Words Are at Sea

Let Us Return

2012-01-03T22:25:00.009-06:00

[…] I believe all you have related
to me let us return to our studios
and work our creations will
outlast us

—John Hejduk (1)

Graphite ore

Tracing with graphite on plan of the Wall House 2

When Kie Ellens first invited me to visit John Hejduk’s Wall House in Groningen, many of the aspects of the Wall House that may be self-evident to an architect or architectural theorist were not self-evident to me. As an artist who was raised in Mexico and Canada, I did not have a contextual understanding of who John Hejduk was: of his work, his training, and his teachings. So I first went into the building, as I often go into ostensible architectural landmarks, self-conscious and looking out for what I may miss.

Initially, I came to regard the effects of my “ingestion” by the building—to borrow one of Hejduk's figures of speech—as an intuitively sensuous experience, regardless of what I knew or, mainly, did not know about the building. But I also grasped that its design was inflected by contexts and theoretical underpinnings that at that point eluded me.

Later on, when I read Don Wall’s interviews with Hejduk, I got a sense that I already “understood” the logic of the building in a non-verbal way. Don Wall’s questions helped me piece it together.

Don Wall: You spoke of the threatening aspect of your work. How do you [equate] threat with the simplicity of the imagery of the work? For instance, this is a ¾ circle, this is a ¾ square, this is a tugboat, this is an airplane, this is a submarine, this is a black cube, this is a blue cylinder: all terribly straightforward, all terribly familiar, nothing threatening. There is no opacity, there is no mystery associated with any of the elements. Nothing complex at an elemental level. Straightforward, frontal images.

Hejduk: They look benign.

Don Wall: But they are not.

Hejduk: You got it.

Don Wall: Well, if the malignancy does not lie in the parts, then it must reside in the way the parts are being assembled. […] There’s a paradox here. The work looks simple, indeed, perhaps naïve at first glance. And that has always intrigued me. When I look at the [Wall House 2], if I look at it in parts, it looks very naïve: it's a window; it's a stair; it’s an attached form; it’s curvilinear in outline. It’s all very straightforward in the manipulations of forms, and yet, there is something about the whole thing coming together which…

Hejduk: … has an otherness. […]

Don Wall: But is it really that? One of the things that Cubism had is that it looked frontally at objects […] a pipe is a pipe, a violin is a violin, in elevation and otherwise. No attempt to fudge the reality of the object as such. Your work is very similar to that: very frontal, direct, head-on. And yet, as it gets assembled, something happens…

Hejduk: There is a cross-over. Internally. […] What you think it is initially isn’t what it is ultimately. (2)

The conversations between Don Wall and Hejduk are replete with references to early 20th century modern painters like Gris and Mondrian. Moreover, Hejduk’s poetry constantly depicts scenarios of imagined conversations between artists. Most notably, in his book “Lines No Fire Could Burn,” there are several poems in which Rodin and Braque are engaged in allegorical conversations.

John Hejduk. Lines No Fire Could Burn. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999.

Literary and artistic references are necessary considerations as I plan a project for the Wall House that will open to the public in the summer of 2013. The project, which I call, “The Inside from the Inside,” will engage with the Wall House on many fronts—one of these fronts is an embrace of Hejduk’s interest in poetics, which I also share.

“The Inside From the Inside” will be an artist’s response to a unique architectural landmark. There is no other building in the world like the Wall House—one can grasp this almost instantly, by apprehending its eccentric exterior. At the same time, the symbolic and formal subtleties present within the space are less evident at a glance. My project will be an opportunity to respond to the house’s phenomenological nuances by drawing attention to the more elusive and mysterious aspects of its interior: to the “spirit of its space”—to again borrow Hejduk’s words.

My project will activate multiple-story relationships that reveal some of the nuanced and metaphoric dimensions of the building. I plan to examine these relationships through an installation that encompasses artist’s books, drawing and lyrical language. Hejduk used drawing and poetry as a vehicles to envision physical and spiritual sites for contemplation and inquiry. My project will be driven by the desire to build upon this exploration through a dialogue with the building, and, by association, with one of the most overlooked architects of the last century.

Tracings with graphite of the shapes of three living rooms of the Wall House 2.
From left to right: the bedroom, the kitchen/dining room, and the living room.
The points at which one crosses the wall are the points of contact indicated in the tracings.

At the center of the project is a large scale graphite drawing that links, like an inner membrane, the three floors of the Wall House. Corporeally these floors are only accessible by crossing a threshold marked by a wall, and by ascending or descending a staircase. The pivotal drawing consequently makes an intervention that models another kind of connective tissue between 'insides': the interiority of the living spaces and the interiority of the viewer/inhabitant. It thereby addresses interiority as a generative concern where sculptural, literary, and architectural elements overlap and punctuate each other. Other components include an exhibition of artists' books and the re-staging of existing domestic spaces as public areas for contemplation and performance.

(1) Excerpted from the poem "Let Us Return." In Lines No Fire Could Burn. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999.
Page 99

(2) John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 53

Structures: on books and architecture

2011-12-20T19:01:00.048-06:00

Illustrated manuscript of the Dalã'il al-khayrat
"The Ways of Edification" of al-Jazuli
Turkey, Ottoman Empire, 1793 CE.
Ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper

John Hejduk, who studied at Cooper Union in the late 1940’s, speaks of one particular formative experience in his early education:

The first project at Cooper Union (1947) was given in the two-dimensional design studio taught by the wonder-full Henrietta Schutz. We were to produce an illustrated book on selected Aesop’s Fables. We worked for one full year on that book. The experience of designing this volume was one of unique importance as a tool for the introduction to architecture. Through a rigorous discipline it trained the eye (visual sensibility) and the hand (tactile sensibility). We learned how to handle a paint brush, and began the exercising of one’s innate feelings toward color, form and space. (1)

John Hejduk, illustrations for Aesop's Fables, 1947
from John Hejduk, The Mask of the Medusa, Pp. 162 to 163

While Hejduk does not specify what was the important relationship between making the book and architectural work, he talks fondly about the useful process of learning how to draw a sequence of images during that whole year. Sequential works often rely on a structure or system to give connectivity to the sum of the parts. Content, scale, continuity, and jolts of discontinuity: all of these are a few factors that contribute to the sound totality of structure. I surmise that for Hejduk the making of an illustrated book was an introduction to the inner process of assembling and relating spaces to create a structure.

Dianna Frid, Against the Dying of the Light, 2010 (excerpt)
Unique Artist's Book.
Cloth, thread, paper, paint, aluminum, adhesives

I perceive the space of architecture and the space of the book as experiences of immersion into structure. Recently I came across a literary model for this experience in Virginia Woolf's 1931 modernist novel, The Waves. Woolf said that for this novel she wrote “to a rhythm and not to a plot.”(2). Her statement resonates with my thinking of artist’s books as spatial and rhythmic moments that do not depend on or culminate in a narrative plot. Their content develops through a rhythm, not an outcome.

Dianna Frid, The Waves, 2011 (excerpt)
Unique Artist's Book.
Cloth, thread, foil, cellophane, adhesives

In interviews, John Hejduk often likens entering a building to being ingested.

Don Wall: Can you clarify what you said before about the two systems of architectural experience?

John Hejduk: You can be in a volumetric situation which is “encompassing.” Architecture is the only art where you can have that experience, which is very curious. Or else, you can be a distance away, a block away from a house on a hill somewhere, and you can look at that distant thing as an object, whatever your perspective is. You approach it, you move toward it, the object is upon you. There is a moment—and I am talking not only about the physical but also the mental moment—when you cross the threshold and you are no longer outside the object. You are in it. (3)

Although both artist’s books (4) and buildings have insides and outsides, the ingestion by a book is of a different phenomenological order than the ingestion of a body by a building. Artist’s books, in their modest scale, can temporally swallow up a person. At the same time, the traversal of an artist’s book is a temporal traversal of spaces. The mental space produced within an artist’s book is composed of physical pages or folios arranged into a sequence. Like rooms in a building, the traversal of space is given meaning by the manner in which the sequence of pages generates content chronologically. In a building, as in a book, there is also a general sense of chronological expectation, akin to suspense, when for the first time one moves through the sequence of its spaces. Although I propose that there are some similarities between architectural and book structures, I am in no way saying that buildings and artist’s book are the same modalities of experience. Being engulfed by architectural space is a physical fact, not a metaphor. While the shelter that books can offer provides psychic sustenance, books are simply emblematic dwellings. In real space we have to work through the limitations and potentials of our bodies; we move around real obstructions and through actual thresholds; and we are subsumed by phenomena, concrete, not represented.

John Hejduk: 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 in it […] 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.

Don Wall: Lets proceed one step further with that. If the threshold is the intermediate moment between two worlds, the looking of the object from the outside as a planar system and the experience of it from the inside as a volumetric system, is there any reason that the threshold in your Wall Houses is so neutral and grey? It ought to be a point, theoretically, of anxiety, of something going on.

Hejduk: I see it as the “moment of the present.” (5)

•••

This entry marks a transitional point in this blog. Words-are-at-sea was started when I was a resident at John Hejduk’s Wall House five months ago. Although I have continued to think about the house and its enduring appeal as an experimental and rich architectural site I have not written in the blog until now. I am prompted to write again as I plan an art project and an exhibition for the Wall House for the summer of 2013. This blog will slowly veer in the direction of that planning and the thought process behind it, but it will be—by necessity—modulated by my long term artistic processes and questions, which are independent from Hejduk’s ideas. At times Hejduk’s writings on architecture have resonated with my approach to making things, but this is not always the case. And yet, I find the opportunity of exploring Hejduk’s work from within the Wall House quite rich. Others often described Hejduk as a mystic. I do not know what that means, although like Hejduk, I do think of space (actual, real space) as mysterious. Rather than a mystic, Hejduk appears to me as an artist, a lone visionary whose strange architecture is not populist, but is quietly influential.

There are many kinds of architectural realities and interpretations of those realities, which include the major issue of representation and re-presentation. Whatever the medium used – be it a pencil sketch on paper, a small-scale model, the building itself, a sketch of the built building, a model of the built building, a film of the built building, or a photograph of the above realities—a process is taking place. Some sort of distortion is occurring, a distortion that has to do with intuition as primal yearning, which, in turn, has something to do with the interpretation and re-interpretation of space and all the mysteries that the word space encompasses, including its spirit. (6)

During my stay at the Wall House, I read, thought and at times wrote about the Wall House from inside it. This sense of interiority as perceived from the inside then, and now from memory, will be carried through to the work I make for the space. For now I envision it as a membrane of graphite that spans the interior of the three stories of the Wall House.

(1) John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 27

(2) Molly Hite. “Introduction.” In, Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, 2006. P. xxxix

(3) John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 90

(4) I refer here to artist’s books in particular to differentiate from books in general, although artist’s books are not easy to place in only one category. To define artist’s book I cite below from Ulysses Carrion’s manifesto on artist’s books first published in 1975 and reprinted in Ulises Carrión. “The New Art of Making Books.” Artist’s Books, Tome I. New York, Barcelona, London, Amsterdam: Turner, 2003. Pp. 310-323:

WHAT A BOOK IS

• A book is a sequence of spaces.

• A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.

• The fact that a text is contained in a book comes only from the dimensions of such a text; or, in the case of a series of texts (poems, for instance), from their number.

• A literary (prose) text contained in a book ignores the fact that the book is an autonomous space-time sequence.

• A series of more or less short texts (poems or other) distributed though a book following any particular ordering reveals the sequential nature of the book.

• It reveals it, perhaps uses it, but it does not incorporate it or assimilate it.

• Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within space; the reading of which occurs in time.

[…]

• Among languages, literary language (prose and poetry) is not the best suited to the nature of books.

• A book may be the accidental container or a text […] A book can also exist as an autonomous and self-sufficient form, including perhaps a text that emphasizes that form, a text that is an organic part of that form, here begins the new art of making books.

• In the old art the writer judges himself as not being responsible for the real book. He writes the text, the rest is done by servants, the artisans, the workers, the others.

• In the new art, writing the text is only the first link in the chain going from the writer to the reader. IN the new art the writer assumes the responsibility for the whole process.

• In the old art the writer writes texts.

• In the new art the writer makes books.

[…]

• In order to read the new art, one must apprehend the book as a structure, identifying its elements and understanding their function.

[…]

• Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments.

• A writer, contrary to the popular opinion, does not write books.• A writer writes texts.

• A book is a space-time sequence.

• […] Books seen as autonomous realities can contain any (written) language, not only literary language, or even any other system of signs.

[…]

Dianna Frid, The Comets, 2011
Unique Artist's Book
Canvas, aluminum, paper, paint, thread

(5) John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 90

(6) Ibid. Page 60

Leaving the Wall House, or Through the Looking Glass

2011-07-19T14:30:00.003-05:00

Photo: William Mazzarella, July 2011

Dianna,
I'm fascinated by the perceptual opening that can happen when one spends considerable time with a space - especially one like the Wall House.
In Through The Looking Glass, there's a constant shifting of expectations and perceptual-mind-bending which happens at dead end after dead end. So, I imagine finding the greatest revelation in the one space which is, on first glance, the least fascinating.
Do dead ends turn into ways of seeing?
Off to swim now.
–Tim Nickodemus (in an email sent on July 14, 2011)

“Space is that which is not looked at through a keyhole, nor through an open door. Space does not exist for the eye only; it is not a picture: one wants to live in it.”
–El Lisstizki (1)

Tim,
It is true that one’s perceptual awareness opens up by spending time with a place. While my perceptual experiences at the Wall House were inflected by the particular architectural eccentricities of the building, they were not essentially mind-bending; at least not in the way I interpret your pointed question to mean.

Living at the Wall House was not like Alice’s crossing into the other side of the mirror—an act with truly mind-bending consequences that suggests there is a very thin line (if any at all) between sense and non-sense, between enigmatic language and communication. I believe, as Kie Ellens said, that the Wall House was an imaginative opportunity for Hejduk to explore, in a very concrete way, the possibilities of building a house–albeit a house comprised by an unusual combination of volumetric shapes on a plane, and which could also encapsulate a symbolic consideration of architecture. After having lived at the Wall House for two weeks, I look at my experiences there as a series of mostly concrete, corporeal relations to space. During my first days there, I was constantly aware of my body as both a sheltered object and a moving entity. It was all new, and I was disposed to be like a pinball bouncing into as many components of the enclosure as possible.

I wrote about how to move from one floor to another (basically from one volume to another) one had to negotiate, with concentration, a narrow spiral staircase. After a while, I got used to this and to most aspects of the building, which in essence means that I stopped being as absorbed and, well, that I stopped noticing its peculiarities at all times. Habit kicked in. But it was upon leaving the Wall House, and arriving in Southern Finland, that other, more common buildings became unfamiliar.

Maybe the real passage “through the looking glass” occurs upon return, that is, when crossing back and noticing the known world as potentially odd–and charged.

Happy swimming,

Dianna

"Buildings are received n a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically. Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of a traveler before a famous building. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to what contemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation. Under certain circumstances, this form of reception shaped by architecture acquires canonical values For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means–that is by ways of contemplation. They are mastered gradually–taking their cue front tactile reception–through habit."
–Walter Benjamin (2)

(1) El Lissitzky is cited by DJAMEL ZENITI, in “Sensing Aalto” in http://www.alvaraalto.fi/ptah/issue/0301/zeniti.htm#top23 (accessed on July 19, 2011)

(2) Benjamin, Walter. 2002. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility (Second Version),’ p 120. In Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, eds, Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leaks and Craters

2011-07-16T10:11:00.002-05:00

From: Dianna Frid

Subject: Big storm in Groningen
Date: July 10, 2011 7:59:22 PM GMT+02:00
To: Kie Ellens

Dear Kie,
I hope that you are having a good time in New York. We just had several hours of intense rain in Groningen. Water has been trickling into the basement through the staircase shaft. William and I went outside to scoop out what seemed to be endless buckets of water, which we dumped into the canal. The main nesting area next to the wall/threshold adjacent to our sleeping room looks like a war zone. The pipes are now exposed–all the birds are either corpses or gone. Little eggs have been abandoned. Do you think it may be a good idea to have a member of your board come to see? Or maybe this has happened before?
Dianna

…

From: Dianna Frid
Subject: continuous drip into the basement
Date: July 13, 2011 8:06:36 AM GMT+02:00
To: Kie Ellens

Hello Kie, Lots of rain again. Apparently it will be raining for the next couple of days. Water keeps dripping into the basement and, well, you can imagine the constant reverberation of sopping sounds this makes. Are you sure there is nobody you can call to come have a look?
Dianna

…

From: Kie Ellens
Subject: Re: continuous drip into the basement
Date: July 13, 2011 2:56:20 PM GMT+02:00
To: Dianna Frid

Dear Dianna,
The dripping was one of the reasons I had to start looking into maintenance.
The first action I took when I was given the job three years ago was to try to make the builders accountable for the crappy construction quality of the Wall House. A legal claim could have been made up to seven months before my term as Director started, so we could not take this route. Shortly after, I had a contractor look at it and he made a quotation that was impossible for the Wall House budget to shoulder. This is one of the planned actions for (hopefully) later this year.
I wish you would have had nice weather all the way, I know how unpleasant it can be with the monotone dripping. I once stayed a night over and it made me mad. See you tomorrow.
(I wish I could do more). Warm regards,
Kie

William has said this many times: that the Wall House is a life-size model, made of something “like cardboard,” expected to to tumble after several days of rough exposure to real weather. I like the analogy but the slow crumbling of the actual Wall House is clearly due to the cutting of corners during its construction. The same cannot be said of the accurate and curious models that Hejduk developed, quite rigorously, over a long period of investigation. Today, the building aptly looks like it was designed in the 1970’s: impractically utopian, imaginative, and retro-futuristic. Not necessarily beautiful. But it also looks like it was built in the 1970’s and much older than its real “Groningen” age. No serious maintenance work has been done to it since it was constructed–badly–in 2001.

There was a ladder against the greenhouse, and little lumps of putty stuck about, for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse [...] She had it on the tip of her tongue to say, as they strolled, "It'll cost fifty pounds," but instead, for her heart failed her about money, she talked about Jasper shooting birds [...]

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1)

(1) Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Page 66.

Optimism and Demystification: A conversation about the Wall House with Kie Ellens

2011-07-12T09:16:00.015-05:00

You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Alice Munro (1)

Kie Ellens at the Wall House, July 2011

This conversation took place at The Wall House 2 in Groningen on July 5, 2011.

Dianna Frid: Perhaps we can begin by talking about John Hejduk and your relationship to him through the Wall House.

Kie Ellens: I have been Director of the Wall House 2 Foundation since 2007 and during this time I have gotten to know John Hejduk–his work, but also how others saw him as a person and how they see his work.
Hejduk as born in 1929 in the United States and he died in 2000. For an architect of his stature he built very few buildings. He remodeled parts of Cooper Union where you can see his hand in the detailing. He worked on collaborations in the north of Spain. There are two apartment buildings by his hand in Berlin. He did a couple of large, almost life-size models in Prague. In New York, he was part of The New York 5 —which included Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves and Charles Gwathmey. Before that he was part of the Texas Rangers. Of all the members in either group of architects Hejduk was the one who realized the least number of buildings.
Hearing people who knew him talk about Hejduk can be quite moving. Especially his former students…For me it has been really interesting to have some of them visit: their experience of the Wall House is a visibly emotional one.

Kim Shkapich, John Hejduk, 1999.

Education of an Architect: A Point of View.

Book; offset lithograph, 9 3/4 in. x 9 in.

DF: Why do you think this is the case?

KE: I think that Hejduk was aware that even the work he did for himself could be useful to his students. He showed them how to be imaginative and how to ask questions regardless of the viability of a project. For example, through the designs for the Wall Houses he could give students a sampler of design decisions around the question, “What is a house?” The Wall Houses posed architectural problems not only for him but for students as well. He wanted to test out his ideas and he wanted his students to see this process unfold.

DF: From what I have read it seems that for Hejduk being a teacher was not irreconcilable with being an architect. I also think of him as someone who saw writing poetry as part of his work.

KE: Yes, and I would broaden this further. I think that drawing was for him as important as poetry. Through both forms one can get a sense that he was thinking in a certain spiritual way. Some people doubt that he was actually spiritual, but, nevertheless, in his work one can tell that he was looking for meaning. He was not exactly a pragmatist.

John Hejduk, Berlin Sketchbook.
From: John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. 1985: New York, Rizzoli. Pages 386-388.

DF: What are the dates of the Wall Houses?

KE: He started designing them in the late 60’s, but the Wall House 2 was first planned around 1972.

John Hejduk, Wall House 2 (Bye House), sketch, early 1970's.
From: John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. 1985: New York, Rizzoli. Page 307.

KE: He kept working on number 2 beyond that; it was a process of fine-tuning an idea, pretty much. In his mind he was testing Wall House 1 and found out that he needed to alter the design so the model could accommodate an experience that was both physical and metaphysical—a full experience of a house. Some of its design is fueled by Hejduk’s interest in Le Corbusier’s houses. As you may know, Le Corbusier was a great influence on him. Through the Wall House, Hejduk both acknowledged this influence, but also cancelled it out: it was like killing the father for him.

Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret, Paris.
Photo: Olivier Martin-Gambier, 2004.
From: http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/

DF: A parricide!
What were other important influences on Hejduk?

KE: Before the Wall Houses Hejduk worked on the Diamond Houses. The Diamond Houses are connected to De Stijl movement of painting and architecture. I think that the Diamond Houses are less radical than the Wall Houses, although the latter span a shorter period of his career. You see, the Wall Houses are very rigorous studies, and, although they constitute a small body of work, they seep into his latter works.

John Hejduk, Diamond House A, Model.
From: John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. 1985: New York, Rizzoli. Page 244.

DF: Was he looking at Mondrian specifically when he worked on the Diamond Houses?

KE: Mainly at Theo van Doesburg.

Theo van Doesburg. Counter-composition V, 1924
Oil on Canvas. 100 cm x 100 cm. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

DF: It is interesting that Hejduk looked at painting for more than one body of work, but his engagement was not chronological. The Wall Houses are a tip-of-the-hat to Cubism, it seems. Earlier you showed me a painting of a guitar still life by Le Corbusier (it was based on a Juan Gris painting). These paintings are supposedly significant for the design of some windows of the house. It appears to me then that, after the Diamond Houses, the Wall Houses were a vehicle for Hejduk to use painting—Cubism—to understand issues of composition. He used one side of the Wall as pictorial space.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). Still Life, 1920.
Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 39 1/4" (80.9 x 99.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art.

KE: The Wall Houses have many different aspects, and their design is a synthesis of many sources. Cubism is one of them, but I do not think that looking at painting is what ultimately helped Hejduk move from Wall House 1 to Wall House 2. It was mainly two things: Le Corbusier and the investigation of time, of the experience of the temporal and spatial in architecture. How you physically and mentally experience time as you move in architectural space.

DF: After staying here for several days I know that the experience of space is predicated on how one moves within the house, from one side of the Wall to the other, that is from the living rooms to the other side of the living rooms. So there is an experience of movement and time. Yet I am also aware that there is a symbolic aspect to the Wall House: Hejduk wanted you to think allegorically about what the Wall does to you as you pass “through” it. Hejduk did not only propose that you become aware of your movement through time and space… What Hejduk saw in the Wall is not as straightforward as that. He attributed to it a “spiritual” meaning. This is shaky ground on which Hejduk presents us with a ready-made metaphor. Can you talk about this?

KE: Hejduk referred to the utility side of the house (the entrance, bathrooms, staircase, and hallway) as “The Past.” The Wall itself is “The Present,” and the living quarters across the Wall are “The Future.” You see: an architect can make a model to find out how things work, and he or she can also make a model to add content to it. I think that the Wall House has aspects of both. Hejduk needed to make a model to find out how the Wall House could work on a human scale, but he also wanted to add content to the model. The metaphors can be forced. It is more important to have an experience of the house than to take on the metaphors Hejduk came up with.

DF: They are overdetermined.

KE: They are too didactic. What I am saying is that one does not have to buy them to experience the building. That’s why I asked you to spend some time here before doing a major project in the future; you have to come to terms with the house first. I have found that the house is not good for everybody and my job as Director has been to find the people for whom the house can be generative. Some artists have come to stay have said, “No. I cannot do a project for the Wall House.” Others have embraced it completely.

Erwin Wurm, Chromodomo, 2009
Site specific project for the Wall House 2 Foundation.

DF: I am glad that, so far, the artists who have come here to work on a project have not succumbed to Hejduk’s allegories. I think that skepticism can be a productive trigger to work in the Wall House.

KE: I also recognize that when I inadvertently get too immersed in the cult of Hejduk I want to run away. I do not want the Wall House to be used as a didactic space. When visitors come for a short visit I do talk to them about John Hejduk to give them a context. But ultimately what is important is that the Wall House offers a position from which visitors can ask themselves “What is a house? What is architecture?” and through this inquiry they understand something new about the concept of the house, and about their own house in particular. Besides, the Wall House has so many different features. For example, you can spend an entire visit just considering the windows, and another visit only examining how it is engineered.
As the director I attend to many different constituencies: the artists, a public already interested in architecture, the general public, and, well, the people who hate the house. Each constituent needs different things. The Wall House is a real site for an actual experience of architecture, not a theoretical one. I am in it for the first-hand experience thing and this is what makes me come back to the house.

DF: I wanted to ask you: since the house was theoretically designed for a couple, was it supposed to be a weekend house or an everyday house?

KE: The plan was that it would be an everyday house for a couple. This particular house, Wall House 2, was designed for Hejduk’s friend, Edwin Bye. Bye wanted to build it, as a weekend getaway in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

John Hejduk. Wall House 2 (Bye House), sketch.

From: John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947-1983. 1985: New York, Rizzoli. Page 304.

KE: As you have deduced from your own experience, the house was not conceived to be someone’s perfectly resolved everyday home but to ask questions about architecture and its uses: how do two people occupy a building? What else can a wall do? Edwin Bye thought that the Wall House 2 would make a wonderful country house. He might as well have said, “It isn’t good enough for everyday use because there is not enough closet space for my wife’s clothing. Or for my own shoes.” There is a difference between how Hejduk intended it to be used and how Bye wanted to use it. In the end, the house was not built in Ridgefield.
Before his death, Hejduk found the perfect spot for the house here in Groningen.

KE: This is the kind of house that doesn’t fit in the middle of a neighborhood. The Groningen location, I believe, is even better than the original plan of situating the house at the edge of a cliff in the woods. Instead, here it is, at the edge of a neighborhood in front of a lake. It has the better of two worlds. It is still close to people, but not on top of them.
Nevertheless, the Wall House can make some people very angry. They say, “How can you possibly live here! It is a disgrace that it has been built!” Sometimes the reactions of people are really fierce, since it takes up space in the real world.

DF: You are saying that because architecture takes up space in the “real word” an architect or a developer is expected to be responsible?

KE: Yes. And it is true. Although early on I learned not to defend Hejduk or the Wall House. That is not my role. If people are angry they are often asking you to validate their anger and to agree with them. I don’t agree with them, and so they have to look at their hostile reaction, more so than at the house.

DF: The hostile or dismissive reactions that you get from visitors are perhaps similar to hostile reactions anyone can have to a works of art: a work that is not “understood” or that is “disliked” for one reason or another. To some extent, I can understand this hostility. Aesthetic, practical or ethical expectations have not been met and there is an adverse reaction. I am not saying that these are the only reasons why the Wall House elicits negative responses; I know that there are more engaging, analytical responses that aren't endorsement of the Wall House either. Still a hostile reaction to a work can help you clarify your own ideas, like a polemic.

KE: Yes, and in this way the Wall House is effective as well! As we say here in The Netherlands, I like to be "the piggy in the middle."
I think that often the audiences that are very hostile look at art as something outside of themselves. For many years–as the director of the Wall House, and before that, as a curator and an advisor to the Chief Government Architect of The Netherlands–my role has been to help people understand that art does not have to be something separate from life. The Wall House has been a useful tool for this.

DF: I am conscious of the imaginative successes of the house and at the same time of some of its failures. I keep coming back to the tension generated by these. As far as failures go, we have talked already about the dead birds. But there are other issues. For example, one could not live here and grow old. One has to be an abled-bodied person to enter the Wall House. If you were on a wheelchair it would be impossible to even enter! So, yes, there are problems with the practical, inclusive uses of space. At the same time, the whole Hejduk project, in my view, stems from the question of possibility, and that optimism is also important.

KE: The Wall House has been important for me on a personal level:
I will use an analogy. Hejduk had to make models to test out his thinking. He wanted to try new things but he also wanted to discover through his work that he was heading in the right direction. This testing-things-out to find direction is what I look for in the artists I invite. I have been inviting people to work on projects in different venues for thirty years. I often invite them to do something completely different from what they have previously done. I say to each artist, “I want you to use this project or this space as an experiment to see what can be possible.” This has not been the case with everyone and for every project, but for me the most exploratory projects have been important experiences; checking to find out if my intuition was right. So my work at the Wall House Foundation, as its Director, is not unlike Hejduk’s. It is experimental.
As difficult as the house is, I have come to understand that its design was meant to celebrate life, but if I say it like that it sounds…Uhm…

DF: Corny?

KE: Yes, it does sound corny. But nevertheless, I keep coming back to the main reason why I ask artists to stay at the Wall House: so that they take it in bits and pieces and discover the potential role it can play in their work.

Dianna Frid, 2011. Early experiments at the Wall House.
Graphite on wall. In-progress. (Projected for 2013)

(1) Alice Munro, Selected Stories, “Introduction.” New York: Vintage, 2001. Cited in http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/176781 (accessed on July 10, 2011).

On the Principle of Charity: a Brief Letter to Lars Hertzberg

2011-07-09T10:09:00.002-05:00

Dear Dianna –
I have gone on thinking about the Wall House. You write, “I am sure that many people abhor the place, precisely because it cannot (will not) conform to what is a fulfilled expectation of the shape/configuration/experience of a house—for this house is someone else’s peculiar ’whimsy.’” Do you mean that people don’t like it because it looks different from the houses they’ve seen before (or from the way they expect houses to look)? Sometimes we do dislike things because they don’t answer to our expectations, but then that usually depends on the particular way they deviate. The design of a building, a piece of furniture or a tool can be strikingly new and yet appealing, say, because of its simplicity. (I should have some example in mind.)

When people react to the Wall House, on the other hand (by the way, I wonder if “abhor” isn’t too strong a word), it may be because, while it is strikingly different from any houses they’ve seen before, they are unsure what sense to make of the way it differs from more ordinary buildings – clearly, it is not through its simplicity, for instance. I’m not sure, perhaps they should just allow more time for getting to know the building. (And, as I said, seeing it in real life, in its actual setting, must be totally different from seeing pictures of it.)

In connection with literature we are taught to apply the principle of charity: we should try to look for a sense even in the things that may at first strike us as meaningless. Is it the case that, when it comes to the visual arts, people are less patient? We tend to say, “I don’t like it, and that’s the end of it.”

(By the way, speaking of whimsy, one building that comes to mind is the Hundertwasser House in Vienna. Do you know it?)

I’m looking forward to seeing and talking to you here, in Finland, soon.

Love,

Larz Hertzberg, (from an email sent on July 9, 2011)

July 9, 2011, Groningen

Dear Lars -

It is good to hear from you. Today one of the dead birds opened its wings. It made me think of a poem that John Hejduk wrote in which he images a conversation between Rodin and Braque. At the end of the poem Braque tells Rodin:

I paint still lifes
and albatrosses through wallpaper
so that one day I may paint the undersea itself (1)

In your note you mention how the principle of charity can be helpful when one is asked to engage with what is difficult, or with what is not perceived as beautiful. As you point out, this is certainly apt when it comes to looking at art, but also so when engaging with other particular things we may not initially "like." This mode of charity is, I believe, addressed in a text by Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just:

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. Here the alternatives posed a moment ago about the 1st genre of error—where the beautiful object vanished, not because the still-beloved object itself disappeared carrying its beauty with it, but because the object stayed behind with its beauty newly gone—are reversed. In the second genre of error a beautiful object is suddenly present, not because a new object has entered the sensory horizon bringing its beauty with it (as when a new poem is written or a new student arrives or a willow tree, unleafed by winter, becomes electric—a maze of yellow wands lifting against lavender clapboards and skies) but because an object, already within the horizon, has its beauty, like late luggage, suddenly placed in your hands. This second genre of error entails neither the arrival of a new beautiful object, nor an object present but previously unnoticed, but an object present and confidently repudiated as an object of beauty.

[…]

Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down. In this sense cultural difference, by diminishing the number of times you are on the same ground with a particular vegetation or animal or artwork, gives rise to problems in perception, but problems in perception that also arrive by many other paths. Proust, for example, says we make a mistake when we talk disparagingly or discouragingly about “life” because by using this general term, “life,” we have already excluded before the fact all beauty and happiness, which take place only in the particular: “we believed we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either.” (2)

In my letter to Noe Kidder I use the word “abhor” to portray how some visitors to the Wall House have reacted, and you note that "abhor" may be too strong a word. I had a conversation with Kie Ellens, the Director of the Wall House, in which he uses the word "fierce" to describe these reactions. He makes an interesting connection with what you imply by charity without employing this useful term (please see an upcoming blog-post with the transcription of my conversation with Kie Ellens). I agree with you that these visitors should give the house more time before dismissing it. Can one accuse them of being uncharitable? Perhaps. Yet it is more interesting to consider multiple instances in my own life when I didn't make use of this principle of charity. To engage with charity at all times and with all things would be utopian if not idealistic, for it requires not only time and patience, but also great discipline.

It has been important to stay in the very peculiar Wall House as a way to cultivate a discipline where the principle of charity is constantly being drawn out. It also has been important to designate these days to demystification, interpretation, and even, at times, to experience in them weird beauty.

I have not been to Austria to see Hundertwasser’s house. But I have been thinking of other houses that I have visited and that in some ways have moved me. One of these houses is right in your turf: the Alvar Aalto House. Have you been there?

We are looking forward to seeing you and Merete in Helsinki in a week. Again, I thank you for your thoughtful note.

With love,

Dianna

(1) Excerpted from John Hejduk, Lines No Fire Could Burn, “And What Are They”. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999. Page 115.

(2) Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Yale University, March 25 and 26, 1998. http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/scarry00.pdf
(accessed on July 9, 2011)

What it looks like, supposedly: a letter to Noe Kidder

2011-07-07T07:31:00.011-05:00

Dear Dianna,
Is the Wall House supposed to look like a sewing machine?
Too bad about the pigeons.
—from Noe Kidder, through email

Groningen, July 7, 2011

Dear Noe,

I sit most days looking at a consoling view of water and green space. There is almost no variation in elevation here, so the sky is large, and often covered in cloud curdle. Someone who drew at a table regularly designed the house and this is a good thing: the windows on the top floor are at the optimal height when one sits. This is the floor where all windows create a band along the perimeter of the room and they do not vary in height or width. In all other spaces, including the long corridor, the windows vary in height, size and shape. In the lower floor, the windows vary in shape quite dramatically. I stress dramatically in reference to received conventions of window shapes. Apparently John Hejduk looked at an already abstracted guitar in a Juan Gris painting and incorporated that configuration to the design of the lower floor windows. When I am absorbed in work I forget what the house looks like from the outside.

Juan Gris, Still Life with Guitar. 1920. Oil on Canvas, 50.3 x 61 cm

I know that this does not answer your question about whether the house is supposed to look like a sewing machine. The word “supposed” is generative, for it perceptively points to a “looking like something” that the architect may have had in mind. Because of the ambiguity embodied in your question I know that you can tell that this house is not a literal representation of a known thing—not even of another house. This latter point is precisely what makes it challenging: the exterior of the building is not a clone of another house like many clones that we see in instances of urban (or suburban) planning. It would be “simpler” (not necessarily “better”) if this oddly shaped building behaved in more familiar ways, ways that would allow us to name what it looks like, as we do to latter Claes Oldenburg enlargements (alas, Claes Oldenburg did make a terrific sewing machine sculpture as part of his early works from “The Store,” but that was another time). While Oldenburg did not make “architecture,” you can tell by the comparison to his work that I am thinking of the Wall House as sculpture and architecture.

Claes Oldenburg, Sewing Machine.

I presume that some people find the Wall House exterior quite whimsical, and your question has brought the foreseeable cast of whimsy into clearer focus. I truly had not thought about Hejduk’s whimsy at all it but–bang!–here it is, and now I will not be able to remove its filter that easily. What I recognize in Hejduk is that his designs are steeped with private metaphors, and sometimes these metaphors over determine the way in which the house is “supposed” to be experienced. I have chosen to not embrace what Hejduk has said, or what he may have wanted an occupant to feel or to think inside/outside the Wall Houses. Instead, as I often do, I allow for theory to give way to the actual experience of being in the work—whether it is for one hour or, in this case, for a few days. At this point, considering whether the house is “well liked” or not would take us to a less interesting discussion of taste and our habituation to it. I am sure that many people abhor the place, precisely because it cannot (will not) conform to what is a fulfilled expectation of the shape/configuration/experience of a house—for this house is someone else’s peculiar “whimsy.” But it is also more than that, and what this more-ness is is what I am trying to understand.

As an artist/filmmaker you might find it interesting to learn that the artist John Bock is planning to shoot a horror movie in the Wall House, and that Carel Struycken, who plays Lurch in The Addams Family movies, has volunteered to be in it. The connections are somewhat interesting because Lurch/Struycken has been here and has taken some informative panoramic photographs of the house. I think of these things in general and of the Wall House in particular with the awareness that “[t]he very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” (1)

And so I return to your sewing machine question. The house’s east façade configures a face (more or less, as you can see in the night photograph below).

Photo: William Mazzarella. July 2011. Groningen, NL.

Is this what Wall House is “supposed” to be? Is this it? You and I know the answer to that.

Love,

Dianna

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. (2)
—Virginia Woolf

(1) Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Page 35

(2) Ibid. Page 202

Detour from Hejduk

2011-07-06T12:01:00.020-05:00

Today we saw the mummies of Wiewert, in Friesland. I asked to keep the text given to us at the church were the crypt was found.

Kie Ellens bought us there after showing us the miraculous Eisinga Planetarium in Franeker, a nearby village. Signs of wonder in the hinterland.

Pigeons and the Prophesy of Poems

2011-07-05T06:08:00.008-05:00

“The more angels there are, the more free space.”— Emanuel Swedenborg (1)

But, by far, the most difficult negotiation at the Wall House is not spatial, but zoological. There is a rather sad presence of pigeons alongside the wall. Dead. In gestation. And alive, excreting. Hejduk’s theoretical model did not anticipate that the crevices between the floors would offer appealing incubation ledges for these feral birds. The glass-framed enclosures on each side of the Wall are now drenched in bird shit. Small eggs hatch here and there. The birds scurry and fret each time we enter our sleeping room or bathroom on the ground floor: our pathways slice through the thresholds that frame their turf. After all, any human who has stayed at the Wall House has been transient, whereas the pigeons seem to be born, copulate and die here.

For Hejduk, a man who prized winged beings, this constitutes a tangible design flub. It is an oversight by which the reality of an ecosystem collides violently with the reality of the imagination.

Then something terrible happened
the wings of the angel began to flutter
at great speed and irregular beat
creating distortion in their shape
then the unearthly sound came
from the mouth of the angel
a screeching lament
its eyes receding into a darkness
it fell to its knees
and began to dig into the Earth
—John Hejduk, from “Dig Into the Earth” (2)

(1) Cited in Yi Fu-Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Page 64.
(2) Excerpted from John Hejduk, Lines No Fire Could Burn. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999. Page 16.

Contour and Wall

2011-07-05T04:21:00.052-05:00

The goal of the formal and colour-coded arrangement of the building elements was to […] clearly delineate the individual areas from one another. An 18 m high and 14 m long wall is the point-of-origin anchor for all the rooms. It is a simple symbol for architecture and in this case separates the undulating living rooms on one side from the utility rooms on the other, each built from basic geometric shapes. [The architect] began the plans in the [1960s and] 1970s when he was working with Cubist art. Cubism’s principle of the segmentation and warping of forms is similar to Hejduk’s technique of reverse drawing the building. One does not need to first enter the building; rather, one understands its spatial structure at one go. (1)

During the three days that we have lived at the Wall House I have so far spent the largest portion of each in the top floor—a floor with mostly undulating windows along its entire perimeter. All east facing windows curve, meander, and just very slightly distort the view of water, verdure and sky. At night, all windows become dark mirrors in lit space—the inside is projected onto them and more palpable distortions appear on the smooth screen surface of glass.

While I face the lake, I am aware of the Wall behind me, which I can see through the west-facing, rectilinear array of windows. From the inside, the Wall is no longer a canvas, but a permeable membrane separating the living spaces (bedroom, kitchen-dining room, and living room) from the transitional ones (bathrooms, staircases, corridor, and entryway). Inside, the Wall has been interrupted to constitute three thresholds, one for each floor. In order to traverse from floor to floor and from living to utility spaces the Wall has to be "crossed." The horizontal traversal of a threshold is a preamble to subsequent vertical movements between the three main volumes. The spiral staircase, encased within a cylindrical shaft, is reached by crossing the threshold of the Wall.

Mask of Medusa, a monograph on the work of John Hejduk. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Pages 300-301. (Photo: D. Frid)

With each passing day I have become accustomed to committing to being in the top floor without perambulating throughout the house. My husband works in the floor below me, at the dining room table. In Chicago, we live in a flat where every room is on the same floor. If milk for tea is forgotten in the kitchen, the negotiation of space occurs horizontally, and nearly automatically. Spiral staircases demand a definite focus, one in which the mind cannot diverge much from what the body does. This observation is now less of a grievance with the Wall House than a means to access experientially what Hejduk may have had in mind for the inhabitants of this particular design: a less distracted embodiment of space.

[W]e can become internally ingested by [architecture], become part of its interior. Instead of just being and outside observer or an outside spectator, we can become part of its very interior organism. We become physical-organic participators; we become enclosed. Architecture is the only art form that affords us the opportunity of being voyeurs who watch the outside from the outside, the outside from the inside, and the inside from the inside. It is all made up from a series of outside fragments and inside fragments.—John Hejduk, from “The Flatness of Depth” (2)

(1) Linz, Barbara. Colour. Königswinter, Germany: h.f.ullman, 2009. Pp. 135-137.

(2) Hejduk, John. “The Flatness of Depth,” in Kim Shkapich, ed., Mask of Medussa. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. P. 313.

From the Outside In

2011-07-04T05:18:00.010-05:00

“The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now–
   James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?
   No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat.”
        —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1)

To see panoramic images of the Wall House exterior please visit http://sphericalpanoramas.com/wallhouse/index-new4.html

Hejduk used the Wall as a plane, a canvas (the screen, again). Three volumes are stacked on the east face of the wall. Each volume is a different color (different activities are performed inside each one) yet together they configure a semblance of a face. A bridge is attached on the other side of the Wall. The house is accessed from the west. A ground level door leads immediately to the first staircase (the first ascent); once above, the work area—an office—is on the right, and a long hallway is in front. From the inside, the outside bridge becomes a tunnel in spite of horizontal, receding slits—references to Le Corbusier, that let the light in. There is a square window on the other side, framed by the corridor, and it draws us in (the view of water) as we enter. And we traverse the corridor/tunnel to cross the Wall and enter the first volume, the one in the middle of the stack, which is the kitchen and dining area. The window faces the lake. We are inside.

Hejduk imagined that the house would sit high above, at the edge of a cliff, in a place more precarious and isolated than this one.

The idea on the page, the Lighthouse in the distance.

(1) Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Page 186.

Memorial and Arrival

2011-07-03T13:20:00.009-05:00

A few months ago I was invited to visit and to live in the Wall House 2 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The Wall House, which is directed by Kie Ellens, is an art foundation housed within one of the few buildings that were realized from a John Hejduk design. (For general biographical information on John Hejduk, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hejduk).

Groningen’s Wall House 2 was built in 2001, but John Hejduk passed away in 2000, shortly before its construction began. Fittingly, the house now occupies its promontory-like location as a posthumous monument to its designer. Of the 24 Wall Houses that Hejduk imagined on paper, this is the only one that became a building; yet like the other Wall Houses, number 2 was supposed to be a theoretical model. There are ways in which the Wall House 2 remains, in my view, unfinished in its transition from theory to practice. The unfinished aspects of the house are mainly revealed through its details and its in-between spaces. The former are exasperating, whereas the latter are generative and eventful. I will speak about these unfinished potentialities in a future post. For now, just newly arrived, I am mainly aware of the memorial function that the Wall House performs: John Hejduk was a beloved, yet not uncontroversial, architecture teacher, and this is a site of pilgrimage for many who study his work and know it well. My relationship to Hejduk’s architecture is recent, and mainly driven by Ellen’s invitation to “come and see—really see.” The main objective of a first stay at the Wall House, as proposed by Kie Ellens to his guests, is to stake out the space and to become steeped in it. William Mazzarella (my husband) and I arrived to the Wall House yesterday (July 2nd). We are to spend the next ten days here.

Both Hejduk’s drawings and poems are filled with figures of and allusions to angels and death. They point to the ways in which he saw the designs of buildings as vessels where symbolism unfolds. Yet the poems are riddled with melancholy and the mystery of death, whereas the Wall House is filled with light even on a gray day (like today). The space is, so far, a screen open to many possible affects, levity above all.

Magnificent Night Angel

After death where does the soul go
does it remain in the last resting place
of the silent body
if it leaves when does it leave
is there resistance to departure
does it leave by itself
is there a guide

It rises and moves upwards
to soul heights
it remains as long as it has to
there is no resistance to departure
it leaves with an angel
who gathers throughout the night
till the light of all dawns
it sends out wave lines of force
announcing its coming
when it arrives in the air
simply becoming heavier
and the angel more thoughtful (1)

(1) Hejduk, John. Lines No Fire Could Burn. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999. Page 22.

To the Wall House

2011-05-20T08:00:00.006-05:00

In early July, I will be living in John Hejduk's Wall House (in Groningen, NL). This visit will mark the beginning of an exploration of spaces: of spaces lived in and occupied by the body as well as spaces conceived through the possibilities of art.

Georges Perec's text, "Species of Spaces" is an influence and thus at the foreground of these public meditations on space: architectural space, the space of landscape, but also the space of text, and the space opened up through images and objects.

Through a variety of virtual and actual site visits I hope to focus on themes of space with more specificity. The visit to the Wall House (with all its resonances with Virginia Woolf's Light House) points to a beginning.