When a House Melts Within

(Wall House # 2: towards a fourth dimension of the Sensible)

Before it war a realized building in Groningen, the Wall House # 2 had existed for few decades as an idea. This idea – or rather its plans, calculations, 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 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, as 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, where 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 the World War II. His early designs were dedicated to spiritual structures like a chapel, a cathedral and a cemetery; also were re-creational structures such as a Ski lodge, a foot bridge, a county fair and even a zoological park among others designs. They explored different aspects of time and site (slope, incline and molded 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[3] and new possibilities of spatial circulation[4]. The early works of Hejduk for residential housing, were rational and geometrical designs of primordial 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 its 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 focusing on the right angle of the square but turning it into a diamond by a 45 degree rotation[5].

Influenced by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Hejduk explored the potential of the flat or two-dimensional aspect of architectural form in relation to a single central point of perspective in the mode 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 romantic and pre-cubist neo-classicism of Ingres; in the cubism of Picasso, Braque, Leger, Gris; in the abstraction of Paul Klee 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[6].

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’[7]  as I understand it, a space between distinctions –between positive and negative, inwardness and exteriority, flatness versus depth. The act of geometric rotation of the square into a diamond would reassess a type of dwelling that would (re)orient the body of the inhabitant into 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. The following study by Hejduk of the Wall Houses, explored the separation of space and elevation by means of one wall only. There are three models of the Wall Houses existing and they differ in spatial distribution, appearance and architectural signification. 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 and 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, élan vital of the Fine Arts, but most importantly, it opens a door to a post-dimensional future of applied space with its phenomenal implications to experience.

Through the collaborative hands of the Municipality of Groningen, BAM Woningbouw BV, Meeùs Makelaars, The Auping Foundation among others generous hands 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 neighborhood of the Hoornsemeer in Groningen, Hejduk’s Wall House # 2, can be taken into further research as a type in its relationship with the city of Groningen and the world – this universal standpoint is based in Hejduk’s ideas that supported architecture as a social act, gently receptive 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 program of the Foundation Wall House # 2, I was invited in my capacity of visual artist, to reside in the building to undertake the research of 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 artistic work of Elsewhere / Elders[8] or better still, the multi-disciplinary works produced by AX710, Robert van der Tol, Akiko Yanagimoto, Richard Saxton among 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. Extracts are published in the book Thought Provoking, Sense Provoking: Wall House # 2[9] by Noorderlicht Publishers Aurora Borealis.

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? [10]

John Hejduk

I

A woman lives in the house; she has taken its name. [11]

John Q. Hejduk’s Wall House # 2 (Bye House) proposes a modern 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 a 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 this wall is a gap, an empty space equivalent of the wall weight – of more or less a cubit length[12]. 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, but 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 of the wall is the studio at on 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 color at the façade. Access to the different levels is by means of a spiral staircase adjacent to the backside of the wall. There are five levels of ascension: a small cellar bellow ground level, the bedroom at ground level, a first level is the kitchen and a living room takes third and fourth level – this fourth level is only accessible by observation from the third. In the spatial physical sense, the building uses both two and three-dimensionality. Also at the phenomenal level of experience that for now I will call the sensible, a fourth spatial 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, not built 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 an almost virtual, free-standing position in relation to the building. The wall retains all the physical overall tension, and yet, it releases it, both physically and transpatially. In Hejduk’s own works ``The wall is a neutral condition. That’s why it’s always painted gray. And the wall represents the same condition as the time of the hypotenuse in the Diamond Houses – it is the greatest moment of 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´´[13]

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´´[14]. The elevational plane is architecturally expressed through the subject who apprehends it vertically. Perhaps the vertical plane emerged back in time 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 in Le Phénomène Humain writes: ``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 an fix on what the hands held and brought before them – the very gesture which formed the external counterpart of reflection´´[15]. Chardin’s ideas help us to reorient Hejduk’s architectural vacuous wall in relation to a spatial dimension of reflection. Within this dimension, the time 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 own words ``is all-encompassing´´[16]

Concerning the spatial dimension of thinking, the neutral condition of the wall requires that the apprehension of its time of passage to be an instance outside itself: outside time and outside space. As Marijke Martin has pointed in her essay Between Immobility and Travel[17] it is ``elsewhere´´ for its spatiotemporal conceptualization, 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´´[18] In any case, its productivity is such, that this space outside itself is able to encapsulate all possible imaginative architectural spaces: space of culture, space of memory, space of dream, space for  the sensible.

Phenomenological to the experience of the two-dimensional flat plane, are the horizontal and vertical trajectories of the building. They highlight the awareness of temporal transition that characterizes the experience of living at the Wall House # 2. Starting at the entrance door it takes on a vertical start as seventeen steps are requested to reach the first floor. A very long, somehow 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 time prerequisite for the moment of trans-spatial passage: a circumambulating movement where possibilities to an earthly downwards and a celestial upwards follow. This trans-spatial circumambulation throughout the vacuous central axis, attains the prefix trans at each temporal moment of passage across the wall. It happens this wall it is not a `normal´ wall – its type does not allocate 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 Vitrivious, writes on the subject of walls ``By walling we shall understand all that 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 the apartments´´[19]

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 element of the many practical elements that constitute building. Secondly, Hejduk’s monumental wall is reaching the sculptural, and in this architecturally artistic manner, holding on the historically drifting attributes attached to art – for instance, aesthetical, critical, venerable, uncanny, unique, sublime,  - to  mention only a few. In relation to building – and to clarify, not in relation to architecture[20] - this attributes are simply unnecessary. Through this architectural grammar 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 (metaphorically speaking) play a role and appear to be a magician’s hat. This referential surplus value brought in by the symbol itself is expenditure, not as much in the economy and service of meaning, but rather beyond this economy, linked to the registry of the unexpected, continuously expanding always ´other` possibility: Mon paroi ``ne représentait pas un chapeau. Il représentait un serpent boa qui digérait un elephant´´[21] Hence, the wall as a symbol ``is in constant movement or referral from sign to sign´´ as described by Deleuze and Guattari in 587 B.C. –AD 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 a medium or wall: the specific forms of all contents dissolve in it.´´[22]

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 symbolic language 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 product of 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. Given these concrete and abstract constants, one might ask how can it be objectivity? As I mentioned in the introduction, it is a matter of (re)orientation within our perceptual intimacy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides us with the perfect Hejdukian example: ``The square viewed obliquely, as something roughly diamond- shaped, it is distinguished from a real diamond shape only if we keep the orientation in mind, if for example, we settle on the frontal aspect as the crucial appearance, and relate any given appearance to what it would become in this context´´[23] Thus perception establishes the standpoint in which we position ourselves towards the thing; further associations will built up naturally on this perceptual standpoint until a new order emerges and other standpoints are requested.

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 order 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, imagery, ideas, feelings and reflexes, which serves to order attention to and direct action in a new mode that is not possible with the use of such symbols´´[24]. Symbolic proliferation at Wall House # 2 is a manner of blossoming rather than a question of 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 and interaction with the rest of the building. As Gaston Bachelard put in La poétique de l’espace, ``It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality´´[25]

II

The sister of a house is its garden. [26]

Tree roots are relatives of a house’s foundation.[27]

Suspended away from the wall and the gap are the living quarters designed in form 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; taken the mighty subject into other natural, perceptual consciousness, correlating the way we experience space and the world it emerges from.

The Wall House # 2 was conceived as a commission received in 1973 from 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 landscape plan shown in The Mask of Medusa, the house would have crowned above a descending landscape over 180 degrees of view[28]. In this initial and yet causative context, it is easy to imagine the house being set in an untamed American landscape in the mode of the Hudson River School –Asher B. Durand or George Hetzel would provide perhaps the most 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 projective powers of our imagination: when contemplating the sometimes dramatic Dutch skyline, William Turner came to mind, Gustav Klimt when a timeless sense of stillness translated into our perception. I use these rather painterly allowances not only to charge the reader’s imagination of what it was like being at the Hoornsemeer in Groningen, but most importantly, to convey a fair sense of the great influence that la naturalidad contemplativa would 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 Wall House # 2, this relationship to the landscape is not one of direct interaction. The habitable organic volumes suspended away from the wall are designed with generous, biomorphically shaped glass- openings. However, we have to notice that apart from those windows that are at the back facing the wall, and two windows at each side of each volume, the glass-openings are hermetically closed to the exterior.

If we look at earlier buildings based in organic geometry, for instance the Church of the Holy Family by Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) it uses ornamental detail with an architectural process that follows unregulated vegetative growth. The use of the spiral in order to access the vertical plane could be a reference to the Wall House # 2. In any case, this Catalonian ornamental stance seems to invite the visitor into a connective romanticism with a natural state. Similar evocative manner can also be encountered in time of late modernism proper to the practice of John Hejduk and yet opposite in 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 in Dessau – school initiated by architects Hannes Meyer (1989 -1954) and Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) and its influence to the program of Hejduk’s school at 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 and ornamentation. Nonetheless, an obvious reference could be the almost cavernous freedom towards the volumetric derived from the Victorian aesthetic ideas of John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) – For Ruskin, Hundertwasser or Hejduk, Venice would be significant. However, there is a further connection that in relation to this paper interest us deeply: Hundertwasser believed the horizontal plane to belong to nature and the vertical plane to humanity. With 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 geometry: the compositional use of the straight line in relation to curvature, in such subtlety as to reach with each shape harmony of form and beauty. The dialogue between the geometrical curvatures is like a proportional musical triple, as Hejduk put it: ``It is all structure´´[29] This procedure points more towards an elemental relationship that goes between the naturalization of geometry and the geometrisation of the natural. In their original state of equilibrium, the natural and the constructed are one instead of denoting a nostalgic relationship with the elements of the natural environment as if these elements were outside architecture and outside us. Neither can we say the architecture of the Wall House #2 uses ornamentation, although the wall with its suspended organic volumes could take an ornamental function from the point of view of the wall being a blank canvas for the residence performing as a representational body.

Henri Lefebvre in his work Production de l’espace, while talking on the context of Western Europe of the sixteenth century, identifies the use of organic forms as a sort of detachment from notions 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 unity´´[30] 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 principles such as centrality, identity or relativity. Before sedentary societies were born, centrality had the most internal power of bodily 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’’[31] 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 his mother’s womb, when the child was at the closest point possible of relativity with the other. As Marc Augé in his Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité has written ``The gleeful and silent experience of infancy is that of the primal experience of differentiation´´[32] 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 glass-openings described before, suppose a failing distance to nature, a distance that reframes the image of the landscape repositioning the necessary space for an unconditional relationship to difference, to the other, in Lefebvre’s words: ``external is also internal inasmuch as the ‘other’ is another body, a vulnerable flesh, and accessible symmetry´´[33]

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)[34] This art object is made out of three pieces of dry hollow stem from the giant Heracleum attached with an organic string. The object was displayed inside a round glass case installed on top a round table in the kitchen. As its title might suggest, this sculpture was meant to represent a set of binoculars: two cones for each eye – the third one, as metaphor for the third eye of one’s self-consciousness.  However, it happens the object as a set of binoculars lacks 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 aesthetic point of this exhibit was to achieve an allegorical sense of unmediated vision. That is, at the lost of objectivity – perceiving distantly the landscape with a naturally ‘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 the experience of a natural sense of ocular faculty could be 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 natural, unaided eye: ``Ruskin attacks those lenses which, bringing the ‘knowledge that modern science is so saucy about, (Ruskin, XXVI, 262) bring knowledge of what is removed from the environs of the self´´[35]. Thus, the nineteen century Ruskin – individual working in a period in history that fostered scientific discovery and its systems of nomenclature – outlaws 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’ (Ruskin, XXII, 208). 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 (Ruskin, XXII, 208)´´[36]

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 attributes and expressions product of this affection, operate under the same conditions as the natural and made-environment according to this physical and sensorial reality that architecture exerts in the dweller. In this sense, the organics at the Wall House #2 manifest themselves in a physical, yet abstract manner inside the building itself: as an organism within and in correspondence to the whole: a system of organization and a system of modification happening internally. Following Roemer van Toorn: ``Not what architecture is, but what architecture can do´´[37]. To support this line of thought, it might help ideas developed by Deleuze 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 ``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.´´[38] Following these concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, the organic of the Wall House #2 occurs though ‘becoming-subject’ of architecture itself. The subject or dweller is the one that comprehends and feels for the animated object that otherwise the Bye House is.

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 expressionism. 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.´´[39] In the Dialogue on the New Plastic originally published in two issues of De Stijl in 1919, 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.´´[40] 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 us to emancipate 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, when 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 naturalized environment. Further, the question would be: if the cultural is a development of nature itself, what did the natural gain with the arrival of the architecturally modified environment?

III

The house searches for its lost occupants. [41]

The house’s ghosts stay inside; if they leave and go outside they disappear. [42]

Lighting is the house’s direct connection to the heavens. [43]

Be day or be night, the house calls for natural lighting. Here, inside, at play is 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 artectonic 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 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 as the subject is there, the symbol will keep on evolving. The Bye House invokes this 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 - including the dweller and the outside viewer – share the almost paradigmatic task to take the three-dimensionality into the two-dimensional flat plane of the wall. The wall of the Wall House #2 is a canvas in which the whole house and its inhabitants can create the conditions and gestures of a compositional tableau vivant.

In this case, the Bye House proceeds as an art form, art excuses all the necessary modes and action of its performance in order to use them for art’s own making. This is Hejduk’s double articulation between residence and representational body. All the possible residential and corporeal aspects involve 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 for the dweller an the very object of representation for those outside looking into the house. Gaze here is the mediator between depiction and reflection.

However, when representation is at play, something other is at stake. Jaques Lacan’s seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis has perhaps something to tell us about art’s own doing: ``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´´[44] or perhaps as Michel Foucault has pointed to in his study of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the double effect of representation in its pure sense, is a double invisibility ``the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing´´[45] 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´´ [46]and again Libeskind, in his second introduction: `` a place which consecrates Architecture with mysteries that are no longer decipherable within the ordinary code of Mimesis´´[47]

Outside the code of mimesis and still in the context of art, El Lissitsky (1890-1947) not only differentiated between ``planimetric space´´ - planar or space, to my understanding - and  perspective three-dimensional space - but he also opened irrational space and imaginary space[48] The product of this differentiation is perhaps the fact that he realized 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, ie, a complex, where rationality is fused with imagination, the physical with the mathematical´´ [49] 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''[50]. Effectively, consciousness as much as it is sophisticated, is at the same time germinal, evolutional and creational.
The Wall House # 2 explores a trajectory that goes from the three-dimensionality to the two-dimensionality of space, producing the symbol itself that develops post-dimensionally through its 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 localization involve not only dimensions of space and place, but also dimensions of time and memory as well as product dimensions its representation - the meaning of the concept and its phenomenological affections it produces.
The Argentinean artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) inspired by George Bataille's concept of The formless [51] was to bring forward a concept of `` Spatialism´´ based on the idea of `` an art in which our idea of art can not intervene´´[52] 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 Manifesto Blanco originally published in 1946: `` We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: color, 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.´´[53]

The exploration of a sense of four dimensions, the sensible that the Wall House # 2 invites you to delve into, requires the internalisation of the outside world through thought, intuition and feeling. This internalisation, mysterious as it is, is an extraordinary blessing out of a single instance of a day that seemed ordinary. Who would have said that at that very moment all the elements would became sensible to each other? Subtle and fragile like the fecund egg of a swan; a creative instance that was! And time and space immanent to its own essential became felicitously tuned to life. Would the recognition of this condition be that 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 can not be thought. It is within 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.''[54]



IV

The soul of a house is its soul. [55]

The studio of a painter is for painting and other things, too. [56]

Wild geese fly in a triangle to puncture the clouds. [57]

Angels carry soulfilaments on their wings.[58]

Gaston Bachelard in La poétique de l’espace 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´´ [59] 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?´´ Asks Deleuze in Différence et Répétition `` Given the conditions of this question, the answer must designate the paradoxical existence of a 'something' which simultaneously can not 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)´´[60]

When our feelings and our reason mediate our living and the living of our thinking, 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 relationship: 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.´´[61]

As a counterpoint to archetype, the Wall House # 2 heartily searches for possibilities or 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 Scissorhands, [62] 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 would like architecture and the art of living to be? And let's not forget our forest, that have always been sacred and our fellow creatures too. Inside the light tower at twilight, by the beautiful waters of the Hoornsemeer, one's moment becomes unveiled: within a still life across the symbol, lightly - a glimpse of the implicate order and consequently the possibilities of re-negotiation and improvement.


How much does
Your heart weight
I do not know
Perhaps as much as
A miniature volume
I would have to turn
It inside out

John Hejduk, A Miniature Volume (extract) [63]