IN RESIDENCE AT CAN LIS

3 min readMar 11, 2016

The home of Architect Jørn Utzon, Mallorca

www.canlis.dk

Studying interior design and architecture in Australia, it was a prerequisite that we examined the Sydney Opera House, yet I didn’t delve much deeper into the life and architecture of its creator, Jørn Utzon. It wasn’t until I began to design a house for a friend of mine in Puglia, just over two years ago, and started to investigate local buildings, and the new Mediterranean housing that was linked to the land and to the sea.

During my searches, one building popped up many times. This building was modern, yet had the feeling of a roman bath house, ancient, and set to its cliff top position like it had been there for the last thousand years. The local Tufo in Puglia is very similar to the Marés stone in Mallorca and so, the house interested me greatly. I discovered that the house had its own website and that architects could take residencies there so, with no time to lose, I wrote to the Utzon Foundation.

Utzon left Australia before the completion of the Opera House in 1966, due to stress and his dissatisfaction with the respect given by the Ministry of Public Works. He and his family passed by Mallorca at the invitation of good friend and architect Erik Christian Sorensen, whose house had no electricity or piped water. They quickly fell in love and bought land on a mountainside but, not having permission to build, they bought another piece of land on top of a cliff, close to the small fishing village of Portopetro. Utzon had been working on designs for a house in Australia that was never built and, with the same ideas in mind, he began to design Can Lis, which he named after his first love: his wife, Lis.

Read the whole story and the interview to Jørn Utzon at Issue No. 3 of OPENHOUSE magazine.