The idea did not come from Utzon. It came from Aalborg University's School of Architecture and Design, which wanted somewhere its students could research and argue about where architecture was going. On the initiative of Adrian Carter of that school, the Utzon Research Center was set up in 2003 to promote an understanding of Utzon's work. That August a symposium and summer school drew 150 participants from around the world, and the response was strong enough to attract money: support arrived from Sydney, and major funding came from the European Union and the Obel Foundation for an Utzon archive and research centre. Only then were Utzon and his son Kim invited to draw a building for it — a commission that grew backwards out of an institution that already existed.

In August 2005 the two Utzons presented their scheme to the press: 2,700 square metres of exhibition and research space on the harbour front. Jørn was eighty-seven. Kim produced the final construction drawings. The Utzon Foundation, under the university's rector Finn Kjærsdam, took responsibility for getting the thing built. Utzon was plain about what he wanted from it. "From the bottom of my heart I hope that the Utzon Center will be a place where good thoughts will meet," he said, "and where the students from the School of Architecture will go when they want to be together to discuss their ideas. It will be a power centre for architecture and human life in the future." Not a monument, in other words. A room to be used.

The centre is impossible to miss from the fjord. Its rooftops curve up in bright, highly reflective sweeps over tent-like volumes that recall the years Utzon spent looking at building in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. Rather than one mass, the complex breaks into several separate buildings gathered around a courtyard on a raised platform. The tall sculptural roofs belong to the auditorium and the boat hall, both facing the harbour, and to the library, which turns toward the park and the city; lower roofs cover the exhibition and workshop spaces tucked inside. Most rooms take in a great deal of light and long views over the Limfjord. Because the wind off that water is relentless, Utzon sheltered the courtyards — which is why the restaurant terrace is usable at all. The whole thing reads as open and welcoming, and simultaneously as something with its back turned to the weather, the way his houses on Mallorca do.

Programming comes from the Utzon Research Center at Aalborg University, whose first priority is research into Utzon's work and his way of thinking, pushed outward through workshops, conferences and exhibitions aimed at architects and at anyone else who turns up. Inside are two exhibition halls, the Utzon Library, the Utzon Archive, the Obelske Auditorium on the upper level with its view over the Limfjord, and Spidsgatterhallen — a workshop hall named for the double-ended Danish boats, where architecture and design students build things. The exhibition programme is not restricted to Utzon. In 2011 the centre mounted a show devoted to the architect Michael Singer, put Utzon's own furniture out in the park, and ran a workshop where children built models under the title "Little Manhattan."

The Utzon Center was inaugurated in May 2008. On 29 November of that same year Jørn Utzon died at Helsingør, aged ninety. The timing gives the building a strange double character: it is a research centre with a full calendar of exhibitions and student workshops, and it is also the last thing its architect ever drew, finished in the town he came from, on the fjord whose shipping first pointed him toward drawing. He had spent decades attached to a building on the other side of the world that he never saw completed. This one, at least, was standing while he was.