Architect: John Hejduk
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism
19 October 2022
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism19 October 2022
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
6 December 2021
Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 16 December 2021
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
17 November 2020
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric17 November 2020
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
23 April 2020
One Thing Leads to Another23 April 2020
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
1 March 2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan1 March 2020
– 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
23 September 2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23 September 2019
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
29 July 2019
Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk29 July 2019
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
29 July 2019
Alternative Histories: David Kohn Architects on John Hejduk29 July 2019
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
4 February 2019
Alternative Histories: baukuh on John Hejduk4 February 2019
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
San Rocco
20 June 2017
San Rocco20 June 2017
This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds
24 October 2016
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds24 October 2016
Paper by Anthony Auerbach read at the Architectural Drawings Symposium, Shatwell, 24 April 2016. I would like to introduce two items from this collection, or rather two collections our host has brought together, whose cohabitation here prompted me to consider whether they are related and whether the relation can be… Read More
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk
1 March 2023
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk1 March 2023
– 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
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