EVOLUTION OF FORM

JOHN HEJDUK 1954-1974: The Evolution of Form from the Nine Square Grid to the Wall House.
ETSAB Master Thesis
2008

This thesis deals with John Hejduk’s work, emphasizing a move towards a language where being and dwelling, city and object, the individual and the community, the modern and the classicizing are confronted through a juxtaposition of parts. Within each project there is pure fabrication, a reduction of signs which does away with style, a formalism which confronts specific concepts where the "idea of the isolated object of the twenties century is put in crisis.” Between architecture, poetics, ethics and a persistent investigation of habitation, an underlying abstraction which relates to thought is present. Hejduk disrupts the meaning of architectonic signs by re-introducing meaning to an architectonic language through a reductive vocabulary of geometries and relations and by inventing a new syntax, placing a void within new programs after having dismantled history and referent. It is the aim of this thesis to analyze the way Hejduk constructs a language which dismantles the topology of house and to situate the breaks within each frame in the progression of the houses from 1954-1974.
 

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