Before it was a realized building in Groningen, the Wall House # 2 had existed for few decades as an idea.  This idea - or rather its plans, calculations, texts, drawings and models - was engendered as part of the Wall House concepts, a series of three studies on residential typologies developed around 1968 to 1976  by the American architect, artist, poet and educator John Q. Hejduk (New York, 1929 -2000)
John Hejduk studied architecture at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union in New York. He began his career as an architect at the end of the fifties, a period in history where the modern movement was to be sharply reassessed on the basis of the post-war essentialities. Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier, were contemporaries of Hejduk. On the international sphere, to mention a few, the Dutch Rem Koolhaas, the Austrian Max Peintner and the Italian born Aldo Rossi.(1)  
John Hejduk was to take on the architectural renovation of the Cooper Union’s building as well as teaching at the School of Architecture to eventually occupy a position as Dean of the school. The Cooper Union School of Architecture would allow Hejduk a life-time dedication to the research and practice of his discipline as well as the dissemination of architecture to his fellow students. In this framework, Hejduk developed fundamental pedagogical tools such as the Nine-Square problem.(2)
The initiation years of Hejduk as an architect (1947-1954) were marked by the cessation of World War II. His early designs were dedicated to spiritual structures like Chapels, Cathedrals or Cemeteries and to re-creational structures such as a Ski Lodge, a Foot Bridge, a County Fair and a Zoological Park among others designs. They explored different aspects of time and site (slope, incline and moulded site), the idea of the straight line in relation to the sky and the earth, the beginning of an innate gesture towards curvature, the biomorphic and new possibilities of spatial circulation.(3)
The early works of Hejduk for residency housing were rational geometrical designs of primordial and transferable character - not only point, plane, line and volume, but also the extend of limited and unlimited field, expansion and compression, the static and the dynamic and the possible organic revelations. The Texas Houses (1954-1963) were designed on the basis of a nine-square grid. The Diamond Houses (1963-1967) followed, they were a continuation of the Texas Houses in the sense focussing on the right angle of the square but turning it into a diamond by a 45 degrees rotation.(4)  
Influenced by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Hejduk explored the potentiality of the flat two-dimensional aspect of architectural form in relation to a single central point of perspective in the sense of Renaissance’s vision. This architectural possibility of both, centrally contained and lateral space, came from the tradition of art and painting itself, in the cubism of Picasso, Braque, Léger, Gris and in the Neo-Plasticism of DeStijlists, Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. Through the making of the Diamond Houses, Hejduk would made the remarkable discovery that certain geometry maintains a two-dimensional and planar condition when centralized in volumetric three-dimensional space.(5)
Like the lozenge paintings by Mondrian, the Diamond Houses would look at the distribution of space with certain attention to what Hejduk called ``the moment of the hypotenuse´´ (6) - as I understand it, a space between distinctions – between positive and negative, inside and outside, flatness versus depth. The act of geometric rotation of the square into a diamond would reassess a model of dwelling that would (re)orient - the body of the inhabitant in phenomenological relation to the temporal conditions of the plane of the now.
The hypotenuse of the diamond was to become a wall in plan and within this gesture, a new paradigm in the history of architecture would emerge.  Hejduk’s study of the Wall Houses, explored the separation of space and elevation by means of one wall.  There are three models differing from appearance and spatial distribution. The focus of this essay is the study of the Wall House # 2 (1973 to 1976), a type developed through a geometrical matrix of vertical/ horizontal planes in relation to a central and vacuous space. As I will go on exploring, Hejduk’s vacuous space is like an abstract grid that not only makes the symbol to speak an autonomy of art and élan vital of the Fine Arts; but most importantly, it opens a door to a post-dimensional future of applied space and its phenomenal implications of experience.
Through the collaborative hands of the Municipality of Groningen, BAM Woningbouw, and Meeús Makelaars in 2001, the realization of the design of the Wall House # 2 has brought this model into a physical residence of public, semi-public and private function. Now in the neighbourhood of the Hoornse Meer in Groningen, Hejduk’s Wall House #2, can be taken into further research, not only as type, but also in its relationship with the city of Groningen and the world – this universal stand-point is based in Hejduk’s ideas that supported architecture as a social act, gently open to be interpreted by all. As it happens when a novel idea is born, it naturally expands and up to date the Wall House concepts keep on inspiring several generations of architects, designers and artists worldwide.
In 2005, as part of the artist in residence programme of the Wall House # 2 Foundation I was invited to reside in the building to research the poetics of (designed) space and the architectural work of John Hejduk. These writings are product of this research and based on the empirical experience of having lived the type. However, they are not evidence - for this the work Elsewhere/Elders (7) or better still, the multi-disciplinary works produced by AX710, Robert van der Tol, Akiko Yanagimoto or Peter de Kan - and the artists and architects still to pass through the Bye House – that would serve perhaps more substantially towards this purpose. On the contrary, the following text acknowledges a felicitous process of learning from the voices of others and it should be taken as ideas in development.

If the painter could by a single transformation take a three dimensional still life and paint it on a canvas into a natura morta, could it be possible for the architect to take the natura morta of a painting and by a single transformation build it into a still life? nbsp;(8)
John Hejduk&

I

John Q. Hejduk’s Wall House # 2 or Bye House proposes a modern architectonical language at the very tension between two zones of occurrence: the physical dimension of a geometry of surfaces that delineates reality as we experience it and the dimensionless zone of empty geometry that retrieves itself into disappearance. This almost indescribable alignment between space there is and space there is not takes on a germinal corporality.
The Wall House # 2 is organized around a central axis of a vertical and horizontal plane.  Both planes allow the three-dimensionality responsible for the production of volume and trajectory in the building. A further two-dimensional plane cutting through this central axis is substantiated as a thin wall. Around the wall is a gap, an empty space equivalent of the wall’s weight – of more or less a cubit length.(9)  This two-dimensional plane of the wall not only works as the (dis)connective structure uniting all the functional spaces that otherwise would be isolated from each other, it also serves as a post-dimensional connecting point that supports the overall architectural body at a symbolic, poetic, and emerging level.
There are four rooms - or more precisely, volumes - in the building: on the back to the wall is the studio at one side of the entrance, and on the frontal side of the wall, three rooms are situated each above the other. Each volume is reinforced by a specific colour at the façade. Access to the different levels is by means of a spiral staircase adjacent to the back side of the wall. There are five levels of ascension: a small cellar bellow ground level, the bedroom at ground level; a kitchen at the second and the living room which takes up to the third and fourth level – this fourth level is only accessible by observation from the third. The building uses two-dimensionality, three-dimensionality and in the phenomenal level of what for now I would name the sensible, a spatial fourth dimension is produced.
The central feature of Hejduk’s study is an emblematic wall. Its flat surface is alienated from the building by means of dissociated space: the width of the wall is equivalent to the hollow distance at each side of the wall. This empty geometry is reaffirmed by its absence and reinforced by the craftsmanship of glass, giving the wall a free-standing almost virtual position in relation to the building. The wall retains all the physical overall tension, and yet, it releases it; both physically and transpatially. In John Hejduk’s own words ``The wall is a neutral condition. That’s why it’s always painted grey. And the wall represents the same condition as the moment of the hypothenuse in the Diamond Houses – it is the moment of greatest repose, and at the same time the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall heightens that sense of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of it being just a momentary condition… what I call the moment of the present(10)´´
The Wall House # 2 explores the temporal condition of the present throughout the elevational plane of experience. As K. Michael Hays exposes in Sanctuaries ``Hejduk understands the elevational surface, together with its temporal dimension, as the topos of the cultural reserve of spatial organizations, of which each moment of architectural experience is just one instance(11)´´.  The elevational plane is architecturally expressed through the subject that apprehends it vertically. I would like to suggest that the vertical plane emerged when we abandoned the horizontal perspective – our four-footedness- to adopt the vertical position. Once in the vertical plane, a new bodily balance as well as a new spatial perspective would be responsible for the human brain to develop a higher level of complexity and a more sensible state of consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin writes in The Phenomenon of Man: ``It is thanks to two-footedness freeing the hands that the brain was able to grow; and thanks to this, too, that the eyes, brought closer together on the diminished face, were able to converge and fix on what the hands held and brought before them – the very gesture which formed the external counterpart of reflection(12)´´
Chardin’s ideas help us reorient Hejduk’s architectural vacuous(ity) in relation to a spatial dimension of reflection. Within this dimension, the moment of passage through the wall provides an open field of possibility, temporally correlated to the subject’s awareness that at that very instance opens itself at maximum of creative amplitude. In Hejduk’s own words it is ``all-encompassing(13)´´.

Concerning the spatial dimension of thinking, the neutral condition of the wall requires that the apprehension of its moment of passage to be an instance outside itself: outside time and outside space. As Marijke Martin has pointed in her essay Betweeen Immobility and Travel(14)  it is ``elsewhere´´  for its spatial conceptualisation, or the very possibility of its connectivity, requires a framework of difference and distance; as Lefebvre put it, ``the concept of space is not in space´´ (15) In any case, its productivity is such, that this space outside itself is able to frame all in the architectural imaginative spaces: space of culture, space of memory, space of dream, space of sensibility.

Phenomenological to the experience of the two-dimensional flat plane, are the horizontal and vertical trajectories of the building as they highlight the awareness of temporal transition that characterizes the experience of the Wall House # 2. Starting at the entrance door it takes on a vertical start; seventeen steps are requested to reach the first floor. A long and narrow corridor follows: the longer it takes to reach the end of the corridor, the more gratifying is the arrival to the other side of the wall. The corridor is like a funnel where our obligations with the outside world filter into daydream. Its thorough geometry uses linearity and narrative as a preparative requisite for the moment of a trans-spatial passage, a circumambulating movement where possibilities to an earthly downwards and to a celestial upwards follow.
This trans-spatial circumambulation throughout the central vacuous axis, attains the prefix trans at each temporal moment of passage across the wall. It happens that this is not a ‘normal’ wall – its type does not allocate architectural volumetric space in the classical divisional sense. Neither it has, tangibly speaking, a protective or supportive task. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) in The Ten Books of Architecture completed in 1452 and elaborated from classical manuscripts by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, writes on the subject of walls: ``By walling we shall understand all the structure, which is carried up from the ground to the top to support the weight of the roof, and such also as is raised on the inside of the building, to separate apartments.(16)´´

The wall at the Bye House profess a different task altogether. First of all, this wall is beyond its common use. The conditions of its use are detached of any utilitarian aspect that would put it as a functional part of the many practical elements that constitute building. Secondly, Hejduk’s wall is monumentally reaching the sculptural, and in this architectural manner, holding on the historically drifting attributes attached to art - for instance, aesthetical, critical, venerable, spiritual, unique, sublime, uncanny, - to mention only a few. In relation to building– and to clarify, not in relation to architecture(17) – these attributes proper of art are simply unnecessary.
Through this architectural grammar and corporality of art is how Hejduk invites us to approach the autonomous implications of the monumentality of his wall. Distinctly, it is a symbolic wall and because of its representational qualities, it might perfectly play a role and appear to be a magician’s hat. This surplus referential value brought in by the symbol itself is expenditure, not as much in the economy and service of meaning, but rather beyond this economy and linked to the register of the expansively unexpected, the always continuously other possibility.
Hence, the wall as a symbol is `in constant movement of referral from sign to sign´´ as described by Deleuze and Guattari in 587B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs `` the signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmospheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment plays the role of the ‘signified,’ but it continually glides beneath the signifier, for which it serves only as medium or wall: the specific forms of all contents dissolve in it.(18)´´

The Bye House’s wall is not a wall as much as it is a medium for the symbolic to proliferate endlessly. Even though its language symbol uses a chain of signs for its semiotic functioning, the wall is not interested in meaning as much as it is interested in its own expenditure - the surplus value produced in the apprehension of its experience. This value performs concretely – in that it is inhabited physical space and therefore lived and real space; but it also performs abstractly– as a quality of the mind and perception.
According to the physicist David Bohm in the context of creativity and the fragmentation between the content of thought and its function, we can get a sense of how new orders of association might emerge: ``The main function of a language symbol is not to stand for or represent an object to which it corresponds. Rather, it initiates a total movement of memory, images, ideas, feelings and reflexes, which serves to order attention to and direct action in a new mode that is not possible without the use of such symbols.(19)´´  Symbolic proliferation at Wall House # 2 is a question of blossoming rather than representation: It uses the symbolic in order to trigger the cognitive tool for the sensible. Once in a more refined state of reflectivity, the production of new orders and intensities will emerge in dialogue with the rest of the building. As Gaston Bachelard put it in The Poetics of Space ``It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality´´(20)

II

Suspended away from the wall and the gap are the rooms, the living quarters of organic geometry. These ‘floating’ cavities are witness of an orphan and ancient order where volume is conceived in itself and not by an orthodox allowance by walls. Instead, a lyrical and organic approach to cavity and openness returns these biomorphic volumes into relationship with the landscape and nature; taking the mighty subject to other perceptual consciousness, between the way we experience space and the world it emerges from.
The Wall House # 2 was conceived as a commission received in 1973 from the landscape architect Arthur Edward Bye - here its nickname of ``Bye House´´. It was meant to be placed in a site in Connecticut, up in the mountains and according to the site plan shown in the Mask of Medusa, the house would have crowned above a descending landscape over 180 degree-view. (21) In this initial and causative context, it is easy to imagine the house being set in an untamed American landscape from the Hudson River School – for instance, Asher B. Durand or George Hetzel would provide perhaps the most perfectly opaque scenery for our Hejdukian plan. Furthermore, in the context of its actual realization in Groningen, the house is facing a natural reserve and a lake.
This landscape takes indeed the attention of our gaze towards a depth of field which in turn, fosters the associative, projective and mixing powers of our imagination: when contemplating its sometimes dramatic Dutch skyline, William Turner came to mind; Gustav Klimt when a timeless sense of stillness translated into our perception. I use these painterly allowances not only to charge the reader’s imagination of what it is like being at the Hoornse Meer in Groningen, but most importantly, to convey a fair sense of the great influence that naturalism would have had in Hejduk’s initial ideas for his commission for Connecticut. In any case, it is worth noticing that from the standpoint of the actual inhabitant inside of the Wallhouse #2, this relationship to the landscape is not one of direct interaction. In fact, the habitable organic volumes suspended away from the wall are almost hermetically closed to the exterior.
If we look for contrast at earlier buildings based in organic geometry on the threshold of the modern period, for instance, the Church of the Holy Family by Antoni Gaudí (1852 - 1926) it uses ornamental detail with an architectural procedure that follows natural vegetative and unregulated growth. The use of the spiral in order to access the vertical plane could be a reference to Wall House # 2. In any case, this Catalonian ornamental stance seems to invite the viewer into a connective romanticism with a natural state. Similar evocative manner can also be encountered in late modernism proper of the time of practice of John Hejduk and yet of opposite conceptualization, in the architectural work of the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928 – 2000).
Hundertwasser does not seem to have been fond of the formalism that grid architecture owes to the tradition of the Bauhaus - school initiated in Dessau by architects Hannes Meyer (1889 – 1954) and Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) – and its influence to the conceptual programme of Hejduk’s school at the Cooper Union. For Hundertwasser, the use of the straight line and right angle was not a natural occurrence, but curvature, spontaneity and all the possible allowances for geometric divergence (including ornamentation). Nonetheless, an obvious reference could be the almost cavernous freedom towards the volumetric derived from aesthetic ideas of the Victorian John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) – For Ruskin, Hundertwasser or Hejduk, Venice would be significant. However, there is a further connection that interests us deeply in relation to this paper: Hundertwasser believed the horizontal plane to belong to nature and the vertical plane to humanity. With a view to its relevance to Hejduk, this is an important correlation to the Wall Houses, architecture that as we have learned, develops consciousness of spatial phenomena through the elevational plane of experience.
The organic shapes of the Wall House # 2 are in fact the product of the most calibrated geometric calculation: the compositional use of straight line and curvature, in such subtlety as to reach in each shape harmony of form and beauty. The geometrical dialogue between curvatures is like a musical proportional triple; as Hejduk put it: ``It is all structure´´ (22) This procedure points more towards an elemental relationship that goes between the naturalisation of geometry and the geometrisation of the natural. In their original state of equilibrium, the natural and the cultural – or the constructed- are one instead denoting an ‘harmonious’ and nostalgic relationship with the elements of the natural environment as if these elements were outside architecture and outside ourselves. Neither can we say the architecture of the Wall House # 2 uses ornamentation although the wall with its suspended organic volumes could be taken as ornamental from the perspective of the wall being a blank canvas for the residence performing as a representational body.

Henri Lefebvre in his work La production de l’espace while talking on the context of Western Europe of the sixteenth century, identifies the use of organic forms as a way to add up to some sort of lost in the notion of origin: ``When an institution loses its birthplace, its original space, and feels threatened, it tends to describe itself as ‘organic’. It ‘naturalizes’ itself, looking upon itself and presenting itself as a body. When the city, the state, nature or society itself is no longer clear about what image to present, its representatives resort to the easy solution of evoking the body, head, limbs, blood or nerves. This physical analogy, the idea of an organic space, is thus called upon by systems of knowledge or power that are in decline. The ideological appeal to the organism is by extension an appeal to a unity´´(23)
As a further allowance I would like to speculate that since the early days of humankind until our present day, unity is rhetorically attributed to such principles as centrality, identity or relativity. Before sedentary societies were born, centrality had the most internal power of unification at a social level. At the cave, it was ritual time. In those days, architecture, was naturally a body without organs, or as Lacan would say, ``something organized around emptiness´´(24)  
Hejduk’s organic cavities are detached from the wall through the vacuous space of separation. These living quarters are perhaps reminiscent of a time when the child was in its mother’s womb, when the child was at the closest possible and relative point with the other. As Marc Augé in his introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity has written ``The gleeful and silent experience of infancy is that of the first journey, of birth as the primal experience of differentiation´´ (25) In the context of the Wall House # 2, differentiation is the effect of isolation but paradoxically, it is also the effect of connectivity and all its projective reverberations. The hermetic windows suppose a failing distance to nature, as if by this failing a reframing of the image of the landscape re-positions the necessary conditional space for a relationship to difference, to the other; in Lefebvre’s words: ``…external is also internal inasmuch as the ‘other’ is another body, a vulnerable flesh, an accessible symmetry.´´(26)

One of the three-dimensional art objects constituting the spatial installation Elsewhere/Elders at show at the Bye House was ``Lost and Finally Found (Robinson Crusoe’s Binoculars)(27)´´  This art object was made out of three conic pieces of dried Herculaneum’s trunk attached with organic string and it was displayed inside a round glass seating on top of the also round kitchen’s table.  As its title might suggest, this sculpture was meant to represent a set of binoculars: two cones for each eye - the third cone, as metaphor for the third eye of one’s self-consciousness. However, it happens the object lacked the essential component of magnifying lens, so the vision of the perceiving subject (Robinson Crusoe’s or the exhibition visitor’s sight in this case) would be one of unaided eyes. The point of this aesthetic exercise was to achieve an allegorical sense of unmediated vision. That is, at the lost of objectivity - perceiving a distant landscape and blurry focal point- a different type of sight would emerge. This would perhaps be a sympathetic affection towards the observed; in any case, the possibility of an honest and natural sense of ocular transcendence and spirit could be at attained.
Jay Fellows, in his study on John Ruskin writings ``The Failing Distance´´ exposes Ruskin as a supporter of lensless vision, the sight of the raw and natural eye: `` Ruskin attacks those lenses which, bringing the ‘knowledge that modern science is so saucy about’, bring knowledge of what is removed from the environs of the self ´´.(28)  Thus, the nineteen century Ruskin – individual working in a period in history that fostered scientific discovery and its systems of nomenclature -   would be outlawing the optics of objective reception in the name of art and soul. Within the notion of the Moral Retina, Fellows writes: ``Ruskin is making a distinction between on the one hand, the use of the eye as an ‘imperfect and brutal instrument,’ which may be ‘vivid with malignity, or wild with hunger, or manifoldly detective with microscopic exaggeration, assisting the ingenuity of insects,’ and, on the other hand, the eye as an instrument of ‘noble human sight, careless of prey, disdainful of minuteness,’ which becomes ‘clear in gentleness, proud in reverence, and joyful in love’. The optics, which the great physiologist calls ‘altogether mechanical’ are, ‘far from being the perception of a mechanical force by a mechanical instrument,’ actually ‘an entirely spiritual consciousness, accurately and absolutely proportioned to the purity of the moral nature, and to the force of its natural and wise affections’ (29)´´
The Wall House # 2’s architecture is aware that from the moment that a typology is made on the basis of the spatial experience it effects on the dweller, architecture becomes, naturally, affective. The expressions and attributes product of this affection, function under the same conditions as the natural-made environment according to this physical and sensorial reality architecture exerts in the dweller. In this sense, the organics at the Wall House # 2  manifest themselves in a physical, yet abstract manner inside of the building itself: as an organism within in correspondence to the whole: a system of organization and as a modification happening internally.
To support this line of thought it might help ideas developed by Deleuze’s and Guattari in one of their readings of Spinoza: ``The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. There is therefore a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural´´ They continue ``It is a plane upon which everything is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions; its dimensions, however, increase with those of the multiplicities or individualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are distinguished from one another only by speed and slowness. What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life. acute;´(30)

These concepts from Deleuze and Guattari help our thought in gaining a perspective of the organics at study as elements in progress. Following these concepts - and developing further from Deleuze and Guattari - the organic of the Wall House # 2 occurs through the becoming subject of architecture itself. The subject is the one that not only feels for but also comprehends for the otherwise inanimate object of the Bye House. It is through the subject’s inwardness, in his/her re-negotiation of perceived distance where we find a conceived unity.
In order to expand his logic of the ``non-places´´, Marc Augé followed the distinctions between geometric space and anthropological space drawn by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phénoménologie de la perception (first published in 1945). In any case Augé states: ``anthropological places create the organically social´´ and ``non-places create solitary contractuality´´.(31)  These two modes find their architectural equivalent at the Wall House # 2, between the organic and the geometric, between three-dimensionality and flatness, between the physical dimension of volume and the dimensionless zone of empty geometry;  this tension is germinal.
The work of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) has been a reference point to the development of John Hejduk’s architectural corpus. In his essay Out of Time and Into Space, Hejduk writes: ``Mondrian’s concern for the spatial-architectural dilemma was prophetic. Painting can be purely abstract expression. In painting reality is established with the limited space of the canvas which can be completely determined by planes. In sculpture and architecture, the work is a composition of volumes. Volumes have a naturalistic expression.´´ (32) In the Dialogue on the New Plastic originally published in two issues of De Stijl in1919, Mondrian says: ``Man transforms nature according to his own image; when man expresses his deepest being, thus manifesting his inwardness, he must necessarily interiorize natural appearance.´´(33)   This inner essence of things explored by Mondrian can also be encountered in the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).
The Wall House # 2 is constructive in the sense that it does not want to emancipate us from the culturally acquired formations as if they were a form of punishment that separate us from the natural state. It rather searches the utilization of our cultural resources to exert a reflective connectivity to which transcend classical dichotomies between the natural and the artificial. Is in the expansion of the connectivity with the world that our state of consciousness becomes more sensible when the environment outside finds its entrance gate. Once the environment is organically within architecture is simply, a naturalised environment. The question of its present becomes most ancient indeed: If the cultural is a development of nature itself, what did the natural gain with the arrival of the architecturally modified environment?
III

Be it day or be it night, the house calls for natural lighting.  Here, inside, is at play a geometry of plasticity one that folds into itself to reflectively re-emerge into mosaics, serpentines and further abstractions. At the realm of worldly appearances, the elegant presence of the Wall House #2 does attain its own inner synthesis: the sense of depth disappears so that flatness can reign over our experience.  The temporalities that are about to follow will lurk into our spatial objective perception. And just like a dream, the house dissolves into otherness and our lived moments happen inside a huge whale. Or is it at the very belly of Barbapapa as it morphs upwards into a satellite with a shape of a doughnut? In any case, this malleable geometry takes the architectonic moment into an artetonic one: churning time and space until they become milk that feeds allegory. Within this spatio-temporal proposition, the house is able to reclaim back to modernity its lost symbolization at last.
In essence - and existence - the symbol has to express itself. Also the symbol has to express something else at the same time its being is cause of the expressed. In any case, the symbol drifts as one’s consciousness does. Nothing in this symbolic realm is to remain fixed, or totally contained in meaning or mannerism: for as long the subject is there, the symbol will keep on evolving. The Bye House invokes the symbolic chain and with it, a new physics of apprehension. So when the symbol speaks as it means it, this is the moment when all the elemental architectural bodies –also the dweller and the outsider viewer - share the almost paradigmatic task to take the three-dimensionality of space into the two-dimensional flat plane of the wall. This transfer involves the flatten-down of three-dimensional perspective into the two-dimensional. The wall of the Bye House is a canvas in which the whole house and its inhabitants can create the gestures and conditions for a compositional tableau vivant.
In this case, the Bye House proceeds as an art form; art excuses all the necessary modes and actions of its performance in order to use them for art’s own making. This is Hejduk’s architectural double articulation between residential typology and representational body. All the possible residential and therefore corporeal aspects involved in the use of the building as shelter become the very script for their re-emergence in the two-dimensional screen-wall. This tableau vivant becomes a representative space for the dweller and very object of representation for those outside looking into it. Gaze here is the mediator between depiction and reflection.
However, when representation is at play, something other is at stake. Jacques Lacan’s seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis has perhaps something to tell us about art’s own doings``…works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent´´ (34)or perhaps as Michel Foucault has pointed in his study of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the double effect of representation is in its pure sense, a double invisibility ``the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing´´ (35) This double-play of representation noted by Lacan and Foucault, seem to point towards an exit point, that the very impossibility of art is by the same token, a door to transparency.
Daniel Libeskind writes in his first introduction of Mask of Medusa `` John Hejduk’s path is thus bounded by a double horizon. He inhabits a territory in which the clarity of vectors is always enveloped in a continuum of ineffable space that casts off its veils in the moment of concealment´´ (36) and Libeskind again, in his second introduction: ``a place which consecrates Architecture with mysteries that are no longer decipherable within the ordinary code of Mimesis’’.(37)

Outside the code of mimesis and still in the context of art, El Lissitsky (1890-1947) not only differentiated between ``planimetric space´´ - or planar space, to my understanding - and ``perspective space´´- three dimensional space - but he also opened ``irrational space´´ and ``imaginary space´´ (38) This differentiation is perhaps product of the fact that he realised of the very limit of three-dimensionality, and the understanding that art can explore new spatial dimensions. He writes: `` Art is an invention of the mind, i.e., a complex, where rationality is fused with imagination, the physical with the mathematical´´ (39) within this dynamism, he concludes ``experience proves that progress consists of our being compelled to accept and, indeed, to regard as self-evident and essential, views that our forefathers considered incomprehensible and were in fact incapable of comprehending´´.(40) Effectively, consciousness is sophisticated as much as it is evolutional.
The Wall House # 2 explores a trajectory that goes from the three-dimensionality to the two-dimensionality of space, producing the symbol that develops itself post-dimensionally through its virtual and temporal relationship to consciousness. The cognitive apprehension of symbolic trajectory supports a constant re-formulation of old questions of space as something fixed and unvarying. In this context, notions of localisation involve not only dimensions of space and place, but also dimensions of time and memory as well as dimensions product its representation - the meaning of its concept and the phenomenological affections it produces.
The Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) inspired by George Bataille’s concept of the ``formless´´ (41) was to bring forward a concept of ``Spatialism´´ based on the idea of ``an art in which our idea of art cannot intervene´´ (42) The artist was educated in Italy in the classical tradition and he contributed to the Novecento movement in Milan. Later on in his career, together with his students in Buenos Aires, Fontana produced the ``Manifiesto Blanco´´ originally published in 1946: ``We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: colour, the element of space, sound, the element of time and movement, which develops in time and space. These are fundamental to the new art which encompasses the four dimensions of existence. Time and space.´´(43)

The exploration of a sense of four dimensions in the sense of the Wall House # 2 requires the internalisation of the outside world through thought, intuition and feeling. This internalisation is a special moment when all the elements are sensible to each other, when the moment itself becomes contained in its own essential. Would this condition be what Deleuze’s and Guattari describe as the Plane of Immanence? `` We will say that the plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane that does not succeed in thinking it. It is the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside- an outside more distant that any external world because it is an inside deeper that any internal world.´´(44)

IV
Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space says ``A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house´´(45)  As I have tried to convey through this essay, the architecture at study proposes a typology for the incorporeal, the realm of the sensible mediated through our feelings and reason. ``What is the being of the sensible?´´ Deleuze asks in Difference & Repetition ``Given the conditions of this question, the answer must designate the paradoxical existence of a ‘something’ which simultaneously cannot be sensed (from the point of view of the empirical exercise) and can only be sensed (from the point of view of the transcendent exercise´´(46)

When our feelings and reason mediate our living and the thinking of our living, the moment might indeed turn into the most consequential: Can we speak about the Wall House # 2 in the same way one talks about love? Because when someone inhabits a place only then we can say that architecture has blood. This metaphor allows us to understand structural design as a system of canalization and interrelationship: the organization of veins where the blood is to be canalized and how: ``Since every quality is a becoming, one does not become ‘harder’ (or taller) than one was without at the same time becoming ‘softer’ (or smaller) than one is in the process of becoming.´´(47)

As a counterpoint to archetype, the Wall House # 2 heartily searches for possibilities of dwelling, both at physical and meditative level. For Hejduk it is spatial separation in which essentiality follows naturally.  His architectural realm of invention stands firmly against all odds and becomes an oasis in the discovery of living.  In this respect, the Bye House is the house of Edward Scissorshands(48) , Edward can perfectly belong besides his scissors, which they still have to learn how. Hejduk’s order of structural organization gives the tools but not the guidelines. So the deeper Edward gets, the more fascinating his journey of discovery becomes.
The Wall House # 2 unveils the ways in which we live versus the ways in which we think and how importantly all adds up to the way in which we conceive reality. How do we want architecture and the art of living to be? And let's not forget our forest, that always have been sacred and our fellow creatures too. Inside the light tower at twilight, by the beautiful waters of the Hoornse Meer, one’s moment becomes unveiled: within a still life across the symbol, lightly - a glimpse of the implicate order and the consequent possibilities of re-negotiation and improvement.


``How much does
Your heart weight
I don’t know
Perhaps as much as
A miniature volume
I would have to turn
It inside out ´´
John Hejduk, A Miniature Volume (extract)(49)

Footnotes

1. For further reference to the architectural avant-garde project of the Post-War period see: De Michelis, Marco, Aldo Rossi and Autonomous Architecture, in: Schoenholz Bee, Harriet, The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 89 -98

2. The Nine-Square problem was developed by John Hejduk on basis to his discoveries from the visual plastic language of Cubism, Neoplasticism and Constructivism.  It was initially introduced at the University of Texas, Austin in 1954. At Cooper Union School of Architecture the problem would be further used as basic pedagogical tool to which to explore in-depth fundamental possibilities of structure and spatial treatment. For further reference see Hejduk, John and Slutzky, Robert in Education of an Architect: A Point of View, the Cooper Union School of Art & Architecture, 1974-1971, The Monacelli Press, New York 1999, p. 23-49
 
3. For further explanations about the training period of Hejduk at Cooper Union see: Hejduk, John, ‘’On Program and Site – Frame 1, 1947-1954’’ in Mask of Medusa: works 1947 – 1983, ed. by Kim Shkapich ; [Introd. by Daniel Libeskind]. - New York : Rizzoli, 1985. – p. 27
 
4. For research on Hejduk’s geometrical concerns regarding the diamond, see introduction to Diamond catalogue Hejduk, John, Mask of Medusa: works 1947 – 1983, ed. by Kim Shkapich ; [Introd. by Daniel Libeskind]. - New York : Rizzoli, 1985. – p. 48, 49

5. Ibid. – p. 48,49
 
6. Hejduk, John, Mask of Medusa: works 1947 – 1983, ed. by Kim Shkapich ; [Introd. by Daniel Libeskind]. - New York : Rizzoli, 1985. – p. 50

7. Marchán, Javier, Elsewhere/Elders – solo art exhibition at the Wall House # 2, Groningen, containing a site-specific spatial installation throughout the Wall House # 2. Exhibition curated by Olof van de Wal for the Wall House # 2 Foundation. Opened to the public from January 22nd to March 12th, 2006 and reviewed by M. Ryckaert in ITEMS Magazine issue 2, p. 21; John Gendall in Inside the Wall (House 2) in Architectural Record, issue 9, p. 216

8. Hejduk, John; Adjusting Foundations, Edited by Kim Shkapich – New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995

9. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Current English, Oxford University Press ; cubit is an ``ancient measure of length, approximately equal to length of forearm´´ The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Current English, Oxford University Press – p. 230   Further references to a model of cubit measurement in relation to cosmology, numerology and kingship, see cubit unit: in circumambulation paths, p.69-70, 119; derivation of, p.17-19, 255,303n. 37; Mannikka, Eleanor, Angkor Wat, Time, Space, and Kingship; University of Hawai’i Press, 1996, 2000

10. Hejduk, John, Mask of Medusa : works 1947 – 1983 John Hejduk ; ed. by Kim Shkapich ; [Introd. by Daniel Libeskind]. - New York : Rizzoli, 1985 – p. 41
 
11. Hays, Michael K, Sanctuaries : the Last Works of John Hejduk - selections from the John Hejduk Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal & The Menil Collection, Houston. [Preface by Toshiko Mori] K. New York : Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 2002. – p. 79

12. De Chardin, Teilhard, ``The Birth of Thought´´ in The Phenomenon of Man; [Introd. by Sir Julian Huxley]. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain, copyright 1955 by Editions du Seuil, Paris. First published in English in 1959 by Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, London, and Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, New York. Translated by Bernard Wall. Perennial, HarperCollings Publishers, 2002, paperback edition 2002. – p.170

13. Hejduk, John, Mask of Medusa : works 1947 – 1983 John Hejduk ; ed. by Kim Shkapich ; [Introd. by Daniel Libeskind]. - New York : Rizzoli, 1985. - 463 p. : ill., foto's tek. – p. 41

14. Marijke Martin ``Between Immobility and Travel´´ in Wall House # 2 John Hejduk, Marijke Martin [Foreword by Niek Verdonk] Edited by Olof van de Wal & Anne Wolff; Published by Platform Grass, 2001 – p. 74

15. Lefebvre, Henri, ``Contradictory Space´´ in The Production of Space, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith; copyright 1974, 1984 by Editions Anthropos; Blackwell Publishing, USA, UK, Australia; English translation first published 1991; Paperback, 2005 -  p. 299

16. Alberti, Leon Battista, ``Of the first Occasion of erecting Edifices; of how many Parts the Art of Building consists, and what is necessary to each of those Parts´´ in The Ten Books of Architecture, [translation of De re aedificatoria] translated by Giacome James Leoni; originally published: The architecture of Leon Batista Alberti in ten books.London: Edward Owen, 1755; Copyright 1986 by Dover Publications, Inc, N.Y – p.

17. For a clarification of the difference between Architecture and building, see Ruskin, John, chapter ``The Lamp of Sacrifice´´ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, first published by George Allen Sunnyside, Kent, in 1880; copyright Dover Publications, Inc, N.Y – p. 8 to 10
 
18. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, ``587B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs´´ in A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism & Schizophrenia, [Foreword by Brian Massumi] translated by Brian Massumi; first published 1988 by The Athlone Press Ltd, London; Copyright 1987 by the University of Minnesota, originally published as Mille Plateaus, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Sizophrénie, copyright 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris – p.117

19. Bohm, David, ``The Art Of Perceiving Movement´´ in On Creativity, Edited by Lee Nichol; Routledge, London 1998; simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, reprinted 2000, 2002 – p. 68

20. Bachelard, Gaston, ``House and Universe´´ in The Poetics of Space, [Foreword by John R. Stilgoe & Etienne Gilson] translated from the French by Maria Jolas; Beacon Press, Boston; first published in French under the title La poétique de l’espace, by Presses Universitaires de France, 1958 – p. 61

21. Site plan of the Wall House # 2 (Bye House) is shown in Mask of Medusa. Ibid. Page 298

22. Hejduk, John, ``The Architect Who Drew Angels´´ interview by David Shapiro, in  Architecture and Urbanism no. 244 (January 1991) – p. 61

23. Lefebvre, Henri, ``From Absolute Space To Abstract Space´´ , op. cit, - p. 274

24. Lacan, Jacques, ``Marginal Comments´´ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; book VII; edited by Jacques-Alain Miller; translated from the French by Dennis Porter; Routledge, London; English translation copyright W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1992; originally published in French as Le Seminaire, Livre VII L’ethique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960 by Les Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1989 – p. 135

25. Augé, Marc, ``From Places to Non-Places´´ in Non-Places, Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity; translated from the French by John Howe; Verso, London, New York, 1995; copyright Verso & translation copyright John Howe, 1995; first published as Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, editions du Seuil, 1992 – p. 84
 
26. Lefebvre, Henri, ``Spatial Architectonics´´ , op. cit – p. 174

27. Marchán, Javier, ``Lost and Finally Found (Robinson Crusoe’s Binoculars´´ Dry Herculaneum, organic string, label, 16cm x 12 cm in round glass box 24cm diameter

28. Fellows, Jay,``The Moral Retina and the Optics of Affection´´ in  ``The Failing Distance – The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin´´ The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 2128, the Johns Hopkins University Press Ltd., London, 1975 – p.11

29. Fellows, Jay, Ibid. -.p.13
 
30. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, ``1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal…´´ , op. cit – p. 254

31. Augé, Marc, op. cit, – p. 80
 
32. Hejduk, John, ``Out of Time and Into Space´´ in ``Mask of Medusa´´, op. cit, - p. 74

33. Mondrian, Piet, ``Dialogue on the New Plastic´´ in ``Abstraction and Form´´, Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas; Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood; Blackwell, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; p.1189; originally published as ``Dialoog over de Nieuwe Beelding´´ in two issues of De Stijl, Leiden, February and March 1919. Extract in Art in Theory 1900-1990 taken from the English translation in Harry Holzman and Martin S. James (both editors and translators), The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, Boston, 1986 – p. 285

34. Lacan, Jacques, ``Courtly love as anamorphosis´´ op. cit, - p.141

35. Foucault, Michel, ``Las Meninas´´ in The Order Of Things, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, [Foreword by Michel Foucault] translated from the French by Michel Foucault; Routledge 1970, 1994, London, UK; originally published in French under the title Les Mots et les choses by Editions Gallimard – p.16

36. Libeskind, Daniel, Introduction in Mask of Medusa, op. cit.  – p. 15
 
37. Libeskind, Daniel, ``Stars at High Noon – An Introduction to the Work of John Hejduk´´ in Mask of Medusa, op. cit – p. 9

38. Lissitsky, El, A. and Pangeometry in Rationalization and Transformation, Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Originally published in German in Europa Almanach editors Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim, 1925. The hereby reference is taken from Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas op.cit, p.303 to p. 307

39. Ibid, p. 303
 
40. Ibid, p. 307

41. For reference to Georges Bataille’s category of the Informe (The Formless) refer to Georges Bataille (1892-1962) from ‘Critical Dictionary’;  ``Realism as Critique´´ Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas; Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood; Blackwell, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA –p. 475
 
42. Fontana, Lucio, and Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul ``Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) `The White Manifesto´ chapter `` Art and Society´´ in  Art in Theory, 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas; Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood; Blackwell, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA – p.642

43. Fontana, Lucio, ``The White Manifesto´´ Ibid – p. 646

44. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, ``The Plane of Immanence´´ in What is Philosophy?; Translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson; Verso, London, New York 1995; first published as  Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? By editions de Minuit, 1991 – p. 59

45. Bachelard, Gaston, ``The house. From cellar to garret. The Significance of the hut´´ Ibid. - p. 17

46. Deleuze, Gilles, ``Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible´´ in Difference and Repetition; translated by Paul Patton, first published in France in 1968 by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris the Athlone Press, 1994 - p. 236

47. Ibid. – p. 236

48. Burton, Tim and Thompson, Caroline. Fictional character of a film of the same title directed in 1990 by Tim Burton (1958, California) with screen-play by Caroline Thompson (1956, Washington) The film is played by actors Johnny Depp (1963, Kentucky) and Winona Ryder (1971, Minnesota) Production company: 20th Century Fox

49. Hejduk, John, ``A miniature Volume´´ in Dutch grey / Hollands grijs John Hejduk : poems; Publication coinciding with exhibition 'John Hejduk / Fabriceren in je hoof - Kunstencentrum Signe en het Glaspaleis te Heerlen [Bureau Piet Gerards, Heerlen/Amsterdam] 2001 - Page 50