Architect: John Hejduk

Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing

Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing

Bahar Avanoğlu

The following notes reflect on a first year teaching studio led by Bahar Avanoğlu at Istanbul Bilgi University. The studio took Niall McLaughlin’s Alternative Histories model, an interpretation of a sketch by Basil Spence for extending the Houses of Parliament in London, as a starting point to continue a chain… Read More

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

Stan Allen and Marina Correia

‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the final of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

Mark Dorrian

As my title indicates, this text will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France… Read More

Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 1

Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 1

Ray Lucas

The following text is extracted, with permission, from Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric and Oblique Drawings by Ray Lucas, published by Routledge © 2020. Available here. Drawing Parallels explores the uses of parallel projection in the work of five twentieth century architects: James Stirling, JJP Oud, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk,… Read More

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Stan Allen

One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More

One Thing Leads to Another

One Thing Leads to Another

Richard Hall

Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More

In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan

In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan

Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford

Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More

John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero

John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero

Stan Allen

Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More

Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk

Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk

John Hejduk’s drawing sketches a house for a couple, or two coupled houses, composed of two almost identical small buildings connected to each other by a walkway which holds each house at a distance apart. Each house has its own spiral stair for independent movement and what looks like its… Read More

Alternative Histories: David Kohn Architects on John Hejduk

Alternative Histories: David Kohn Architects on John Hejduk

You enter stage right, walking along a raised path with a lake extending upstage and a six metre high wall placed centrally that will conceal your progress from the audience. Downstage a cast of building bodies are pressed against the wall. The drawing is an enigma, suggesting multiple possible encounters… Read More

Alternative Histories: baukuh on John Hejduk

Alternative Histories: baukuh on John Hejduk

John Hejduk’s take on Corbusian purism liberates the very same forms from the kind of gravitas there at their inception, in the 1920s. Once pregnant forms – conceived and refined during extensive morning painting sessions – they become in Hejduk’s production, as light as the effort to draw them using a felt… Read More