Unlocking the Tower

IN THE END, society will do us in. Like lemmings heading for the sea, we march in mute senselessness toward a future bleaker than the present or past. John Hejduk '53 thinks that artists must help us to break loose from the shackles of an antiquated social/political system. He demands that his fellow architects awaken to the needs of mankind. Architects must create new programs, reshaping the environment to ensure the continuation of humanity.

Hejduk agonizes over the state of mankind. He doesn't rant and rave; he has been driven to the depths of despair and gropes gingerly about in search of a way out. Hejduk is retracing his steps, going back over the various phases of his career and back into history, reconsidering old problems and how they relate to his present investigations.

The two sets of his drawings now on exhibit at the Graduate School of Design bring out the evolutionary and the cumulative aspects of Hejduk's work. The first set, done 25 years ago, feeds forms and concepts into the works done in the last five years. None of the drawings is merely an aesthetic creation or a diagram for future construction; all grow out of Hejduk's intellectual speculations. As he revealed in a lecture given at the GSD last week, Hejduk conceives of his metaphysics graphically--a drawing or quick sketch becomes the articulation of a philosophical idea.

In the first series, seven houses designed in the years 1954-64, Hejduk has chosen a simple geometric shape, the square, to express the essence of his architecture, and he begins a search into the "generating principles of form and space." By starting with juxtapositions of basic relationships--of point, line, plane, and volume--Hejduk hoped to explore the themes of spatial expansion and contraction, of compression and tension, as well as the meaning of the architectural plan and section.

Hejduk began the house series while teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, only a year after graduation from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. The house series reflects his early academic orientation. Hejduk set up his problem and planned a highly systematic and methodical process of investigation: he would design one house each year for ten years, each time exploring different aspects of the situation.

The simplicity of the overall scheme--in plan, and later in elevation, the houses were based on a nine-square grid--allowed Hejduk to focus on detail. The spirit, and genius, of the study lies in the subtlety of the architect's persistent, Miesian attention to detail. Hejduk never breaks from the basic grid or initial program; he develops his ideas by adjusting column widths and positions, by fluctuating between compartmentalization and unification and by changing the relationship of part to part.

AS PETER EISENMAN pointed out in an essay on the houses, the project represents a development of certain general themes. Walls and roofs function as planes compressing space. Hejduk alleviates the tension within the box-like shape by puncturing the surface of the walls with glass windows or cutting away the roof to open courtyards. Hejduk also works at resolving the conflict between a symmetrical form (the nine-square grid) and the asymmetrical demands of a program for a functioning house. At first he conceals the asymmetries within the house; later, he reflects them onto the facades by arranging columns which echo interior walls.

Hejduk incorporated the houses into his search for an architectural language, a vocabulary of forms. As such, they exist in the realm of abstraction and generality not unlike the platonic world of forms. The landscape of Texas, with its sparse vegetation and flat expanses of land, provided a suitable environment for such investigation. There Hejduk saw objects as having a "clarity and remoteness." Texas, for him, "gave meaning to isolated objects and void spaces."

In contrast to the abstract formalism of the seven house projects, the second series of drawings concerns the world of man and the state of human thought. The works form Hejduk's Venetian Trilogy, a project done over a four-year period beginning in 1975. The trilogy functions as an allegory for the architect's view of society.

In the first part of the trilogy, Hejduk designs the "Cemetary of Ashes" to house the ashes of thought. Individual cells contain the remains of the literary masterworks of history, such as Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. A separate building contains a man who does nothing but observe the cemetary. The second part, the "Thirteen Watchtowers of Canneregio" consists of 13 towers, built in a row on a rectangular concrete slab. Each tower houses one man: a modern house across a canal houses the last man, the observer. The third part, the "House for the man who refused to participate," is a wall with nine cell-like rooms cut into it. The inhabitant can move from room to room, yet can always be observed from the outside.

Hejduk insists that he did not venture into fantasy in creating the trilogy, but that the situations represent a distillation of his observations of society. The "Ashes" project is meant to be "a real indictment of the European tradition--of the structure, the method, the burial of thought." The inhabitants of the 13 towers represent individuals caught in pre-ordained social and political roles, locked in historic ritual. The inhabitant of the modern house personifies the 20th-century argument for an escape from history--yet the system subsumes him along with the others. Finally, the citizen who refused to participate must live in a two-dimensional house. Cut off from human contact, he must at the same time live under the constant scrutiny of others.

THIS TRILOGY helps clarify the linkage of mind and eye in Hejduk's work. Several levels of symbolism operate within the drawings: black, white, and the spectrum of colors take on certain meanings. The observer in the "Towers" project stares out from his isolated chromatic house onto a Europe that is systematic and monochromatic. Inversions of color enhance the disturbing effect of the images--in one scene the earth fades to a dull gray, the sky flames orange-red.

The works imply a sense of time, not of days and hours as much as of the relationships of the past, present, and future. Broad expanses of land, straight, uninterrupted groundlines, and overhead views emphasize the horizontal and vertical as elements in time as well as space. The flat "wall-houses" exist on what Hejduk terms the "plane of the present." While the optimists of early Modernism spoke constantly of the future, Hejduk sees man as trapped in the compressed, two-dimensional realm of the moment.

These grim images have brought Hejduk from an "architecture of optimism" to an "architecture of pessimism." But he has not despaired completely. His recent work illustrates his attempts to create a new context in which to operate. Hejduk feels that architects must stop to consider what people need, in the most profound sense. Intending to make his work "social and political, not in a cheap way," Hejduk wants to see if architecture can become a narrative for the affairs of men.