When, late in 1990, Jeffrey Kipnis and I proposed a working session and debate involving a handful of architectural theorists in an effort to focus what we all believed were increasingly divergent theoretical trajectories being spun off at ever greater distances from the practical concerns of professional designers, Phyllis Lambert and the Canadian Centre for Architecture responded with enthusiasm and generous support for a conference. And we had no trouble agreeing that our first test case of theoretical practices meeting a theoretical practice should be John Hejduk. Hejduk’s pedagogy, his personal convictions, as well as his multimodal architectural production, all seem to be founded on a sympathetic, if not entirely similar, refusal of disciplinary boundaries and unchanging definitions. What is more, prepoststructuralist theory (if one allows that formulation had not been able, it seemed to us, to theorize Hejduk’s work at all, let alone its possible implications for a generalizable architectural practice., Architectural theory in its more recent iterations, we thought, should set for itself just that goal.

    The fact is that Hejduk’s recent work developed handinhand with the reformation of architectural theory itself in what might properly be called the linguistic research of the neoavantgarde in the 1970s : the attempt not only to codify architecture as a language but, further, to collapse the distinction between the object of architecture and the theoretical text. First, the identification of what counted as the architectural object was shifted away from a single, purely phenomenological mode of perception toward multiple and differentiated « textual » structures, resonances, and plays of signification — this had begun as early as Hejduk’s Texas Houses and their « textualization » of the work of Mies van der Robe and Le Corbusier. Simultaneously, as the newly constructed object-text’s internal powers of meaning construction and its intertextual plays were stressed, Hejduk’s written text (expositions, interviews, poems, fictions) — formerly an appurtenance to the autonomous architectural object — ceased to he merely a set of project descriptions and took on the status of an equally important, interwoven object-text, a combination of a wide range of signs and codes. This is Stan Allen on the emergence of Hejduk’s intertexts : “These distinct practices improperly occupy the same ground. A complex spatiality results : a textual architecture that is the exact counterpart to the compositional tactics of Hejduk’s projects.” And Robert Somol observes that, as a result of this cohesive and intensive intertextuality, “it is difficult to tell what does not count in the work of John Hejduk, to distinguish the central focus from the peripheral, the totality from the vignette.” Writers of architectural « theory » dedicated to a reformation of design « practice » would naturally be drawn to the work of an architect who has fruitfully ignored those very distinctions.

    Jeffrey Kipnis solicited the contributions presented at the Hejduk colloquium held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, from the authors whose essays now appear in this volume. The essays have all been reworked after the discussions that ensued in Montreal but maintain, t hope, the speculative, probing tone of that event. For my part, in this introduction (which is also something like an afterword) I draw from those discussions and add some of my own reflections on the theoretical practice of John Hejduk. Here I rehearse a few aspects of his architecture conceded to be its constitutive features even if the writers disagree about the interpretation of these features. These aspects stretch from a stylistic preference for basic, geometrically and tectonically controlled forms and elemental biomorphism (hair, beaks, eyes, legs) to typological variations on theaters, periscopes, caissons, funnels, traps, and labyrinths ; allegorically they include angels, animals, and machines as well as a set of reduced human characters (The Identity Card Man, The Mask Taker, The Lottery Woman, et al.) ; narratively, they employ traditions of folklore, carnivals, and masquerades in alternately melancholic and ecstatic moods; thematically they conjoin routinized craft and trade, falls from grace, and struggles of life and death.

    Hejduk’s pessimism is a component of his critical task — to destroy the false picture of a world already finished, whose features are already decided before the architect arrives on the scene, to purge architecture of decades of accumulated biases and partitions. It is perhaps this side of his task that is easier to grasp with interpretive methods given to us by the historical avantgarde, which similarly sought to destroy the aesthetic conventions of bourgeois continuity, putting in their place either the sheer heterogeneity of deinstitutionalized urban life (as in certain forms of expressionism and dada) or the overarching autonomy of formal or technological modernization and its desubjectifying effects (as is found, in different ways, in architects as diverse as Nikolai Ladovsky, Giuseppe Terragni, Mies van der Rohe, and Ludwig Hilberseimer). A fundamental question about Hejduk’s work regards the affirmative side of his endeavor : the possible fusion of polemical and constructive tasks, of purging and restoring a world ; the recognition that architecture must somehow scandalously exceed what it is given to work with, must convert its raw material into proposition as well as critique.

    This notion of an elevational space that enables figurality without ground seems right : it follows well enough from the research of the Wall Houses, which are themselves tilted up versions of the Diamond Houses with pieces of the ground still intact ; it is a consistent filling out of the semiotics of the neoavantgarde (with, perhaps, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind occupying other positions in Somol’s “not-urbanism / not-sculpture” matrix). It is in the same dissociation from Rowe and the politicoarchitectural model of one-ground / many-figures that Somol finds the possibility of a « minor urbanism ». For if Hejduk’s can be construed as a chronotope where the reconciliation of the many within the one is dissolved into a state of the-many-becoming-one, then the promise of his excessive, positively promiscuous affiliations can be extended to the city itself.

    Stan Allen, however, warns against the overly enthusiastic attribution of « minor » to Hejduk’s work, pointing out that Hejduk’s practice still comprises, along with angels, insects, and other fauna, the familiar and not completely deterritorialized forms and procedures of modernism’s masters and that his authorial space is still populated by a progeny who, like Louis Althusser’s subjects who work by themselves, are most dedicated to carrying on the master project when the master is seemingly not there. The old dogs of modernism and the inescapable influence of Hejduk as a teacher ballast the airy flights his work simultaneously enables. Similarly, Peggy Deamer argues that this “absent” author who nevertheless oversees diegetic development is a structural condition of autobiography and, indeed, that Hejduk’s « heroes », his biographied building-machines, are reflections of himself. Deamer : “The objectification of the self, the urge to thwart morality by solidifying the life into an object, is a fact of both psychosis and autobiography. In the cross-fertilization between the inner and outer worlds, each acts as a representation to the other…[Hejduk’s heroes] reenact, by the consistent crossreferencing of the inhabitant /subject with the building/object, the process of self-objectification at play in the autobiographical process in general.”