hays ENCOUNTER

expression needs to press the death instinct into its service...

..the property of architectural desire...lies on the borderline between the bleached out
abstractions of formalism...and the aesthetic expressions we as individuals mistakenly believe
to have been made for us alone
Hejduk (JH)s arch not like Eisenmans indifferent to sensuous experience, but rather decidedly
animated and personified even if not quite human
JHs objects seem to be aware of us
the fundamental architectural form WALL
the diamond
if the primitive condition of arch is the square, the square is nevertheless generated as the
isometric projection of a diamond, making the diamond paradoxically prior to, or more
primitivistic than, the square.
the diamond returns to the square in the event of its perception
wall/square
and that becoming-the sequence of events in which deep space and past time is collapsed onto
a vertical surface- subtends the entire career of JH
moment of the hypotenuse
the wall/plane(the form)
the wall (in wall house) represents the same condition of the moment of the hypotenuse in the
diamond houses
[it is] the sense of it being just a momentary condition...what I call the moment of the present
...every element of the wall house comes from the formal repertoire of Corb
wall
arch is the point of subjectification from which the viewers subject position emerges...JH
understands the elevational surface, together with its temporal dimension, as the topos of
cultural reserve of spatial organization,of which each moment of arch experience is just one
instance

...all of archs latent possibilities...the entire ach language, lie waiting in accumulated layers just
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behind the plane

wall as a signifying apparatus contains all the sedimented conventions of the discipline
JH: wall is all encompassing, it;s an expanding universe, its emanating from a centre; its an
explosive centre.
you are not just looking at it: you are in it
Lacan
sardine can floating on the sea looking back at him
pins him to the fundamental lack in his own self and to his own decentred moment
...only through visual engagement with a virtual counterpart, in a mirror or on a screen
[framed???] can we acquire identity..Lacan diagrams this very similarly to JHs spatial apparatus
Lacans diagram of the gaze

a cone of viewing emanates from the object itself

Lacan calls the coincidence of the two planes image-screen or the mask
for JH & Lacan the image-screen is an apparatus of the imaginary/symbolic necessary for our
social and cultural existence - a historically generated repertoire of images and codes through
which we as social subjects are constructed in something like an architectural mirror image
one side of JHs wall is a mirror
JHs work has been described as: a few finished elements that are geometrically precise,
insisted on in an almost obsessional manner, fixed in time and continuously refined
JH and Rossi
Modena cemetery: JH notices estrangements and detournements in the purity: from Ledoux
ideal city Chaux, Boullee cenotaph, Campo Marzio, multiple influences and meaning behind the
silence of the purist style (dechirico, morandi, fellini, visconti etc)
JH was to unleash all that Rossi suppressed
Cemetery for the ashes of thought
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half is missing, cant google it, but the whole one is in the paper. reminds Paul Klee and
Japanese wabi
.
.almost nothing [103]
it is... and elementary diagram of desire, according to which the unavailability or interdiction of a
desired object...becomes an attracting void of enormous significance
the primordial signifier that creates the void (Ding, Heidegger):
the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing
this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as nihil, as nothing (Lacan)
[this gets close to Buddhism]
Lacan and the ancient temple
a construction around emptiness that designates the place of the Thing
JH: since 1974 Venice has preoccupied the nature of my work...in the past four years my arch
has moved ...from optimism to pessimism
moving on to MASQUES (Venice, unassimilable arch thing)
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masques open a lens to archs otherness as JH begins to catalogue the multiple, idiosyncratic
recordings of arch elements: angels, animals, martyrs and machines etc
in the masques, the subject-object distinction already disturbed in Wall house and Cemetery, is
collapsed
we are now in the realm of the as if , for nothing is typical, everything is only like something
else
there is something in JHs repetitions that cannot be wholly absorbed into the identification of
the same. there is something that stalls, arrests, something that wont go through: it remains, it
bothers, it haunts.
Derridas remainder
the exorbitant remainder that cannot be managed by symbolization
destruction of the dichotomy: formal abstraction/figuration - results are uncanny, monstrous
JH refuses separation between abstraction and representation, functional/fantastic, or buildings
and animals into different registers.
Bakhtin
[118] glorification of the material bodily lower stratum eating drinking defecation copulation
swallowing and regurgitation
Robbe-grillet
remark on Kafka hung in JHs office
the hallucinatory effect derives from the extraordinary clarity and not from mystery or
mist.Nothing is more fantastic ultimately than precision
[thing of Gertrude Stein on the beauty of the normal]
.recognition of the Other with whom we can have no audience
redemption
a certain failure is a requisite fro redemption
...JH broods on our fall from grace, on constitutive absence and the necessity of loss....
...perhaps it is the cross, rather than the square or the diamond, that is archs most primitive
form...
Cathedral and thirty-two Enclosures

32 enclosures: exploring penetrations through walls and occupation of single-room sanctuaries;

creating landscapes interfused and haunted by objects
...but the diagrams of this space resemble nothing so much as Lacans diagram of the gaze, of
vision turned back on itself
Mask/face/faciality [131]
the mask and the masque that subdue and negotiate meanings and experiences too awesome
for us to see directly
the mask does not hide the face, it is the face
significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies
hejduk stuff

http://sharkitecture.tumblr.com/page/5

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