132-79.
44
Richard Leplastrier, address to students, University of Newcastle, NSW, September 2010.
45
Jay Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, in Ben Farmer and Hentie Louw, editors,
Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 1993),
pp.74-77.
46
Cheng Liyao, Chinese Architecture: Private Gardens (Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag,
1999), pp.140-41.
47
Richard Weston, ‘Nature and Culture’, in Alvar Aalto (London: Phaidon, 1996), pp.114-121.
48
Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1978),
pp.135-36.
49
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, rev. ed. (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons,
1996/1975), p.171.
50
Appleton, Experience of Landscape, p.94.
51
Weston, Utzon, p.107.
52
Weston, Utzon, p.103.
53
See extensive discussion of the topic of defining levels in architecture in David Leatherbarrow,
Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology and Topography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000), Chapter 2, ‘Building Levels’.
54
Utzon, Additive Architecture, pp.296-309.
55
Tobias Faber, Jørn Utzon: Houses in Fredensborg (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1991), p.7. Faber
quotes from an uncited work by Austrian architect Roland Rainer.
56
Courtyards and courtyard house types from numerous cultures are illustrated in the section
‘Additive Explorer’, in Utzon, Additive Architecture, pp.230-69. Many of the images are Utzon’s
own photographs.
13
th
Audience: Proceedings of the XXVIII SAHANZ Annual Conference
Brisbane, Australia, 7-10 July 2011
57
Amos Rapoport, ‘The Nature of the Courtyard House: A Conceptual Analysis’, Traditional
Dwellings and Settlements Review, Volume XVIII, Number II, Spring 2007, pp.58-62.
58
Rapoport, ‘The Nature of the Courtyard House’, p.64.
59
Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Inglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p.82.
60
Utzon, Additive Architecture, p.248.
61
Christopher Alexander, et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, buildings, construction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.561-64.
62
Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, pp.563-64.
63
Weston, Utzon, p.375.
64
Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, p.74.
65
Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, p.74.
66
Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, p.74.
67
Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, p.75.
68
Appleton, ‘Landscape and architecture’, p.77.
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