The German magazine [ark] recently asked Chris Precht, Krysztof Ingarden, and I: “for whom (architect, famous star e.g.) would your office like to build a house and what would it look like?”
Designing a house for an individual is quite often misconstrued as requiring the kind of specification that is becoming of a suit, as if the house is made to ‘fit’. Ledoux raised the stakes through a series of polemical proposals under the banner of “architecture parlante”, invoking the idea that architecture speaks, communicates, embodies as part of a broader social contract. Between these two realms sits the generic found object –resilient, timeless, flexible, and trans-historical.
These divergent realms capture attitudes displayed by John Hejduk in the many chapters that defined his intellectual preoccupations, at once a deeply introspective poet, but also a discursive pedagogue whose didactic calisthenics defined not only an era, but a way of debating form, organization, and an architect’s education as part of a collective discourse.
In these two sketches, I capture two modalities of that thinking: the first an industrial shed, encasing and memorializing his monumental figure, and the second, the paradigmatic exercise of nine-square grid, transformed three-dimensionally to suggest not only the configurative play of typological transformations based on monolithic aggregations, but also the building of the colossal figure that befits such a character: H.
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