Festival dell'architettura

Abstract

A drawing by John Hejduk is an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the creation, representation and realisation of a work of architecture, following the reasoning of the American maestro.

Through its own means - walls, roofs, boundaries - the architectural image has the capacity to evoke and invoke the profound sense of unexpected situations, to "refresh" our vision of things against the danger of automation.

What emerges is a scenario in which, in the creative circle involving maker and spectator, the reality of architecture contributes to its part in the project of "manufacturing the world"

The March-April 1978 issue of the magazine "Art in America" published a short essay by Richard Pommer entitled "Structures for the Imagination". (1) Pommer took advantage of an exhibition of drawings by Michael Graves, Venturi & Rauch, Walter Pichler, John Hejduk and Aldo Rossi at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, to recall the role of imagination in the architectural project and the "mystical modernist faith" in its ability to regenerate and vivify reality. John Hejduk showed a drawing of the Grandfather Wall House [Figure 1], of which Pommer had to say: "The function of drawing in creating the new architecture of imagination is nowhere more explicit than in this work." (2) 

To Pommer, drawing basically suggests two issues, bound to one another or with one the effect of the other: the evocative power of drawing, that is, to evoke a certain reality" (...) which neither perspective views nor the building itself could evoke in the same way." And that this evocation is somehow forcibly induced ("The drawing thereby enforces in the imagination (...)." - "We are forced to imagine (...)."by a representation that works inside the circle or short circuit that is established between the conception of the work and the observer.

I. Reality and Fiction

The nature of a work can be understood by the way in which it is conceived and by the extent to which it can be observed, within the conception circle (concept, mental processing, imagination) - representation - realization (manufacturing, construction). (3)

I can imagine a jug, an apple, a table and put them in relation to one another, i.e. compose them. I can draw these objects pictured on a two-dimensional surface, and represent them inside a frame. (4) Drawn on a paper surface, what I imagined is a fiction, but is also a realization, the reality of a drawing on a sheet of paper. I can also realize the jug and the table that I imagined and arrange them in three-dimensional space, in the so-called 'real space'. I can make a film with a video camera shooting all around the building from 360°, with different natural light from dawn to dusk or create a light source myself. I can also photograph the jug-apple-table, producing a still image of the representation of a construction. 

Unlike painting, due to its complexity, architecture cannot be conceived starting from a single image, but is made up of a series of images that are only fragments of the work's reality, starting from an image "inside his mind's eye', which works as a catalyst. (5) We are faced with the illusion of a reality of which the architect can make a certain number of representations on a sheet of paper. He can draw plans, elevations and sections, isometric or axonometric views, and perspectives. All are specifically real (ink and paper), all are representations of what will be, and an illusion of space and depth. "In any case, drawing on a piece of paper is an architectural reality." (6) 

Then the work is built. In the same way as its conception, it cannot be grasped simultaneously by the viewer in its entirety. We can observe the inside from the outside, the outside from the inside and the inside from the inside. It is a series of internal and external fragments. From afar the observer may perceive the building as similar to the model, then approaches the work until it is understood in its internal space. The same route can be repeated with a telecamera that takes moving images, or with a camera that takes stills. The developed film can be viewed and projected onto a screen, but a more profound comparison, "a most reduced confrontation", occurs when a fixed observer looks at a single fixed image, a single frame: "The mind of the observer is heightened to an extreme, exorcising out from a single fixed photographic image all its possible sensations and meanings – a fragment of time suspended, a recapturing of the very image that has been photographed." (7) The intensity of the comparison is not only dependent upon an empathy with the ways in which the work was conceived, i.e. the single image, the catalysing fragment. But also by the steadiness with which the observer observes the fixed image. Hejduk relates the movement of the body and mind in space, establishing an inverse proportionality that reminds us of the tradition late-medieval "wandering spirit", which leaves the body in a dream or in ecstasy. (8) When the body is in motion, the mind assumes a secondary role and vice versa. "When our mind is working intensively, our body, for all intents and purposes, seems to be fixed and might as well not be in motion." (9) 

II. Process and Intuition

The different forms that reality assumes in the circle conception - representation - realization combine to produce the object of the transfiguration, just as the production of a picture contributes to produce what is portrayed. (10) "In this movement and tension between the real and the imagined, between drawing, model and construction", (11) the work of interpretation and reinterpretation, representation and re-presentation, decoding and recoding concern every time (and every time from scratch) the passage from the non-revealed to the revealed, from the invisible to the visible. It is in this passage, in these "betweens", that Hejduk's obsession is identified, and it is this mystical and mysterious space that he assumes as the place of the transfiguration: "The many masks of apparent reality have made me wonder, speculate and ponder about the revealed and the unrevealed." (...) "Some sort of distortion is occurring, a distortion that has to do with intuition as primal yearning [my italics], which, in turn, has something to do with the interpretation and re-interpretation of space and all the mysteries the word space encompasses, including its spirit."

Hejduk often returned to the necessity that such a process of transfiguration be stimulated by a forcing. At other times he spoke of "dictatorial insistence", (12) this time of a "sort of distortion", which takes the form of a minimal movement, a throwaway: "I believe that full comprehension of an object involves the least physical movement [my italics] of the observer. I can speculate that painting is fixed, sculpture is fixed, and architecture is fixed." (13) Picasso began a monumental interpretation of "Las Meninas" by Velásquez from the turning to the left of the Infanta Margarita Maria's head, which works as a catalyst for the transfiguration of the entire work. (14) With the well-known intuition of 45° field rotation – the "Diamond Configuration" – Hejduk demolished every familiarity with an axonometric view, causing it to take on the features of a planar representation ("shallow depth"). While the artists of the abstract avant-garde recognize in the axonometric model the possibility of representing new architecture, which does not recognize basic and immutable  types, shuns symmetry and frontality, "(…) does not distinguish between a 'before' (façade) from a 'behind', a 'right' from a 'left', and, if possible, even an 'up' from a 'down' ', (15) the "Diamond Configuration" allowed Hejduk to recover the primordial spatial references (high, low, etc.) that are essential to any iconology. (16)

III. Conclusions: Teatro senza Spettacolo (17) 

Hejduk's demolitions, the unusual shapes that his drawings assume, the axonometric views and planimetric montages, have nothing sadistic or hallucinatory, as Tafuri pointed out. (18) What interested him was bringing out the evocative power of the architecture: "What is important is that there is an ambience or an atmosphere that can be estracted in drawing that will give the same sensory aspect as being there, like going into the church and being overwhelmed by the Stations of the Cross (a set of plaques which exude the sense of a profound situation). You can exude the sense of a situation by drawing, by model or by good form. None is more exclusive than the other or more correct. They are." (19)

Hejduk's concern was to represent the proound meaning of a situation, not by an explanation, but through a clarification that passes from being overwhelmed by a representation, that exudes, like a body, the sense of a "profound situation". His breaching of the conventions of representation resembles the concept of "defamiliarisation" with which Šklovskij invests literary language and art, which have no practical function, but have the task of letting us see things with different eyes and "refreshing" our vision of things against the danger of automation. (20) In the drawing of the Grandfather Wall House the sky and the ground lose their usual position and the observer is located directly in front of the wall with an axial precision impossible to achieve in reality. And yet this is an anti-scenographic theatricality, in which the mind of the observer is forced to imagine new ways to travel through and inhabit living spaces by a composition in fragments, in which the architectural image – as Pommer stated – directs and guides the idea, "(...) it is architecture as signpost to idea".

What Hejduk sought through the project was the evocative power of the architecture itself, expressed through its elements, "(...) a reflection on the nature of architecture itself, on what architecture is or ought to be, on walls and roofs and boundaries, for example, rather than on technology or a social program, or a vision of the future, as earlier modern architecture was meant to be." (21) And what Hejduk sought to fully comprehend, through a continual paring, starting from his own symbolic reference system, is architecture itself.

Notes
(1) This essay was a review of a series of exhibitions mounted in New York between 1977 and 1978 with drawings by Michael Graves, Venturi and Rauch, Walter Pichler, John Hejduk and Aldo Rossi: "Drawings Toward a More Modern Architecture" presented jointly by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and the Drawing Center in New York; "Architecture I" organised by Pierre Apraxine for the Leo Castelli Gallery, and in an expanded version at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia under the title "Architecture: Seven Architects".

At that time, Richard Pommer was head of the Department of Art History at Vassar College in New York.

(2) "The drawings of John Hejduk are of particular interest in their attempt to revivify the mystical modernist faith [corsivo mio] in the meaning of abstract spatial signals by matching the convention of pictoral flatness to the ground plan of architecture. The drawing thereby enforces in the imagination spatial perceptions which ironically can't be controlled in the actual experience of architecture. The plan commences a dialogue with the elevation on the surface of the drawing: the shapes of the rooms in the plan recall those of the clouds in the elevation; the wall in the elevation refers to the concrete walk shown in plan in front of the wall. Up and down, earth and sky, lose their accustomed positions. Instead, the fundamental positions in space are defined by reference to the wall, which here coincides with the plane of the drawing. We are directed frontally against the plane of this very long wall with an axial precision impossible to achieve in reality. We are forced to imagine the different states of approaching and dwelling, of freedom and containment, of our eventual isolation, which neither perspective views nor the building itself could evoke in the same way. The function of drawing in creating the new architecture of imagination is nowhere more explicit than in this work.[my italics]". Taken from Richard Pommer, Structures for the Imagination, "Art in America", March/April, 1978.

This text was republished by John Hejduk in  Mask of Medusa, New York 1985.

(3) "The problems of conception, image, representation and realization are haunting obsessions to my mind's eye.". John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Mask of Medusa, New York 1985.

(4) "It must also put reality into a frame. The so-called reality is transformed.". John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Op.cit..

(5) "Whatever the initial catalyst is, let us assume that an architect has an architectural image inside his mind's eye. The initial image is like a single still-frame, because I do not believe that at first any architect has a total image of an architecture simultaneously- to my esperience or knowledge, it doesn't work that way. There may be a series of images one after the other over a period of time, but that period, no matter how small, is a necessary ingredient for the evolution toward a totality. It must be understood that so-called total architecture is ultimately made up of parts and fragments and fabrication.". John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Op.cit..

(6) John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Op.cit.. Very explicitly, Hejduk speaks of architecture as a notational system: "Althoug the perspective is the most heightened illusion – whereas the representation of a plan may be considered the closest to reality – if we consider it as substantively notational, the so-called reality of built architecture can only come into being through a notational system.". For Nelson Goodman, a symbolic system is notational when it allows us to track back retroactively from the work to the representation it was made from and that also certifies its identity. Goodman considers architecture a transitional notational system, whose language "has not yet acquired the full authority to be able to create in every case a divorce between the identity of the work and its particular production (...)". Nelson Goodman, I linguaggi dell'arte, chap. V, para. 9, L'architettura.

(7) See the entire sequence of representations and re-presentations in John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, op. cit..

(8) Cf. Robert Klein, Pensiero e simbolo nel Rinascimento, in La forma e l'intelligibile, Turin 1975

(9) John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Op.cit..

(10) There is a well-known response by Picasso who reproached him for the fact that his portrait of Gertrude Stein looked nothing like her: "It doesn't matter, it will look like her!"

(11) Richard Pommer, Op.cit..

(12) "Objects relate in various ways to its dictatorial insistence". John Hejduk, Out of time and into space, in Mask of Medusa, Op.cit.. Cf. Lamberto Amistadi, Paesaggio come Rappresentazione, TECA 3, Naples 2008, pp.37-41.

(13) John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth, in Op.cit..

(14) "If one set out to copy Las Meninas in all good faith, let's say, when one got to a certain point and if the person doing the copying were me, I'd say: How about putting that girl a little more to the right or the left? [My italics] I'd try to do it in my own way, forgetting Velásquez. Trying it out, I'd surely end up modifying the light or changing it, because of having changed the position of the figure. And so, little by little, I'd be painting meninas that would seem detestable to the professional copyst; they wouldn't be the ones the copyst would believe he'd seen in Velásquez's canvas, but they'd be 'my' meninas (...).". From Picasso's Las Meninas, Editorial Meteora, Barcelona 2001, p.28

(15) Theo van Doesburg, De architectuur als synthese der nieuwe beelding, in «De Stijl», 6, pp.78-83. Cfr. Bruno Reichlin, L'assonometria come progetto. Uno studio su Alberto Sartoris, «Lotus», 22, 1979.

(16) See: John Hejduk, Introduction to Diamond catalogue, Cubist influence, in Mask of Medusa, op. cit..

(17) In his Teatro senza Spettacolo – Theatre without the Spectacle, Carmelo Bene demolished the conventions of theatrical representation.

(18) Cf. Manfredo Tafuri, John Hejduk: l'evento interrotto, in Five architects N.Y., Rome 1998.

(19) John Hejduk in Mask of Medusa, Section A, op.cit.., p.58.

(20) Cf. Viktor Borisovič Šklovskij, L'arte come Procedimento, in I Formalisti Russi, edited by T. Todorov, Turin 1968