Architecture professor Richard Weston compares a tiny Spanish island hideaway with a huge English retail landmark
My small wonder is a house perched on a cliff on Majorca. Approached from the road it seems unremarkable: only a tiled bench hints at something special. Entering, you can turn right into a stoa-like space for outdoor living, or left into a tiny patio with a colonnade to one side. It might be a model for a temple, made before the refinements of Classicism had been invented, but within lies an unforgettable room, dominated by large openings in deep-set reveals. In mid-afternoon, a slice of sun enters through a slot in the west wall. Raking across the rough stone it brings 20 minutes of drama before leaving the stage to the captured views of sea and sky.
Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, designed the Can Lis on the Spanish island of Majorca in 1972 and named it after his wife Lis. They now live on the island in the Can Feliz, which Utzon created 20 years later.
The house is called Can Lis and was designed by Jørn Utzon, architect of Sydney Opera House - unwitting prototype for today's wannabe city icons, an example of which I choose as my blunder: Selfridges in Birmingham. Not because it's one of the world's worst buildings, far from it, but because of the mismatch between hype and reality. The shiny discs may be pretty, but hanging a gross overenlargement of a supposedly biomorphic surface from hidden steel scaffolding is not exactly my idea of architecture.
Designed by Future Systems, Selfridges’ first store in Birmingham opened in 2003. The designers took their inspiration from a chainmail Paco Rabanne dress, which is translated into an external skin made of 15,000 spun aluminium disks.
Postscript
Richard Weston, a professional research fellow at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University in Wales, is the co-author of The Complete Handbook of Architecture, available this month from Mitchell Beazley, £9.99
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