There is a book called "Mask of Medusa" that talks about Hejduk's work. There is also a A+U special feature on him... I believe its a 1991 publication. There is also a book about the NY Five called "Five Architects" that has a section about him along with Meier, Graves, Gwathmey and Eisenman.

there is a short movie entitled "builder of worlds" that features him it is interesting to see him speak about his work, other books of his, Adjusting Foundations, Vladivostok, He has some poetic work he has done also see David Shapiro

below is an excerpt from a interview with Shapiro out of context regarding his relationship with Hejduk

JH: For twenty years you have taught at Cooper Union. Could we end by talking a little about your experiences there?

DS: I was very lucky. This mad dean, John Hejduk, my best friend for twenty years, believed architects should be thinkers, not greedy connivers, and that they should learn from poetry. So bizarrely enough, though I have always taught children and believed in it long before other people did, I began to teach young architects. I saw them as structuralists of the imagination. I taught them not just to write sestina, but then to build a house in the form of a sestina, or to build a house in the conditions of a villanelle, or to build a pantoum house.

Teaching architects at Cooper has been very important to me. It was the first completely drenching experience I had after teaching with Kenneth at Columbia, but Cooper was more widely open. When you went into Cooper Union, you might meet a doctor, a surgeon, a poet, an anthropologist. I invited Israeli novelists and French philosophers. We were all interested in analogies-to see if you could get some immortal energy from these different fields and make your architecture as fresh as a surgical cut or your poetry as fresh as a spare cage.

So for many years John Hedjuk was scorned. It was hard to get through the accreditation processes. He had to make the school very strong in practical ways so they could do this other thing. Most architecture said we destroyed architecture. A lot of people felt like it was a wonderland: enter here and give up everything but the imagination. John felt a drawing was just as great as a building. He gave Emily Dickinson's poetry as the best thing ever done to the president of Romania.

It is very unusual for a non-mediocrity to land on top, for a genius of creativity to be able to do the bureaucratic work of creating a school where the faculty and the students could meet at a place of thought. He used to say he'd done better than Black Mountain; there's just person after person who after this experience has changed the vocabulary of architecture. Now architecture with literature is taught all over the world.

I was obsessed with Hejduk for seven years, I have read every book he has ever published tons of times, and what I have learned through repetition is to stop trying to understand him, to stop searching for meaning in his work, but rather to begin developing my own, I think my infatuation with him was the most important time in my life, it was a fresh perspective on the world and I will never forget the feeling I got when I looked at the work for the first time.

btw the last paragraph is mine not Shapiro's

it's cool that you're inspired...this would be a great opportunity for you to learn how to read his buildings for yourself...think of the spaces as language and try to describe them with words (centralized, decentralized, scattered, whatever...sounds trendy, I know but...) ...attempt to put words to translate how you feel and think about the building.

When we studied Hejduk our prof told us to draw a triangle over and over again, one on top of the other, draw it until you stop thinking about it, keep drawing it until it is no longer a triangle but a gesture or a motion and it no longer resembles anything that can be easily recognized. After we did this we began to understand what Hejduk was getting at, try it for yourself.

JG, i don't know much about hejduk but am intrigued by what you said. i'm very much interested in and believe that somewhere within mindless repetition (the triangle example) lies the creative process. do you know of any other published people that have similar views? i've become familiar with lewitt, allan wexler, morandi to name a few. thanks.

As for theorists you can look at people like Donald Schon, Arnheim, or Goodman. For architects check out Libeskind's Micromegas or Choral Works (maybe it's called Chamber works) or some of Rossi's sketches.

However it's not about mindless repition like the Surrealists automatic writing but instead reflecting while doing.

i had Don Wall - The Gentle Inquistor from Mask of Medusa, and when he talked about Hejduk we would sit mesmerized listening to the stories and projects being done at Cooper. what i learned from Don was that Hejduk didn't read philosphy, his sources were fiction, poetry, catholicism, cultural, private, personal, etc...he did not shift from ideology to ideology, he was always intensely original and true to himself and will remain uniguely american, and one of the great minds of the 2oth century...

thanks for the names JG (do you have first names for arnheim and goodman?).. i'll give them a look.. yes i'm familiar with libeskinds earlier drawings.. ever checked out theatrum mundi?

and i just used mindless as a metaphor; i didn't mean it literally. i understand the reflection part.. i've done many many excercises where i've drawn hundreds of thousands of lines purely for reflection purposes. sol lewitt's got some interesting writing on the stuff.. especially a few articles where his "helpers" have written about doing his work.

must be rudolf arnheim, the perceptual psychologist/art historian

i would also suggest looking at allan mccollum's multiples; it is less about the product and more about the process; when you repeat a gesture so many times you are forced to step back from it and think about it conceptually. mccollum might make the same vessel 10000 times, and it starts to be about the how and the why and the micro-differences.

re hejduk i think of him a lot as an experiential architect and the path he defines is a poetic one, with his interest in poetry and mythology and so on. michael hays's essay in Sanctuaries is good on that topic.

hello -

similar to asied, i had a pretty healthy hejduk fixation during my latter undergraduate and graduate studies, particularly his urban design strategies.

for me, he is essentially (and by his own description) someone who has 'filled-in' some of the territories not finished by the big three - corbu, mies, wright. he saw himself as expounding on the linguistic capcity of architecture, but was never interested in semiotics the way eisenman was. he was much more interested, especially early in his career, in the spatial linguistics of primary elements: column, line, plane. hence, the infamous 9 square grid exercises that he developed at cooper. one of his most telling lines can also sum up his attitude: 'peter eisenman once told me that i could be considered a critical regionalist if the territory is the mind'. he was deeply intellectual, but, as beta pointed out, not academicly so (or at least not cannonically so).

for me, the actual work gets really spotty after the time of 'mask of medusa'. there are a couple of churches, but it moves drastically from more abstract metaphors (using elements to construct a language) to more abstract characters (using language to create fiction). vladivostok, soundings, etc. just don't quite do it for me. he's trying to create the city through his imagining of it's inhabitants, and giving architectural personnas to them. the plan for berlin (as part of the iba exposition) is amazing though...

My god man, would you quit it with your quondum links. We've all seen the site - it's a pain to navigate and your writing isn't interesting. Please stop already.

buffalo fill, with all respect, I find value (often) in the quondam links. Example: ether mentioned above the fruitful contemplation to be found in repetitive tasks and Rita's link speaks of the repetition of wringing cold water out of towels on the day of Hejduk's death. Repetition as a meditative device, to me, has enormous value - but repetition forced out of circumstance is a drag.

I imagine the triangle exercise was very illuminating, and perhaps, as my flight out of Philly was just announced to be 1.5 hours delayed, I will attempt the exercise now.

(aside: ether, can't wait to hear about your trip to Cranbrook, where "the zen of repetitive work" was a hot topic while i was there - see Thom Faulders' project in "Architecture Studio" for a particularly beautiful example of this type of work)

Back to Hejduk - Hejduk's death hit me hard, not as a personal loss, but in the huge loss I knew the architecture community had just been dealt, and in particular for those who knew him personally.

I only met Hejduk once and was impressed and moved to a level I can't convey here. His life and work had absolutely no boundary. He presented a stunning model for a House for a Poet, and spoke of the material qualities of butter - I think of him often when I make my eggs in the morning. Though we can't all be poets of his caliber in our work, I think we should try.

I saw him lecture at MIT a few years ago. I was struck by his stature; he was Andre the Giant big. You felt him when he came into the room but his personallity was so gentle and kind. He read a few poems from his Writing Architecture book and then just flipped through some slides without commenting on the meaning at all, he just described each space. He then left the room as if the lecture was just another task in a daily routine. He was someone who seemed to me who truely lived inside his work and it meant something really personal and deep to him and didn't care if you "got it".

To me his death sort of symbolized the death of an era which valued drawing and the relationship between the classical arts and architecture.

i had typed these up for a friend in an email... thought i might post them here. my favorite passages (no pun intended) from vladivostok. my copy is overdue but i do not want to walk it back to the library. argh. ...

THE GENETICIST

He is in love with twins. He is having an affair with both of them,
with Paul and with Ruth. They are amused by his overexcitement about
the double helix and by his perversity regarding the electrfying of
bulls.
One evening he decided to take a short-cut to ruth's house through the
pine woods located on the east hill. As he came out of the woods he
was confronted with an image that he cannot forget. Paul was riding
the white bull, bent over and whisepering in the ear of the animal.
Ruth had wrapped her arms and legs around Paul, her black hair
intertwined with purple grapes that stained her skin and that of the
white bull. Her breasts were pressed hard and close to the back of
Paul. Both were naked.

CHIEF OF POLICE

There had been a series of winter murders. The Chief of Police is in
charge of the investigations. What perplexed him at first was that the
crimes had been commited after a snowfall, so tracking was not
difficult. The victim's voice was torn out. The footprints were that
of an animal. Its route from the scene of the assault was covered with
the drippings of black printer's ink. The red of the blood, the white
of the snow, and the black of the ink reminded him of a 1917 political
poster. The tracks were that of a panther, but he was sure it was not
a black panther. This disturbed him. He visited the printing shops in
town trying to match the inks.
On the night of October 11, a heavy snow bagan to fall. The Chief of
Police pit on his leather boots, winter coat, and fur hat. He placed
his revolver within his inner jacket. He picked up a bull horn in
order to amplify his voice. He walked the streets of the town. The
Prussian blue night sky was filled with falling snow crystals. He
heard a cry from down an alley. Pulling out his revolver, he ran down
the darkness shouting into the amplfier.
At the far end he witnessed what appeard to be a black animal ripping
out the voice of its victim. The Police Chief fired a single shot. The
animal fell. The Police Chief lowered his gun, dropped the bull horn
and apprached the area of the crime. The victim was lying in the snow
face up. The throat was removed. The animal was a panther, but a grey
panther that had been covered in black printer's ink. The black ink
was mixing with the red blood and the white snow, which remined the
police chief of a modern painting he once had seen a long time ago in
Leningrad. He began to cry until his face was covered in a thin sheet
of ice.

L.Bell - Next time when you cook eggs for breakfast. Just remember Hedjuk loves egg salad sandwiches, somewhat of staple for him during lunch.

I remembered seeing a documentary about tri-border city of Vladivostok, a major trading port for Chinese, Russian, and Korean, promptly believe people trading there must speak two of three languages, this all entirely foreign of foreigness. I wonder if THE GENETICIST reflects on the spirits and seperation of this place. Characters hinted as Ruth being Korean, Paul being Chinese, and the moderator as Russian, however not specific to this order. All searching for the voice of local authority.

I remember at a Hejduk lecture him rememerbing an epiphany of sorts regarding space: one morning he scooped a spoonfull out of the margerine (or butter) tub,l and it hit him!:"now dat was solid space!"

how many hejduk books are out of print?

i saw hejduk talking shop to pj and eisenmen about poetry.

i think he was the only *corbusian revivalist, among other commonalities, from new york five to approach corbu from the poetic gesture side.

(*i know it is a questionable quote but i am practicing my quotes these days.;.)

mask of medusa

vladivostok

john hejduk, 7 houses

victims : a work

bovisa

berlin night

the riga project

any others???

not sure - most of hejduk's early books (mask of medusa, vladivostok, bovisa) are long out of print. some of the later ones (especially those by michael hays) are still around.

a quick check of amazon.com, though, shows one of the great books he did - an illustrated volume of aesop's fables. for those with kids, it's a nice book to have. all of his illustrations are tempera, i believe.

... and the lancaster / hanover masque (!!!)

i'm just throwing this out there, because after my talk with kenneth goldsmith about ubuweb, i was think that we (or i) should try to get as many of hejduk's out-of-print books online as possible. these texts and drawings are too valuable to be entombed on the shelves...what do you all think and who has what?

i have many of the books. you know what is weird though? it's how little material exists ABOUT Hejduk, Hejduk's Chronotope is the only one i've seen, it's out of print, and mine is underlined to death.

i agree. i think we should make a concerted effort to keep his (and others) stuff alive and accessible to everyone. and the only place i can think of that would work is ubu, unless someone was to start some kind of architectural equivalent...

Something that's always been interesting to me: some architects have taken it on themselves to build unbuilt Hejduk projects.

I can think of at least three:

Martin Finio and Kevin Fischer built a mobile/masque thing near the flatiron building: link

Peter Eisenman added twin Hejduk towers as the reception for his City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela: link

and Hejduk's Wall House 2 was built, a year after his death, in Groningen, Netherlands, it was originally intended for Connecticut: link

I imagine there might be more, too, anyone know about any others?

There's something so strange and beautiful about this idea, constructing the unbuilt buildings, in a different context, of a dead paper architect ...

i don't know, 765. after having seen the built work, i almost wish it had stayed on paper. i'll take hejduk's delicious axons anyday over candy colored stucco.

But these are just ghosts, ghosts of ghosts, even ... the execution falling short just foregrounds it.

That said, I think the Finio and Eisenman realizations are pretty cool.

there are few other built works:

'the collapse of time' was done by the AA back in the mid-80's. they produced a book on the process (one of the rarer in my collection).

'the house of the suicide' and 'the house of the mother of the suicide' were done at georgia tech. not sure where they ended up afterwards. i remember seeing similar pieces in the czech republic (maybe they were the same structures) years later.

two little structures were done in riga.

hejduk's largest project, completed while he was alive, was for a 80-100 unit housing project in berlin, under the iba program. kind of interesting to see his translation into a real building.

they also built a 'villa' project in berlin, i think as part of another development.

he also did several renovations to the cooper union school.

finally, there was one other masque project done in europe - i can't place the city or name of the structure offhand.


the best documentation of his built work was an a+u - jan. 1990. a whole bunch of helen binet photos...

oh, and there is one other little sculptural house of cards type masque that was built in groningen. loved that thing.

the work of Hejduk helps define the thinnly laid out transition between the post-modernism of Aldo Rossi and the work of the NYC five.

I was an undergrad at Syracuse in the early eighties, under Werner Seligman. Seligman was, along with Hejduk, Colin Rowe, etc, one of the "Texas Rangers". The recent book about the HH Harris era at U Texas gives a lot of insight into the teaching methodology that became the foundation of many east coast schools (Cornell, Harvard, etc) in that time.

To over simplify, it was about tearing down the rationalist, quasi-scientific apologia for heroic-period modernism and seeing it instead as a language system rich in possibilities for metaphor and poetry. I find myself always returning to Rowe's essays (Mathmatics of the Ideal Villa, Transparancy: Literal and Phenomonal, etc) for inspiration.

Hejduk was a legendary figure to us in those days.

to extend the notes of LARU:

not only were house projects of Hejduk produced by others, but a whole range of interventions and constructions were produced by friends, colleagues or ex-students of Hejduk. they included:

'Collapse of Time'; at AA, directed by Raoul Bunschoten

'House of the Painter', 'House of the Musician'; at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

'Riga:Object/Subject'; at Philadelphia College of the Arts, directed by Meton Gadelha

'House of the Suicide' and 'House of the Mother of the Suicide'; at Georgia Tech, directed by Jim Williamson (version also shown at Castle, Prague)

'Security'; Oslo School of Architecture,

'Angel Catcher', 'Chariot', 'Sphere, Cube, Extended Pyramid'; at LoPSia, Unite d'Habitation, Briey-en-Foret, France, directed by Donald Bates

i am sure there are others i am forgetting or didn't know about.

all of this should make it into the wiki.

That is so fascinationg.

Do you ahave any links for any of those, dlb?

from www.wallhouse.nl :

" We currently have two periods of artist in residency: April - June and October - December. These residencies are payed for, in fact, you even get a small allowance. The Wall House is the apartment you would live in, and it also has got a studio space. The artist in residency period is an international program."

more

earlier i was going to say that, having visited hedjuk's iba housing in berlin in 1990, i wish he had stayed unbuilt. but i realized that was an ungenerous and empty critique, so i had to think about it some more. more than anything the reason for the comment would be that i had found in his work an idealism and a different kind of 'poetic' approach than i had found anywhere else. it was fantasy, really. building it in such a conventional way as the iba project sort of took away the fantasy, bringing it down to earth. i appreciate that 'getting built' is a kind of proof, that housing in a city that needed it like berlin is a good thing to undertake, etc, but somehow hedjuk's image for me was sullied by his building in the real world.

i know, that's probably still not fair.

... michael hays, obviously a huge john hedjuk fan, is architectural curator at the whitney. he organized a hedjuk exhibit a few years ago. hays got his undergrad at georgia tech.

georgia tech had the house of the suicide and the house of the mother of the suicide on view for many years in the school of arch's main atrium, and at some point put them in storage. i think they donated the works to the whitney on the occasion of the hays organized exhibition. in any case they were exhibited in the whitney's courtyard in that exhibition.

[i did a small google search to find more solid info but this is all i found- although i'm sure there's more]

some years ago i worked with someone that studied at tech with jim williamson and was in the student team that built the objects. he enjoyed the experience very much.

the 'Collapse of Time' project was documented in a book published by the AA, with the same title, (1987).

the 'Riga; Object/Subject' from Philadelphia College of the Arts is represented in the book Vladivostok [Rizzoli, 1989] (pgs 50-53) [i believe there was also a small brochure published by the college]. So too is the Oslo project, 'Security' (pgs 76-77), some images of 'Collapse of Time' (pgs 74-75; 78-81), images of the strucutres at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (pgs 102-103), another project for the Milan Triennale (pgs 150-153; don't rememeber the name), plus photos of the 2 of the 3 built housing projects in Berlin for IBA - one near Checkpoint Charlie (pgs 116-127), the other out at Tegel (pgs 62-69).

the work created for the Unite d'Habitation at Briey-en-Foret were shown as part of the exhibition "machines d'architecture", at the Fondation Cartier, outside Paris, in 1992. the catalogue of the same name has images of Hejduk's pieces on pgs 14-21.

in regards to the impulse to have Hejduk's works remain "unbuilt" as if this maintains their poetic status, this would be in complete contradiction to Hejduk's desires. he desperately wanted to build these many projects and all the projects of his writings, but he refused to do so in the mindless, commercial world of the commercial developer. many of his projects were meticulous drawn and detailed - by Hejduk and others - through complete working drawings. for all of their 'otherness' Hejduk never considered his work nor himself as a 'fantasy architect', or as a 'paper architect'. he was just a real architect who did not find a world ready for his architecture, but he was committed to the making of architecture as a material, disciplined practice.

his book called "Texas Houses", published by Eisenmann's IAUS is an incredible rich analysis of a Miesian house, all drawn with a 9H pencil, on vellum, in the heat of Austin, back in the sixies, when Hejduk was teaching at UT [mentioned above in the story of the 'texas rangers'].

if Hejduk did not build much, remember that this was out a condition by which he was clearly able to produce extremely detailed and precise working drawings, but he chose "not" to participate in the current building situation [reference this back to his project in Venice for a house "For the One who Refused to Participate"]. his retreat into poetics was not because he didn't know how to do buildings, but if anything, was because he knew too much.

by the way, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, has the largest collection of Hejduk Archives. if you go to their collections sections, and search in 'Collections Online' under John Hejduk, they list 341 drawings in the collections. reading through these you see how many projects Hejduk did, not just the last works, but building projects from the '50's and '60's.

two other books i don't think we've mentioned yet, but may be two of the most important (certainly relative to his long term legacy) are the cooper union 'education of an architect' tomes (the one from the 70's and the one from the late 1980's). beyond getting to see if liz diller or daniel libeskind really were 'all that', it's a great insight into how he structured the 5 year sequence.

finally, one last thought - we're focusing more on the formal books/works here, but some of the best reading i've done on hejduk is to jump in on the various interviews he's given over the years (for tons of periodicals). they are extremely insightful if you're interested in hearing how his mind ticks.

every time i came up with a great idea on exposing or exploit an urban facade, i'd realize i was designing a wall house. his work is genius for many reasons.