“ Drawing, Writing, Embodying: John Hejduk‟s Masques Of Architecture” Amy Bragdon Gilley Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Architecture Design and Research Marcia F. Feuerstein Marco Frascari Alberto Perez-Gomez Ann M. Kilkelly Brian F. Katen February 2, 2010 Alexandria, VA Keywords: John Hedjuk, Masque, emblem book, modernism, Rossi, Ben Jonson Copyright (2011) “ Drawing, Writing, Embodying: John Hejduk‟s Masques Of Architecture” Amy Bragdon Gilley ABSTRACT The following dissertation will examine the architectural masques of architect and poet, John Hejduk. Hejduk's masques are more than the text or the drawing; like their inspiration, the Stuart Court Masque, the architectural masque is a compendium of text, symbol, history, and performance, which is meant to lead the viewer to a greater comprehension of the citizen's role in the creation of community. There has been as yet no study of the direct links to the Stuart Court Masque, the invention poet Ben Jonson and architect Inigo Jones, or what the links in Hejduk's masques to the emblem books, which are the heart of the Court Masque. The following dissertation will undertake an explication of two key Hejduk texts as means to demonstrate the architectural meaning of Hejduk's Architectural Masques as a descendant of the Stuart Court Masque. The dissertation examines Hejduk's pedagogical biography, the history of the Court Masque and emblem book (which is the basis of the Architectural Masques), Hejduk's own dumb' emblem book, Silent Witnesses, and finally, Victims, his first masque which is the application of his theory to the masque. The methodology of the dissertation involves an explication of Hejduk's texts, drawing on an understanding of his own education as an architect and educator. The examination of his two texts, Silent Witnesses, and Victims, are to be the basis for drawing out the imagination as a student and a teacher. Such textual examination is meant to encourage the reader, and future architects, of the deep influence of the past in creating art of the present and future. TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: JOHN HEJDUK: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY 24 CHAPTER TWO: SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 61 CHAPTER THREE: SILENT WITNESSES: AN EMBLEM BOOK 85 CHAPTER FOUR: VICTIMS: A MASQUE 145 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION: PALLADIAN WINDOW 220 References 233 Appendix 238 iii INTRODUCTION In 2000, John Hejduk's final project Sanctuaries, based on a collection of paintings entitled Enclosures, was posthumously published. This work has both answered and left unanswered questions regarding this architect's placement within the traditions modern and post-modern architecture. John Hejduk's professional biography covers a complex journey from a personal journey from a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast to a disciple of Le Corbusier in his modeling of the Nine Square Grid project and Diamond houses to the creator of the very original Architectural Masques. His legacy has been generally linked to the studio projects and pedagogical practices, including the remodeling of the architecture building, at Cooper Union in New York City, but his influence as a teacher has been more wide-spread. His late work, the Architectural Masques, provide a deeper foundation for the practice of teaching architecture than his more famous, more accessible Nine-Square Grid Project. The opaqueness of the Masque, a dramatic form unfamiliar to most non- theater scholars, often is misinterpreted, and consequently, its relationship 1 to emblem and symbol as the basis for construction is often missed. Instead, Hejduk's work is perceived through many other guises, surrealism, and a postmodern rejection of classical, and so on. To create his masques, Hejduk employed a series of intentionally allegorical images which have buried beneath them a deep recognition and relationship of symbol to architecture. What the individual paintings in Enclosures do is provide a manual on the meaning within the composition of architecture as an enclosure. An enclosure is both meant as a definition of closing off property and of the regions term of seclude. An enclosure is also an addition in a letter. It is derives from the Middle English term to shut in. Of all three meaning, these enclosures are of the second type, to seclude, with the piercing of the boundary walls as the key element. This definition of architecture barriers is at the heart of all of Hejduk's architectural masques. “Religious imagery has historically provided art with the most widely understandable code for its attempts at transcending this unsatisfactory world…” 1 Furthermore, Hejduk‟s Enclosures develops a specific architectural language of line, 1 K. Michael Hays, “Architecture‟s Destiny,” in Sanctuaries: the Last Works of John Hejduk, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002), p. 2 color, and plane that surpasses his earlier experiments with Mondrian and Le Corbusier influenced composition. The first of these untitled paintings depicts three angels: one between the spheres holding a large sword surrounded by a shadow or perhaps wings of red, while below rest two angels. (Figure 1) One slumps against the left corner of the box while the other sleeps on its side on the ground. At the top is a rather simple depiction of the sun Figure 1 [Fair Use] John Hejduk Enclosures with rays and a blue halo. Beneath the angel with the sword is another sun, with a blue halo and a reverse cross also with wings. The painting divided into three fields: a blue border surrounds the interior box of texture in dark brown, almost like a parquet or perhaps wings, that rests on a strip of brown. The border is broken by the yellow and white light that streams from the angels. The light crosses over the border and escapes into the „real‟ world. What are peculiar about these angels are their wings, patterned with red and blue; the avenging angel‟s wings are blue and white. In the tradition, these 3 angles are robed. They float awkwardly within the space, shapeless but for the human gestures. They do not have halos but streams of light and a red halo. The effect is startling, causing pause and silence. There is no entrance to these enclosures from within the painting; one can enter only from above as viewer and as angel. The angels are trapped within these planes. Each image contains the unspoken text of angels in other paintings recalls the Giotto angels. The angels break through the walls. The interior constructed within the plane. The brilliant color alludes to another level of emotion. While the complex composition offers a sense of planes within planes, developing layers, pushing some ideas forward and some behind. The light shooting from the angel the left startles the view awake, throws the eye off to the right. “Speaking when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see, and see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it is because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.”2 2 Pierre Bonnard quoted in Sarah Whitfield, ”Fragments of an Identical World,” in Bonnard, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1998), p.13. 4 Hejduk‟s belief in these paintings was that the questions such as “how the cross was constructed and detailed?“ contain the instructions to understand architectural language. Hejduk‟s „crosses‟ in Enclosures are simple diagrams; but the cross within the paintings suggests a much more complex cross. “This fitting together of two pieces of wood raised up as a gallows gives nothing as such to be seem of the least holiness or the least divinity-except a human body that one may have perhaps already seen before he had been put to death.”3 The various articulations of the representation of the cross vary far more than is suggested in this one painting. The marks on the canvas that recreate these crosses in Hejduk‟s paintings are to explore the precise way one can apprehend architecture: a alchemy of construction, material, and symbol. LITERATURE REVIEW This sense of medieval craftsmanship is often missing in discussions of Hejduk's work, specifically the Architectural masques. A review of the current literature on Hejduk's Masques suggests that there is room to tackle 3 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.) p. 72. 5 his work through a study related to the emblem book and the court masque. The major articles discussed below reveal thoughtful imaginative understandings of the masque, offering suggestive approaches. The most critical commentaries on Hejduk‟s Masques which generally mention some aspect of performance in Hejduk‟s masque but do not pursue the connection are Anthony Idler's “ John Hejduk: Vagabond Architecture, ” Wim Van den Bergh‟s “voiceless reason, silent speech,” James McGregor‟s “ the Architect as Storyteller, Alberto Perez-Gomez' “The Renovation of the Body.” In comparison, I look at Catherine Ingrahm‟s “Errand, Detour, and the Wilderness Urbanism of John Hejduk,” which offers a view of Hejduk‟s work as representative of a uniquely American impulse, bypassing the usual discussion of Hejduk as modernist. Anthony Vidler‟s “ John Hejduk: Vagabond Architecture” assigns Hejduk to the role of the vagabond. Vidler examines and then dismisses the two most obvious definitions of his work as being neither an expression of a relentless personal idiosyncratic nature nor a critique of the urban architecture as fixed immobile. Peering deeper behind what he calls witty quasi-anthropomorphic buildings, masques, Vidler considers them as catalysts for critique, a “perceptual reminder, a kind of memory theatre.” 6 Although Hejduk‟s architecture dos not appear fixed, it is site specific in the sense that its images derive from a consciousness of the site. In Victims, for example, the site echoed with the memories of the former torture chambers used during World War Two now occupied by „ houses for the „identity card man‟ and the ‟keeper of the records‟. These representations are, in Vidler‟s words, kafkaquesque. Yet, Vidler avoids the obvious connection to the strolling player by suggesting that Hejduk indeed is playing out the role of the Vagabond, whose role in society has been as „edgeman,‟ a disturber of the order of things. Despite Vidler‟s appreciation of Hejduk‟s wit, what Vidler is interested in exploring is Hejduk‟s framing of architecture within a political and critical framework. What Vidler‟s article presents is a new definition of architecture as one that poses a challenge to assumptions about order. Vidler poses Hejduk‟s work as neo derive, a reformation of the romantic wandering of Rimbaud and the political gestures of the Situationists‟ „derive‟. Although an individually composed „psycheography‟, these derives posed a challenge for traditional architect who tends to operate in „state space,‟ or consciously parceled out closed divided space. The vagabond inhabits a nomadic space, a „heterogeneous infinitesimal passage to the liminal, a continuous variation.” 7