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A B O U T L O V E F O R P L A C E , C A N L I S

M I G U E L Á N G E L R U P É R E Z E S C R I B A N O . A r c h i t e c t a n d P h . D . s t u d e n t

( W i t h a t h e s i s i n p r o g r e s s a b o u t J ø r n U t z o n ’ s w o r k )

U N I V E R S I D A D P O L I T É C N I C A D E M A D R I D ( S P A I N )

“Porque del amor del hombre con la tierra nace la casa,

esa tierra ordenada en la que el hombre se guarece,

cuando pinta en bastos,

para seguir amándola.”

Camilo José Cela , writer

Nobel prize of Literature (1989)

This definition of house making by Camilo José Cela, could be applied verbatim to Can

Lis, the house built by Jørn Utzon as permanent residency forty years ago (1972-73), and

in which he lived during the next twenty years of his live, approximately.

My arrival at the house was at the beginning of a dark and rainy Friday, just when the sun

rises. The choppy sea, attacked just twenty meters below me, at the foot of the cliff

where the house is located. However, the sound that it generated was rather a mellow,

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rhythmic and low murmur. This murmur, could be heard deeply every time I moved

between the different pavilions that compose the house, during the thirty days and thirty

nights I stayed there. Besides, the variation was not only audible but also visual. The sea

changed its appearance almost every hour, acting as a background image in every room

of the house.

It took me several days being able to see and feel the sun. Unusually, all of Majorca Island

was covered with clouds for two weeks. The feeling I had, when these days went by, was

similar to the ones I used to feel while reading the Utzon’s writing (Platforms and Plateaus:

Ideas of a Danish Architect) when he goes up to the top of the Maya platform of Uxmal

and Chichén Itzá in Yucatán peninsula (Mexico): “Today you can still experience this

wonderful variation in feeling from the closeness in the jungle to the vast openness on the

platform top. It is parallel to the relief you feel here in Scandinavia when after weeks of

rain, clouds and darkness, you suddenly come through all this, out into the sunshine

again.”

The following days, with the sky just clear and a light almost horizontal (because of

proximity to winter solstice at those dates) being reflected all the time in the vibrant

surface of the sea, the sun would indicate incisive the beginning and the end of the day.

The beginning, shinning direct and perpendicular through the bedroom’s windows into

bedside of each bed, just afterwards appearing in the horizon. And the end, making the

mares of the atrium’s columns to shine, just before hiding over the pine’s top of the

Mondragó Natural Park. Between both moments, all along the day, as if it were a sun

clock, the sun was going along every of the six radials holes of the living room, showing

and making obvious time going by.

The mares is mainly the native material in Majorca. It is mined from quarries which are

located mostly in the central and southern regions of the Island. With it, it has been built,

for donkey's years until a few decades, the most architecture of the place, including

Palma’s cathedral (s. XIII – s. XIV). Can Lis, according to this tradition, was built with this

material almost entirely, with a nude mares, without whitewashing. About his mining’s

process and manipulation at the mine, do still talk about his walls, in which we can find

the tracks of the radial machine’s cut. Ultimately, the house is also that neat soil that

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Camilo Jose Cela talked about, so it is built sculpting the material of the immediate

ground where it grows.

Sea, sun and mares are three of out all primary elements which Utzon finds, when he

arrived to that isolated place, on the cliff’s top, in front of the horizon, where the sky and

Mediterranean sea meet just seemingly. From his love for that environment, namely doing

for this three elements, talks his own house, Can Lis.

Miguel Ángel Rupérez Escribano

Architect and Ph.D. student

(With a thesis in progress about Jørn Utzon’s work)

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid