- Title
- Fabulating landscapes: Utzon and McCahon
- Creator
- Roberts, John; Roberts, Maria
- Relation
- 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ). Proceedings of the 29th Annual SAHANZ Conference (Launceston, Tas 05-08 July, 2012) p. 911-925
- Relation
- http://www.sahanz.net/conferences/
- Publisher
- SAHANZ
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Jørn Utzon’s 1962 article ‘Platforms and Plateaus’ includes sketches of flattened yet leavened landscapes: flat-topped mountains and built platforms from ancient Mexico, rising skyward. The landscape idea of a plateau, transposed into the architectural idea of a built platform – in Utzon’s words, a ‘deep idea’, of ‘great strength’ – embeds landscape concepts in Utzon’s architectural thinking. Utzon’s platforms have echoes and resonances in the work of New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, where hills and mountains rise against dark or bright sky spaces, making grounds for words, numbers, verse and biblical texts. Contrasting valencies of light and earth endow McCahon’s works with physical presence and spiritual resonances. Norberg-Schulz, in Genius Loci, suggested the cosmic capacity of landscapes as metaphors of spatial archetypes: a sky-oriented landform represents Apollonian intellect and clarity, while low, concave landscapes manifest chthonic forces. These ancient tropes invest natural landscapes with mythic cultural presence. It is possible to see common mythopoetic themes, related to communicating human presence on the earth, in the work of Utzon and McCahon. Their work arguably achieves significance in accommodating or depicting human drama against elemental spatialities of landforms, horizons and sky, and through poetic materials of light and dark. In this paper, mythic potentialities of landscape in art and architecture are explored through selected works and images by Utzon and McCahon. Themes of light, darkness and earth in Utzon’s work are considered together with McCahon’s syntheses of landscape, light and words. This paper exploits the renown of two major antipodean creative figures to consider landscape and myth-making in art and architecture.
- Subject
- Utzon; landscape; architecture; McCahon
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309330
- Identifier
- uon:21842
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781862956582
- Language
- eng
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