The Complexities of John Hejduk's Work

Exorcising Outlines, Apparitions and Angels

J. Kevin Story

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138476493
• eBook ISBN: 9781351105873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book traces the development of John Hejduk's architectural career, using the idea of "exorcism" to uncover his thought process when examining architectural designs. His work encouraged profound questioning on what, why and how we build, which allowed for more open discourse and enhance the phenomenology found in architectural experiences.

Three distinct eras in his architectural career are applied to analogies of outlines, apparitions and angels throughout the book across seven chapters. Using these thematic examples, the author investigates the progression of thought and depth inside the architect's imagination by studying key projects such as the Texas houses, Wall House, Architectural Masques and his final works.

Featuring comments by Gloria Fiorentino Hejduk, Stanley Tigerman, Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Phyllis Lambert, Juhani Pallasmaa, Toshiko Mori and others, this book brings to life the intricacies in the mind of John Hejduk, and would be beneficial for those interested in architecture and design in the 20th century.

1 Formations of John Hejduk’s pedagogy

Exorcising outlines, Part 1

It is necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for hands execute, but the eye judges.

Michelangelo

Early artistic influences

John Hejduk was born July 19, 1929 and grew up in the Bronx in New York City. As a high school student he attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan just across the Bronx River from the borough of the Bronx. It is interesting to note that the acclaimed film director Stanley Kubrick was one year older than Hejduk and grew up in the same Bronx neighborhood. Additionally, Hejduk’s friend and fellow “New York Five” member Charles Gwathmey attended the same high school. By Hejduk’s own admission, he did not excel academically in his high school years and after completing high school he was accepted to Cooper Union on a probationary basis due to his poor grade point average.¹ At the time Cooper Union was a three-year institution that provided a certificate upon graduation. The intent of the education at Cooper Union during Hejduk’s years of attendance from 1947 to 1950 was to prepare students to move on after graduation to another institution of higher learning (a university) for a more in-depth study of their interests. John Hejduk’s educational experience at Cooper Union would prove to have a profound effect on the foundations of his future pedagogical underpinnings.

Looking back I can see the influences on me. I know where I come from, and I want to pay homage to those influences. ²

Hejduk credited three of his Cooper Union teachers as influential in his education, modern artist Robert Gwathmey (architect Charles Gwathmey’s father), sculptor George Kratina and artist Henrietta Schutz. These teachers provided Hejduk with the analytical tools and skills that would inform his artistic work for the remainder of his life.³

Robert Gwathmey

Hejduk credits Robert Gwathmey with teaching him the importance and ability of “extracting the abstracted essence of form through the figure”.⁴ While Gwathmey’s style of art was not minimalist or abstract in the strict sense, Hejduk was able to see the abstracted realities represented in Gwathmey’s work. This is especially evident in the geometric ordering found in Gwathmey’s “Hoeing” painting from 1943.

Figure 1.1 Hoeing, 1943, Robert Gwathmey, American, 1903–1988, oil on canvas, H: 40” × W: 60¼” (101.60 × 153.04 cm)

Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: Patrons Art Fund, 44.2 and © Estate of Robert Gwathmey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

The painting is a complex study of the plane. The arrangement of the figures and field are distorted into a flat, cubist plane … As Hejduk says … “ the people are abstracted themselves .” Their relationship to the land turns it into a field of color … the six smaller human figures in the background are composed in triangles, acting like a wall. ⁵

Gwathmey’s artwork reflects a sophisticated use of figure and plane. His subjects were figural and thematically recognizable, but his representations had a distinct quality of perspectival flatness. Gwathmey’s “Hoeing” is an example of the compression of spatial context through the juxtapositions of objects and figures common to many of Gwathmey’s paintings. This spatial device would be redefined by Hejduk in his own work in the decades after his experiences with Robert Gwathmey’s teaching. We can look back at the evolution of Hejduk’s body of work and clearly see architectural themes including; compression, flatness, allegory, sociopolitical commentary and use of color as direct influences from Gwathmey’s work. Indeed, the palette of colors used in Gwathmey’s 1943 “Hoeing” painting is strikingly similar to the subdued color palette used by Hejduk in his “Enclosures” drawings from 1999.⁶

George Kratina

George Kratina’s influence on Hejduk is multidimensional, although seemingly less straightforward than that of Gwathmey. Kratina taught sculpture and Hejduk remembers Kratina as follows:

He was a Catholic, and he was a Catholic sculptor. Basically a very religious man, religious in the sense of his Catholicism and a passionate teacher who never saw anything bad in your work, he always pulled out whatever was good in it. ⁷

Sculpture class with Kratina was Hejduk’s first experience with three-dimensional design. In his recollections of his classroom days with Kratina, Hejduk stated:

I was a very bad sculpture student. I didn’t know how to transform an idea into three dimensions (my work) always looked static and uptight. That’s how it was. That was my experience of three dimensions. It just didn’t work. ⁸

Hejduk never directly stated how Kratina’s teaching influenced his thinking. But, based on comments by Hejduk’s wife Gloria, observations seen in John Hejduk’s work and statements made by Hejduk himself, Kratina must have influenced the teaching style eventually adopted by Hejduk, as well as, influencing Hejduk’s lifelong exploration of the relationship between form and space. Hejduk’s admission as a failure as a sculpture student at Cooper Union must have contributed to his motivation to see beyond the physical nature of an object in deference to the underlying essence of the spatial nature found within the object. For Hejduk, the cutting away of a block of wood to express an idea in sculpture as an end product of artistic expression was not as important to him as the discoveries that are made during the process of trying to re-present the idea expressed through various artistic media, including sculpture. In 1985 Hejduk stated:

There are many kinds of architectural realities and interpretations of those realities, which included the major issue of representation of re-presentation. Whatever the medium used – be it pencil on paper, a small-scale model, the building, a film of the built building, or a photograph of the above realities – a process is taking place. ⁹

Hejduk disliked the exteriority posed by sculpture. He viewed sculpture as inanimate objects without the duality of interior and exterior spatial experience. This position by Hejduk points to the limitations of sculpture as a spatial medium. Form for forms sake, for Hejduk, equated to form absent of spatial experience. The investigation of architectural transitions through time and space would become one of the pivotal milestones in the evolution of Hejduk’s pedagogical underpinning.

While you can mentally “go into” a painting – your mind gets “caught” in it and you mentally proceed through – you cannot physically go into it. Sculpture is similar, it’s external to you; very seldom can you go into it. That’s why I have an objection to the sculptors who pretend to be dealing with architecture; their interiors are empty … I walk in, I walk out, nothing. Architecture has the double aspect of making one an ­observer or voyeur externally, and then completely “ingesting” one internally. One becomes an element of the internal system of the organism. ¹⁰

Hejduk’s view of the spatial limitations of sculpture and his view of the varied processes used to create many types of architectural realities may have been born out of frustration at his first attempts at three-dimensional design under George Kratina. While this influence on Hejduk speaks to his personal search for architectural clarity, in hindsight we can also see Kratina’s influence on Hejduk as an educator. Hejduk discussed his view of how to teach architecture with his colleague David Shapiro by saying:

Osmosistically, by osmosis. I never draw for the student or draw over their work and I never tell them what to do. I try to, in fact, draw them out. In other words draw what’s inside them out and just hit a certain key point and then they can develop their idea … and that should be gently, really gently handled. I teach with gentleness. ¹¹

This teaching methodology seems to be a lesson Hejduk learned from his experiences with Kratina. Even through failure in Hejduk’s student attempts at sculpture, the encouragement of his teacher motivated him to see beyond the “static”, “uptight” qualities of his sculptural attempts. The process revealed a new dimension of form and space that Hejduk would produce in the years to come in projects like “Christ Chapel” and “Cathedral” from 1996, which reveal an expressive spiritual content and his Catholicism being reflected in the work. Hejduk’s recollections of Kratina’s strong Catholic beliefs exhibited in his sculptures must have been such a strong influence on Hejduk that he would, like Kratina before him, desire to embody his deep spirituality within his own work.

Hejduk continually pondered questions of transformation and renewal, but he also was cognizant of his previous experiences. He described his work as additive and he would search for new meanings as it progressed. Hejduk would discard that which seemed redundant or superfluous, but retain the essences of the work that came before. His work and his life are like the Biblical account in Proverbs 22:6 which states: “Train a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it”. Hejduk was soul searching (exorcising) constantly during his life and especially during his last few years. His search in his final years, on one hand, was exorcising his deeply guarded spiritual faith, but he also was exploring the depth of his appreciation of Renaissance art. It is ironic that the construction of his last project designs, which exhibited Hejduk’s deep faith, exists only in drawings and wood sculptural models of Christ Chapel and Cathedral. These wood models embody Hejduk’s Catholicism just as Kratina’s sculptures embodied his. Through all of Hejduk’s early academic influences, Kratina had the deepest philosophical impact. Kratina’s instructions and influence provided Hejduk with pedagogical tools that would ultimately help define his own work as an educator and artist. Hejduk’s early failures in three-dimensional sculptural explorations challenged him to search deeper into the nature of form. He would remember years later that Kratina always had a word of encouragement to the students which influenced his own teaching methodology. And to remember Kratina and his work as deeply religious reminded Hejduk of his own need to feel-out and express the depths of his soulful introspections.

Henrietta Schutz

Henrietta Schutz taught two-dimensional design at Cooper Union. Hejduk would describe Schutz as the third major influence on him while he was a student. Hejduk stated:

She taught me, I think, the very essence of my architecture. I l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Formations of John Hejduk’s pedagogy: exorcising outlines, Part 1
• 2. Pedagogy of the Texas Houses: exorcising outlines, Part 2
• 3. Pedagogy of the Wall House: exorcising apparitions, Part 1
• 4. Pedagogy of the Architectural Masque: exorcising apparitions, Part 2
• 5. Pedagogy of the Last Works: exorcising angels
• 6. Pedagogy of the Cigar Box: experiencing the otherness of John Hejduk
• 7. A serendipitous life: the end of the beginning
• Epilogue: The otherness of John Hejduk: a collection of thought
• Bibliography
• Index