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Can you talk about the house and its significance both as a landmark in Danish architecture and as a family home where your father experimented with architecture and design. 

I was six years old when my parents started building it. Typical houses at the time were saddle-roofed with a few little windows and a door in the same dimension, and a chimney sticking out. My father came along with an open plan house where everything is in one space, more or less, a core with a kitchen on one side and a fireplace on the other and a bathroom at the end with skylights and nothing else. It had a flat roof covered in aluminium, under-floor heating and a floor-to-ceiling glass wall towards the south west, which was very surprising for a lot of people. People still wanted to keep out light in those days so they had never seen anything like it. 

What characteristics bind his architecture from this modest family home to his masterpiece?

A lot of people who know my father only because of the Opera House expected him to make something similar elsewhere, even with a more straightforward job. But no, everything has to be exactly what it is at that particular spot with that environment and that economy and the client’s wishes. What links it is his way of thinking. For instance, he is naturally drawn to nature. He was brought up with a father who was a very keen outdoors person. ‘I want to sit in the forest, sit that way and enjoy the sun at this time in the afternoon and so on.’ So those principles guided him

Would you say the Opera House is an expression of his personality in some way?

For the Opera House he never saw the actual site but he could see from images it was a peninsula sticking out in the water with nothing around it. He said, ‘ok you are going to look at it from all around and even from above, so we will make some sort of sculpture that covers all the rooms that are necessary for the performing art centre’. The shells that we see and recognise today are a sort of raincoat over the acoustical venues inside. He likened it a bit to a walnut where you have one surface outside and another inside. He also said it was like your fingers where you have the skin, creases and a nail, they are different but all part of the same being. He liked to investigate a lot of different effects and possibilities, so many little or large details, that come together in harmony.

What was your father’s approach to furniture design? How did his architectural practice inform his furniture design?

Just after the second world war he designed a lot of lamps because there wasn’t much building going on. When he returned from Sydney, furniture was something that came out of his not having much work. He was very versatile from producing lamps. ‘I want something to hang over my dining table that reflects light in this manner, so how do I do that? I want to be able to sit on the chair this way and I want to maybe use this technique to produce it because it is relatively cheap and it also looks beautiful.’ There were many logical threads through, what one could call his production fantasy, and that was why he could do it.
 
Can you talk about the prototype for the stool and share any background on the concept and design?

It seems to have many familiar references: maritime, sculptural, organic, modular structure, a touch of Alvar Aalto in the base, a playfulness in expression, utility. Can you elaborate on these? It was part of a lot of different furniture ideas that my father had done in the late 50s before we went to Sydney.  My father designed the stool with inflated rubber cushions for the seat which was a reference to marine fenders – he liked to sit on them. He had a lot of ideas and references, as he did with his architecture, but back then was not overly concerned with sketches so a lot of the documentation was discarded. This stool exists because there was a model.

I think the all-wood version developed by Fritz Hansen is a very interesting and nice piece of furniture sculpture. It has a character. My father said, ‘when I design a building, I design with this or that plan and then the architecture follows because if the idea is strong then it will create an architecture rather than drawing a façade’. The same thinking applies to his furniture.

How do you speak about your father’s legacy to the new generation discovering Utzon?

I think it is a particular way of looking at problems and looking at the givens, the site, the economy or whatever  and considering what qualities do I have, how can I enhance them? You cannot expect a person to be able to make a beautiful poem unless they can write or have some ideas.  If your source of inspiration is what other architects have done in the past year, from magazines, then you will never exceed that. But if your sources are what people have done in the past, not any particular time or thing or area, and you try to recreate for our modern world something with a similar character or quality, then you cannot go entirely wrong.