As one of the most influential thinkers and educators of Architecture in the twentieth century, John Hejduk (1929-2000) represents both the realism and idealism prevalent in the discipline from the 60s to the 80s. He explored a myriad of architectural ideas through radical and thought-provoking drawings and design proposals. When peer architects focused on the medium of building, Hejduk claimed “architecture doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the final form of a complete building.”[1] He never embraced market economics, never gave up the investigation of an architecture he believed in, built or unbuilt.
At the twenty-first anniversary of his passing, John Hejduk: Double Poetics, the first exhibition on Hejduk’s work in China, will be held at the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai. The exhibition will revisit Hejduk’s selected drawings and models from Formalism to Architectural Pessimism. The exhibition is composed of two categories of contents: original work and inspired work. Hejduk’s original work includes original artifacts such as drawings, physical models, and photographs. Inspired work includes projects in search of an understanding of Hejduk’s design thinking, such as 1:1 scale installation and physical models. The exhibition will also show the short film, John Hejduk: Building Worlds, by Michael Blackwood Productions, on a rotational basis.
PSA was originally built in 1985 as the Pavilion of the Future and renovated and expanded in 2011. The building incorporates elements of industrial buildings: huge orange industrial pipes are right at the window; trusses cage the atrium space; a tall chimney space is surrounded by continuous spiral staircases. The usually close distance between the visitor and these architectural elements induces an emotional impact. Such close distances were present in an interview with Shapiro when Hejduk sat in front of the back of a clock, a building scale clock of his Cooper Union renovation project.
The design of the exhibit intends to embody the richness of references and the surreal impression of Hejduk’s work. The space outside the exhibition hall serves as a prelude, incorporating stark symbols in industrial structures in the existing building. Painted in black, the beams remind the visitors of Hejduk’s sketches of Victims. At the entry, a long hallway provides a deep perspective. In this church like space, Hejduk’s sketches, saturated with colors and textures, are placed on both sides, with more delicate models of churches in the middle. The visual axis ends at a wall with enlarged sketches of Victims, providing a final note on Hejduk’s architectural life. Visitors can glimpse the final note as a reference before they trace the journey of Hejduk’s career through the order of the exhibit.
Turning into the exhibition hall, the visitors are immediately forced into diagonally organized spaces as if they were meandering within moments of Mondrian’s Diamond Series and Hejduk’s Diamond Museum. A sequence of drawings and models unveil in a chronological order, from the Texas Houses to the Diamond Series, the Wall House Series, and the Masques. A full-scale model of Inhabitant Who Refuses to Participate is located in the central open space, gazing at Hejduk’s pencil drawing of the same project and his large sequential sections of Wall House 1. Taking a secret life after Hejduk’s work, pedagogical artifacts inspired by Masques hide behind a curvilinear wall. Exiting the maze of the diamond configuration, the visitors encounter Hejduk’s last projects, the Sanctuary, opposite of where they entered, and then they are absorbed by a dark space where Hejduk is talking on the screen.
[1] John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, p.134.