John Hejduk - Infamous Lines

John Hejduk

Moving Masques

by Zac Porter

John Hejduk (1929 - 2000) was born in the Bronx, New York and educated at the Cooper Union, the University of Cincinnati, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After graduating from Harvard, he received the Fulbright fellowship to study in Rome. Upon returning the United States in 1954, Hejduk was invited to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, where he joined Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky and others as one of the so-called “Texas Rangers.” Although only a few of his designs were ever built, Hejduk produced several important bodies of work and also had a large impact on architectural education through his career as a teacher and later as the Dean of Cooper Union’s School of Architecture. His creative work can essentially be separated into two periods: the earlier, abstract and compositional projects and the later, narrative-based projects. In the earlier works, Hejduk took a syntactic approach to architectural design, drafting geometrical compositions that recall the works of Modern painters like Piet Mondrian. However, the later projects focus on elaborate narratives of inhabitation. In his architectural masques, for instance, the individual structures are often outfitted with wheels that allow them to be moved from place to place in a ritualized geographic performance.

Throughout his career, Hejduk’s formal sensitivities remained fairly consistent, allowing one to easily trace the figural qualities of the masque silhouettes back to his earlier projects. For instance, the masque character, Security, can be read as a miniature Wall House. Yet, despite these formal similarities, the ways in which Hejduk represented the earlier projects suggest figure/ground relationships that are much more defined than those of the masques. It may seem strange, at first, to argue that Hejduk’s earlier, conceptual projects, such as the Diamond Houses and the Wall Houses, are involved in any sort of fixed relationship with the ground. After all, most of the projects did not have a client or site in the conventional sense (although there are a few notable exceptions). However, the argument hinges on Hejduk’s belief that a drawing could stand by itself as a completed work of architecture. And, if one reads the drawing as the architectural work, then the page of the drawing—its frame—becomes the site. So, while these abstract, compositional studies may not be informed by a specific geographical context, they are nonetheless sited within the proportions of the sheet of paper on which they are drawn. And, in fact, many of these drawings were exhibited and sold as works of art—the Museum of Modern Art even acquired two of Hejduk’s colorful, isometric projections of Wall House II for their permanent collection.

As material traces of an architectural thought process, these early projects are grounded in the medium of drawing. However, in the case of Hejduk’s later work, the relationship between the drawing and the frame is substantially dissolved. Inside of his publications, the masque characters are represented as bold silhouettes that could be said to resemble Rorschach ink blots or the ancient pictograms of the Egyptians—they are harsh figures that display a strong sense of contour and make no effort to blend in with the background.

Throughout the pages of these books, the masque characters frequently shift their positioning and jump up or down in scale, disrupting any attempt to read a consistent relationship between the drawn figure and the frame of the page. For this reason, it could be said that Hejduk’s method of representing the masque characters parallels their nomadic movement from city to city.