Word: hejduk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THIS TRILOGY helps clarify the linkage of mind and eye in Hejduk's work. Several levels of symbolism operate within the drawings: black, white, and the spectrum of colors take on certain meanings. The observer in the "Towers" project stares out from his isolated chromatic house onto a Europe that is systematic and monochromatic. Inversions of color enhance the disturbing effect of the images--in one scene the earth fades to a dull gray, the sky flames orange...
...contrast to the abstract formalism of the seven house projects, the second series of drawings concerns the world of man and the state of human thought. The works form Hejduk's Venetian Trilogy, a project done over a four-year period beginning in 1975. The trilogy functions as an allegory for the architect's view of society...
...first part of the trilogy, Hejduk designs the "Cemetary of Ashes" to house the ashes of thought. Individual cells contain the remains of the literary masterworks of history, such as Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. A separate building contains a man who does nothing but observe the cemetary. The second part, the "Thirteen Watchtowers of Canneregio" consists of 13 towers, built in a row on a rectangular concrete slab. Each tower houses one man: a modern house across a canal houses the last man, the observer. The third part, the "House for the man who refused to participate...
...Hejduk insists that he did not venture into fantasy in creating the trilogy, but that the situations represent a distillation of his observations of society. The "Ashes" project is meant to be "a real indictment of the European tradition--of the structure, the method, the burial of thought." The inhabitants of the 13 towers represent individuals caught in pre-ordained social and political roles, locked in historic ritual. The inhabitant of the modern house personifies the 20th-century argument for an escape from history--yet the system subsumes him along with the others. Finally, the citizen who refused to participate...
...time, not of days and hours as much as of the relationships of the past, present, and future. Broad expanses of land, straight, uninterrupted groundlines, and overhead views emphasize the horizontal and vertical as elements in time as well as space. The flat "wall-houses" exist on what Hejduk terms the "plane of the present." While the optimists of early Modernism spoke constantly of the future, Hejduk sees man as trapped in the compressed, two-dimensional realm of the moment...