Awarded with first prize in a competition. Built 1982-84 in collaboration with Jan Utzon. Partly damaged during the Gulf War 1992.

With reference to the central street in an Arabic bazaar, all the different parts of the complex, the hall of the parliament, the meeting rooms, the reception rooms, the library, the offices, etc., are placed along a central street. The street is oriented toward the sea, the Persian Gulf, and ends in a big, open but covered space, in the shadow of which the people can meet its leaders. The form of the roof refers to the form of the desert tents of the Bedouins. 

“In the small sketches, you can right from the start see the big wall and how you fill the various sections, for I wanted to express the various sections with their dimensions, their lighting and with their dependence on each other by arranging them in side streets going out from the central street.

That is to say that in fact it turned into a jigsaw puzzle for the client, who could himself choose whether he wanted this or that and arrange the sections just as clearly as a tree expressed itself – trunk and branches, and the leaves and the fruit, so that at any time it was possible to move things around and build on. And that happened of course over the many years we worked on it and then it developed in different ways. And this is one of the stages. At one time we reached the final project, the blue book. And then they could always add on, of course.

Shade

I just think this ought to be included, the feel of the house, at a place near the water’s edge, the shore. There we had the idea – among other things we had a picture of two Arabs sitting fishing on the shore under a foresail from one of their boats fixed on two poles supporting a beam – that’s to say a thin one. The shadow it cast was so elegant. And a wonderful idea. So we said there must be something we could take from it. From a constructional point of view, it would be best with large columns creating horizontal links that virtually form windows or light intakes for Covered Square extended to the entrance hall the place where the politicians meet and assemble. Then they could make their decisions and meet the people in the shade out towards the water.

It was of course a bit difficult to get it accepted because they actually thought it was possible to do without it – and it was not part of the program either. But just as you sought silence in a church and such elements, thoughts and shapes as it contains, we thought that Covered Square supported and actually reinforced the idea of this building. So there was no better symbol than a sail above to announce that the shadow represents the great leader and when he departed, his shadow disappeared. For you couldn’t live without his projection. And then of course it was an elegant expression of the interdependence existing between the leader and the population in contrast to the invisibility characterizing the distribution of powers in a democracy.

Between light and shade

So…the big columns… have a weight of two large arches lying beside each other, and they have a certain surface at the end and along the edge.

The weight of the entire element must be borne by the central element, that’s to say the anchor. The stem of the anchor is big enough to take the vertical pressure of the two halves of the semi-circular shape of the roof. And the round tube arose because we must have lateral rigidity, and so we could choose ordinary buttresses, but then we had chosen to work with the rounded form, which is more rigid in every sense and which must be able to take all kinds of horizontal elements linking and bracing the entire system laterally. And as they have a hollow external surface where you can see the column shape of the anchor and a solid round cylindrical surface that gets thinner the higher it goes, you easily achieve a straightforward and static guarantee for the rigidity of the side that is to face the neighboring elements. At the same time we also get a typical interior surface, an interior positive rounding of all the elements so that you stand in a room very elegantly admitting light through the openings while on the outside you then have the opposite, also providing lights and shade. So the column is as alive as the upper surface of a big leaf and the lower surface of a big leaf. The same leaf. You get a positive and a negative surface. And the rigidity that we have in the thin round forms is extremely elegant both inside and outside against the building. You get a space that is just as assured in its form as a Gothic space or any other space in which you use the construction to throw light on the free play of forces.

A tube on the end

The idea of the column came to us when we were looking at the windmills on Mallorca. A shape that makes you want to lean against it. The shape is simple. And incredibly strong. You can test it for yourself by rolling a piece of paper to form a tube and standing it on end. You can test the strength by putting a porcelain cup on top. We had really done something like this with the dome in Bagsværd where –keeping to the same image – we figuratively speaking folded the same piece of paper horizontally across the papers machine direction. Remember that the ceiling in Bagsværd is only 12 cm thick with a free span of 20 meters. So if you take a column, it has to be able to support the elements resting on it. I took some beer bottles and put them up on a table. That was here in Hellebæk. It was suddenly quite obvious. If you take a column that is to support the large projection, you have the problem of the link to the next column in the row. It must be able to support the elements resting on it. Be suitably rigid, have a buttress on either side and then a column. Walt had already discovered that we hardly needed foundations because the ground was extremely hard, what is known as desert pack. And the shape of the columns created space in itself and the light had free play across the curved surfaces that came to a point above. In principle, the bits were quite small corrections cast in the same shape from top to toe. And where the cross braces were superfluous, steel reinforcements were put in the mould. Everything cast. In making the elements, we avoided the troublesome work of shaping and shuttering. When you are building a house of concrete, you are in reality building two houses, pouring a bit of concrete in between and then you pull the houses down again. It’s crazy really. We hadn’t seen that before. So we made those columns that were to end up naturally on the surface that was to support the column in the arm of the anchor. Shaped like an anchor, isn’t it? That`s what an anchor looks like. Seen vertically, you have a `stem´ and four arms. If you make a cross section, you get a column in which the stem is of such a dimension that it can support two of the arms, and get a buttress that can meet the other buttress in a transverse element set sideways. That’s the entire mystery. That’s how it was made. And a very simple story indeed.

You go from a large ground plan on a constructive element and continue upwards and end in the smallest imaginable and necessary thickness and at the same time with a lateral rigidity in connection with the neighboring element, and the weight of the roof – the roof elements – is optimally distributed; and the fact that the column is 4 meters means that in a way it isn’t experienced as a real column. If you go a mill or something of the same dimension, it has a fantastic effect on your personality. Small people passing huge columns experience the light coming in from above curling round the columns and giving rise to an internal sense of space of niches, of the weight of the building. There’s something about them. Isn’t this what Reitzel means by having a bit of a shock? Hey, what`s going on? And then it really happened by me arranging some beer bottles in row because I thought it would be great instead of a simple flat plane that couldn’t be distinguished from a piece of paper cut out here and there and the roof here. We rejected that on the spot, all those fine designs, and started all over again with an ordinary beer bottle. Everyone was wildly enthusiastic. And prefabricated, of course. That was already decided.

The idea of the column came to us when we were looking at the windmills on Mallorca. A shape that makes you want to lean against it… and then I lined up a row of beer bottles to illustrate what I had in mind. 

Arab countries have a tradition of very direct and close contact between leaders and people. The dangerously strong sunshine in Kuwait makes it necessary to protect oneself by seeking refuge in the shade. The shade is vital for existence, and this hall, this Covered Square, which considered symbolic of the protection extended by a leader to his people. There is an Arab saying: "When a leader dies, his shadow is lost.”

The choice of colour for the Assembly was unproblematic. From my journey along the Atlas Mountains I remembered how the colour of the house reflected the colours of the local soil. Or rather the colour of the sand. Quite another matter was that if we had built using the American-inspired steel constructions that were very common in the area, with false ogival arches in screwed-on plaster sheets representing ancient bricks, the Assembly would have burned to the ground. As we all know, steel melts at 1200 degrees. Thin reinforced concrete, which is heat-absorbing, does so gradually from 1500 degrees. So it was just the furniture that had been destroyed in a shell with a bullet hole here and there. Now the Assembly Building is painted white.

In reality you can draw a parallel to Fa Shi, where they produced a specific part, a building element, a corner, a beam, a column or whatever for a government building that in practice could be taken down and put together as needed. In different sizes, spans and dimensions. But with exactly the same elements. Quite fascinating like when I walked around Isfahan studying the Islamic Arab building elements. And the factory was an existing element factory in Kuwait that was given the job by the main contractor on the basis of the moulds that came from England. They cast the elements, transported them to the building site and lined them up there. Productivity was high. Unfortunately, the fine concrete suffered during the war between Iraq and Kuwait, so that it was subsequently necessary to paint the Assembly Building white, so that it now stands as a painted surface instead of the finest concrete. But the main impression is pretty powerful after all. They couldn’t alter that.

In the project for the new Parliament in Kuwait, a bazaar-like street gives access by the side streets to the various ministerial offices, the Parliament Chamber and other official rooms and ends under a large roof 40 x 80m offering shade and directly looking over the sea.

On going through the project for a last time before starting building, the desire was expressed to save money by doing away with this hall, but at a meeting with the originator of the project for the new Parliament, “the Speaker of Parliament”, I told him that this great hall was intended as a symbol of the relationship between leaders and people in the Arab countries. The shade was protection. I had been told that when a leader died, it was said that “his shade fell away”.

You cannot live in the desert lands without shade, so we shook hands on agreeing to keep the open hall, which also stands as an architectonically necessary link between the great open natural space over the sea and the enclosed building. The hall is like the surf. Created of the encounter between sea and land."

"Collaboration with (Max) Walt went fine. He immediately suggested we should combine our offices so that architects, engineers, building technicians and draughtsmen worked at the same address in Englischviertelstrasse in Zürich. And that was an unqualified success. Every time there were problems, they were solved on the spot.

Max Walt was a brilliant engineer who immediately understood the intentions and could on the spot work out on the back of a tramcar ticket whether this or that could be done. In this way it was possible with great precision to exploit all the excellent qualities of the concrete. And of course we were planning challenging constructions and we were making use of the qualities of concrete, which when reinforced and shaped like a cylinder becomes hard and incredibly strong.

Instead of a square column well reinforced with iron, we constructed a semi-circle – a circular column of thin concrete. Typically with a net reinforcement in it. And with this we also managed to introduce some pieces that couldn’t really be called columns, but which formed large spaces. Columns which by their nature could be compared with blades of grass, which of course are hollow inside and have strength along an edge – that’s to say very big blades of grass like bamboo, which have sections; and the columns are really made up of segments of course.

It was wonderful to be able to vary the columns outside and inside and to create space instead of facades with traditional windows. Even at the stage of the model proposal the difference could be seen between the effect of square posts and the beer bottles as columns. And Max Walt said that it was in order on the basis of his examinations of the terrain, which showed that the site was on compacted sand. So if you wanted to have a little column you had to dig down a bit – if you had a column of such and such a type, you hardly needed the foundation. He repeated that time and time again.

As a result of our own studies we discovered that all the local building bore the stamp of tradition and individual craftsmanship. We could rely on a uniform quality throughout the entire building process. Actually a pleasure in itself to make it in prefabricated elements.”

Jørn Utzon