The Anony­mous Detail

Introduction

This writ­ing exam­ines the unique log­ic of fab­ri­ca­tion in archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings of the Amer­i­can archi­tect, John Hej­duk (1929−2000), espe­cial­ly as these relate to the last phase of Hejduk’s work, gen­er­al­ly known as the Masque Projects. It pro­pos­es that Hejduk’s rad­i­cal recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the archi­tec­tur­al pro­gram and his encom­pass­ing effort to give form to that pro­gram — through rich­ly expres­sive draw­ings, paint­ings, and nar­ra­tives — were para­dox­i­cal­ly reliant on rather anony­mous, even mun­dane, sets of draw­ings employed in the dozen or so phys­i­cal con­struc­tions that emerged from the imag­i­na­tive world(s) that the Masques create.

As such, this writ­ing will exam­ine Hejduk’s late work in gen­er­al but will focus on those projects that Hej­duk brought for­ward for more detailed elab­o­ra­tion in the mea­sured draw­ings that often fol­lowed his ini­tial sketch­es and writ­ten vignettes. These mea­sured drawings—particularly those for the Berlin Masque[2] and the Lancaster/Hanover Masque[3]—must be seen as insep­a­ra­ble from the more provoca­tive aspects in Hejduk’s masques, and they pro­vide both an exten­sion of and an essen­tial ground­ing for the work while plac­ing it in a real­i­ty that was, for Hej­duk, ulti­mate­ly and always ambiguous.

The con­trast between the Masque’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al provo­ca­tions and the ordi­nar­i­ness of the mea­sured draw­ings is essen­tial to their impor­tance, mean­ing, and our under­stand­ing of them. These mea­sured draw­ings are ulti­mate­ly not sim­ply about clar­i­fy­ing the process of con­struc­tion (as archi­tec­tur­al draw­ing con­ven­tions would dic­tate) but para­dox­i­cal­ly align with the larg­er mean­ing of Hejduk’s masques — as part of an alle­go­ry that cre­ates an open­ing into the imag­i­na­tion for both the view­er and the inter­preter or builder of Hejduk’s work. 

The sub­ject is approached ini­tial­ly by com­par­ing Hejduk’s meth­ods of rep­re­sen­ta­tion with the sur­re­al­ist painter, René Magritte. Magritte, as in Hejduk’s mea­sured draw­ings, avoids overt dis­play of painter­ly or draughts­man-like skill in favor of a more anony­mous – and impor­tant­ly – more open engage­ment of the viewer’s imag­i­na­tion. This anonymi­ty is essen­tial to both the artist’s and Hejduk’s work and their sim­i­lar engage­ment of the view­er as a co-cre­ator in their mutu­al­ly cre­at­ed worlds, worlds filled with the para­dox­i­cal and uncertain. 

Out­side of the world of art, par­tic­u­lar­ly for those unfa­mil­iar with Mod­ern Art’s his­to­ry and aspi­ra­tions, the qual­i­ty of a work of art, more specif­i­cal­ly, a paint­ed work of art, may be relat­ed to the artist’s hand – her or his skill in apply­ing paint in the cre­ation of images. In the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion, this adroit­ness might even be thought of as chief among an artist’s abil­i­ties and that which sep­a­rates artists from non-artists. This may be, of course, too over­ar­ch­ing a gen­er­al­iza­tion; the intent here is not to make an unim­peach­able state­ment on Mod­ern Art but to empha­size how skill might be gen­er­al­ly viewed by those out­side of artis­tic production.

If the artist is a real­ist painter, this adroit­ness goes hand-in-hand with accu­rate verisimil­i­tude. If the artist devi­ates from real­ism, this adroit­ness may be relat­ed to her or his abil­i­ty or inven­tive­ness with­in a par­tic­u­lar style of paint­ing as in the case of the Impres­sion­ists. Even in abstrac­tion, adroit­ness is priv­i­leged — in the cal­li­graph­ic pre­ci­sion of Jack­son Pol­lack, Robert Moth­er­well, or the lyric ges­tures of Motherwell’s spouse, Helen Franken­thaler. In this way, the artist’s hand is her or his sig­na­ture – seen in tell-tale details of brush­work or ges­ture that dis­tin­guish one’s work from another’s, a Mon­et from a Degas, a Lee Kras­ner from a Joan Mitchell.

But what of the con­trary? What about artists who are unin­ter­est­ed in these dis­tinc­tions – who are not inter­est­ed in the skill­ful artist’s hand, with impress­ing the view­er with a mas­tery of tech­nique, or with inven­tion with­in a par­tic­u­lar style? What if the artist believes that such things sim­ply obstruct our approach to their work and serve as a dis­trac­tion from con­tent and, most impor­tant­ly, from the recep­tion of ideas? 

And — giv­en that the sub­ject at hand is archi­tec­ture and not paint­ing — what about an archi­tect who shares such a dis­in­ter­est in the skill­ful hand revealed through the con­struct­ed images used so often in archi­tec­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion (draw­ing), or in the case of the archi­tect, John Hej­duk, whose work is addressed in this writ­ing: draw­ings, paint­ings, and buildings?

John Hejduk’s archi­tec­tur­al work is wide­ly under­stood to be ground­ed in the rev­o­lu­tions of painter­ly abstrac­tion of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and in the artists who led these rev­o­lu­tions. The list is long: Piet Mon­dri­an (the Dia­mond Series), Juan Gris (the Juan Gris Prob­lem at Coop­er Union, where Hej­duk was dean of the School of Archi­tec­ture), Braque (the Wall­pa­per Series of his late works), and Le Cor­busier as both a Purist painter and archi­tect (the Wall Hous­es, espe­cial­ly the Bye House).

These artists were explic­it­ly intel­lec­tu­al and for­mal inspi­ra­tions for Hejduk’s remark­able series of archi­tec­tur­al inven­tions. How­ev­er, two addi­tion­al artists, also among Hejduk’s influ­ences, are of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for this writ­ing and to Hejduk’s late work: the Bel­gian sur­re­al­ist René Magritte[4] (1898−1967) and the Ital­ian painter and print­mak­er of still lifes, Gior­gio Moran­di (1890−1964).

Of the two, Magritte may have been the more con­cep­tu­al­ly influ­en­tial. His attack on the arbi­trary con­nec­tion between words and images may very well have influ­enced the dis­par­i­ty between titles, nar­ra­tives, and images in the for­ma­tion of Hejduk’s Masque Projects, and the masques cer­tain­ly adopt Magritte’s dis­so­nance between word and image, with the titles of his objects seem­ing­ly detached from their appearance.

Magritte also plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in The Silent Wit­ness­es[5], a word­less com­pendi­um of images Hej­duk sub­mit­ted to Yale Per­spec­ta 19, at a time when the Masque Projects were just devel­op­ing. Com­prised of repro­duc­tions of four 35mm pho­to­graph­ic slide sheets, images of Magritte’s paint­ings appear promi­nent­ly in the over­all set of images – a col­lec­tion whose absent text presents the reader/viewer with­out the cap­tions that might allow for descrip­tion or any cat­e­gor­i­cal dis­tinc­tion between images. The reader/viewer is left to sur­mise or con­jure their own rela­tion­ship between images, and this was the key intent in Hejduk’s submission. 

Magritte was not inter­est­ed in skill, at least not as we might gen­er­al­ly under­stand it. His paint­ings are know­ing­ly ordi­nary, and, in their exe­cu­tion, he delib­er­ate­ly plays down painter­ly skill. He might even strike some­one unfa­mil­iar with his work as an ama­teur painter or a naïve artist—an obser­va­tion that pur­pose­ful­ly masks and even facil­i­tates the fact that he was a painter of pro­found­ly deep thoughts. The appar­ent­ly unskilled qual­i­ty of Magritte’s work is cer­tain­ly clear when he is com­pared to oth­er sur­re­al­ists. Max Ernst, for exam­ple, was a remark­able inven­tor and mas­ter of tech­niques, while Sal­vador Dali made real­is­tic depic­tion his sig­na­ture, and some might say, a mar­ket­ing tool.

The ori­gins of Magritte’s approach to paint­ing may come from his first impres­sions of de Chirico’s Song of Love — he sup­pos­ed­ly wept…having ​“seen” thought for the first time[6]. How­ev­er, just as like­ly a source of Magritte’s approach to paint­ing was his back­ground as a drafts­man of wall­pa­per and as an adver­tis­ing design­er in the 1920s, an employ­ment he returned to in the 1930s when he ran an agency with his broth­er, design­ing film posters under a pseu­do­nym as a means of earn­ing a mod­est liv­ing. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, this is work where eas­i­ly replic­a­ble and ordi­nary depic­tions were the dom­i­nant approach to image mak­ing (the kinds of images which were the cur­ren­cy of adver­tis­ing at the time).

As opposed to Dali or Ernst, Magritte’s intent rel­a­tive to tech­nique was not to con­front the view­er with skill­ful and pow­er­ful depic­tions of some oth­er real­i­ty, there­by entic­ing the view­er into a dream-like and impos­si­ble world (Dali), nor to invent a world out of the world’s detri­tus, mar­velous­ly trans­formed (Ernst in his ear­ly col­lages and lat­er fro­tages). As Suzi Gab­lik com­ments in her book,Magritte, ​“Magritte’s paint­ings are intend­ed as an attack upon society’s pre­con­ceived ideas and pre­de­ter­mined good sense”[7] Magritte intend­ed to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form the ordi­nary world through its own terms — to unmoor us from our habits of thought by trans­gress­ing the pact between word and image [ 2 ] and con­fronting us with the arbi­trari­ness of signs, and most impor­tant­ly, the delin­eation between the ordi­nary and the extraordinary.

In Magritte, we are nev­er quite sure what is ordi­nary and what is not — as is not the case with Dali and Ernst, where we are clear­ly look­ing into their invent­ed worlds. And that is the point, and the absence of tech­nique is vital to this point – an absence that pro­vides a por­tal into Magritte’s con­found­ing world with­out the need for artis­tic eru­di­tion. Magritte cre­ates this rather egal­i­tar­i­an por­tal through ordi­nary means — by paint­ing in a kind of ​‘dumb’ way – the way of a wall­pa­per drafts­man, adver­tis­ing illus­tra­tor, or a sign painter.

The phrase ​“sign painter,” is a delib­er­ate play on words. Magritte’s arbi­trary world of signs is achieved through a desta­bi­liz­ing play between word and image where ordi­nary, unas­sum­ing things achieve extra­or­di­nar­i­ness through a kind of magician’s sleight of hand. Ordi­nary objects — apples, combs, pipes — are paint­ed in the most ordi­nary way and in a way that empha­sizes their ordi­nar­i­ness. This is not a cel­e­bra­tion of the hand’s facil­i­ty in ren­der­ing speci­fici­ty or spe­cial unique­ness to a depict­ed object. It is not that beau­ti­ful apple or that exquis­ite and unique pipe. That apple is every apple, and that famous pipe is every pipe. It is this ordi­nar­i­ness and absence of speci­fici­ty that allows our own indi­vid­ual imag­i­na­tions to enter Magritte’s para­dox­i­cal world and become authors of our own under­stand­ing. — although our own quandary may be a more apt expression.

Although not a sur­re­al­ist, but also impact­ed by de Chiri­co, Gior­gio Moran­di is a painter of the ordi­nary in his own dis­tinct way. His most wide­ly known works are still life paint­ings of objects that he col­lect­ed and metic­u­lous­ly, even obses­sive­ly, arranged and rearranged for each paint­ing, draw­ing the out­line of each object’s posi­tion (its plan) on a sheet of paper beneath it to note its exact place­ment — an assem­bled world of dusty objects paint­ed in a small stu­dio in the apart­ment he lived in with his sis­ters for most of his life. 

The objects: com­mon bot­tles, vas­es, and pitch­ers, were paint­ed over in mute tones to dis­guise labels or any tell-tale mark­ings the objects might have, thus ensur­ing their anonymi­ty while empha­siz­ing their com­mon­ness. The light­ing, through a sin­gle win­dow, was care­ful­ly mod­u­lat­ed, and the palette of col­ors was almost always mut­ed. Addi­tion­al­ly, it is said that Moran­di nev­er removed the dust that gath­ered in the stu­dio, nor from the objects that he paint­ed. The over­all effect is as if the objects are viewed through a haze – a sort of dusty translu­cence not unlike look­ing at an image under vel­lum – the paper Hej­duk used for the mea­sured draw­ings that will be addressed below.

The arrange­ment of objects on Morandi’s table [ 3 ], with these same objects appear­ing repeat­ed­ly, is metaphor­i­cal­ly relat­ed to the city out­side his stu­dio win­dow, the city of Bologna, known for its arcades and dis­tinc­tive medieval tow­ers. Hejduk’s masques (them­selves a form of urban­ism), with their col­lec­tion of repeat­ed objects/buildings, are cer­tain­ly anal­o­gous to Morandi’s still lifes, whose plans are as delib­er­ate­ly worked as Morandi’s tracings. 

It should also be not­ed that Hejduk’s atten­tion to Moran­di is also evi­denced in the numer­ous Moran­di bot­tle-like tow­ers in Hejduk’s work.[8] Also of note is the fact that in the many draw­ings for these tow­ers, espe­cial­ly those in the book Sound­ings[9], Hej­duk adopts the cross-hatch­ing of Morandi’s etch­ings to ren­der both the tow­ers and the dark, gray-toned atmos­phere that sur­rounds them [ 4 ].

John Hejduk’s Masque projects began in the late mid 1970s with such projects as The House for the Inhab­i­tant Who Refused to Par­tic­i­pate (1974−79), Thir­teen Watch­tow­ers for Cannare­gio (1975), and The Ceme­tery for the Ash­es of Thought (1975) but they come into full elab­o­ra­tion and promi­nence with the Lancaster/Hanover Masque (1979−83) and with Hejduk’s sub­mis­sion of the Berlin Masque (1981) for the Inter­na­tion­al Build­ing Exhi­bi­tion Berlin (IBA). They con­tin­ue in var­i­ous forms until Hejduk’s death in 2000, with per­haps their most poignant man­i­fes­ta­tion in his Cathe­dral project (1996).

In the Lancaster/Hanover Masque [ 5 ], Hej­duk cre­ates an enclosed com­pound for a small farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty in rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia filled with build­ings, build­ing-like objects, and archi­tec­tur­al crea­tures. These are accom­pa­nied by a list of six­ty-eight sub­jects and objects (The Sui­cide and The House of the Sui­cide [ 1 ], or The Cel­list and the Music House, for exam­ple) and fol­lowed by asso­ci­at­ed, frag­men­tary nar­ra­tives con­cern­ing each sub­ject and object, accom­pa­nied by sparse and agi­tat­ed sketch­es. At times, some of the objects were lat­er select­ed to be devel­oped in sets of large, mea­sured draw­ings in pen­cil and col­ored pen­cil on vellum. 

In the Berlin Masque, Hej­duk respond­ed to a rather straight­for­ward pro­gram for social hous­ing on two adja­cent blocks in the Wil­helm­strasse area of what was then West Berlin. He dis­card­ed the func­tion­al brief sup­plied by the com­pe­ti­tion and instead drew upon a quote also includ­ed in the brief by Ita­lo Calvi­no from Invis­i­ble Cities as a start­ing point. This quote describes one of the many of Calvino’s imag­i­nary cities and specif­i­cal­ly con­cerns the fleet­ing iden­ti­ty of the city over time and in the imag­i­na­tion. Hej­duk pro­posed enclos­ing the two adja­cent sites with walls and fill­ing them with a series of objects like those described and drawn in the Lancaster/Hanover Masque.

Both projects might be described as embody­ing or ani­mat­ing the emerg­ing, occult­ed con­scious­ness of a com­mu­ni­ty and as an alle­go­ry for dwelling that is giv­ing form to a sub­tle and unspec­i­fied mys­tery. It is also an invi­ta­tion to imag­ine the city as a con­struc­tion of our own imagination—drawing upon the impre­cise clues that Hejduk’s draw­ings and nar­ra­tives provide.

Hej­duk rad­i­cal­ly upends the nor­ma­tive archi­tec­tur­al pro­gram in these projects, and he notably removes the neces­si­ty of a client from the pro­gram­mat­ic equa­tion. It is true that in pre­vi­ous sem­i­nal bod­ies of work (the Dia­mond Series, Texas Hous­es, and the series of projects that include ¼, ½, and ¾ Hous­es as well as the Wall House projects) there was no con­ven­tion­al client, but the pres­ence of a client was implied. In the Masque Projects, no such rela­tion­ship is present. Hejduk’s auton­o­my in invent­ing and author­ing the pro­gram of the masques is clear, and this is as impor­tant and rad­i­cal­ly cre­ative an act as the cre­ation of the indi­vid­ual objects that com­prise the masques.

The objects that make up the masques are of a hybrid nature and appear to be a col­lage of dis­parate and lay­ered ele­ments. Many of the objects resem­ble a hybrid of indus­tri­al or agri­cul­tur­al archi­tec­ture and many have clear bio/anthropomorphic qual­i­ties: the Secu­ri­ty [ 6 ] project for Oslo, for exam­ple, resem­bles both a men­ac­ing dog-like head and a mil­i­tary pill­box attached to a sus­pend­ed wall attached to a cube-like build­ing with stair like a tail and sus­pend­ed on stilts all of which sit on three pairs of rail wheels. The object, as many of Hejduk’s objects are, is faith­ful to the surrealist’s mantra: ​“As beau­ti­ful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrel­la on an oper­at­ing table,” that the sur­re­al­ists took from Le Chants de Mal­doror by the Comte de Lautréa­mont.[10]

The repeat­ed use of stairs, rail wheels, the appear­ance of car­ni­val-like ele­ments, and the frag­ment­ed nar­ra­tives asso­ci­at­ed with the objects and even their repeat­ed appear­ance in oth­er masques all sug­gest that the objects indi­vid­u­al­ly, and col­lec­tive­ly, are vagabond and itin­er­ant. Many have shift­ing and lay­ered mean­ings. The House of the Sui­cide, for exam­ple, may be the face of apotropa­ic fig­ure Medusa, the flames ris­ing off the suicide’s back, the black spires of Prague, Cezanne’s paint­ing The House of the Sui­cide, or even Magritte’s paint­ing, The Rape.[11]

It is not the intent of this writ­ing to exhaus­tive­ly address the nature of Hejduk’s masque projects, which have been done else­where by this author and oth­ers. I am describ­ing the masques to the extent that the descrip­tion may serve as a pref­ace to the dis­cus­sion of Hejduk’s draw­ing that follows.

Hejduk’s Masques are his­tor­i­cal­ly relat­ed to sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions of the Eng­lish Renais­sance archi­tect Ini­go Jones, also titled masques. They are filled with masked actors in elab­o­rate cos­tumes, stage sets, and very large archi­tec­tur­al props – build­ing-like ele­ments and even crea­tures — used in the per­for­mance for an elab­o­rate alle­gor­i­cal production.

Hejduk’s Masques con­sti­tute an equal­ly elab­o­rate world: an invent­ed world of archi­tec­tur­al char­ac­ters and con­trap­tions, at times filled with dancers, ani­mals, spir­its, and angels. The masques are insert­ed into the city where their engage­ment with that city and its implied, occult­ed, and tran­sient spec­ta­cle may be played out, and then the spec­ta­cle moves on. This elab­o­rate world (or oth­er city) is mul­ti-form, a com­plex­ly com­posed, ambigu­ous whole made of a col­lage of frag­ment­ed nar­ra­tives, scant sketch­es, paint­ings, lists, index­es, and repeat­ed char­ac­ters whose names often change from masque to masque. 

For the read­er famil­iar with Umber­to Eco’s The Open Work, Hejduk’s masques will seem famil­iar. Eco’s open work is char­ac­ter­ized by its mul­ti­plic­i­ty of mean­ings, the audience’s (readers/viewers/listeners) par­tic­i­pa­tion and inter­ac­tion with the work, and a dynam­ic with­in the work that lacks fixed mean­ing or con­clu­sion. As opposed to more tra­di­tion­al views of art, the open work invites its audi­ence to active­ly par­tic­i­pate in con­struct­ing under­stand­ing and mean­ing; it is a work in which the author offers ​“the inter­preter, the per­former, the addressee a work to be com­plet­ed”[12] As such, the audi­ence becomes a co-cre­ator in the work, and this process of co-cre­ation is what allows the work to be con­sid­ered open and dynam­ic: a ​“con­trolled dis­or­der”[13]. Both the sig­nif­i­cance of Hejduk’s Masque Projects and their rela­tion­ship to Magritte may be bet­ter under­stood in this regard. This point is equal­ly impor­tant in approach­ing Hejduk’s drawing—particularly his more anony­mous, mea­sured drawings.

As men­tioned above, in the process of the design of a par­tic­u­lar masque, usu­al­ly near its com­ple­tion, a set of mea­sured draw­ings would be made by Hej­duk in pen­cil and col­ored pen­cil on vel­lum. Impor­tant­ly, these draw­ings were often made in antic­i­pa­tion of the con­struc­tion of one of the masque objects in one of the mul­ti­ple sites around the world where they were built.

These objects were often con­struct­ed in aca­d­e­m­ic set­tings where a group of stu­dents and instruc­tors would engage with Hej­duk in the con­struc­tion of one or more of the masque objects. After the Masque Projects became known and attract­ed inter­est. Sev­er­al such groups par­tic­i­pat­ed in these efforts. Projects were con­struct­ed in Lon­don (The Col­lapse of Time), in Philadel­phia (Subject/Object), Oslo (Secu­ri­ty), Atlanta (The House of the Sui­cide and House of The Moth­er of the Sui­cide), Buenos Aires (Masque), and Barcelona (House for a Poet), as well as sev­er­al oth­ers. These efforts con­tin­ue to this day.

Typ­i­cal­ly, and sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the draw­ings were the only direc­tion that Hej­duk gave to these groups. As a ped­a­gogue[15], it was Hejduk’s view that these were teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties as well as col­lec­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties for dis­cov­ery, as mutu­al­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive endeav­ors, and as part of an egal­i­tar­i­an desire for the exchange of ideas. This is to say that those who par­tic­i­pat­ed in con­struct­ing the objects were clear­ly viewed by Hej­duk as co-authors and collaborators.

Of all the remark­able rep­re­sen­ta­tions in the Masque Projects, these mea­sured draw­ings are sur­pris­ing­ly the most ordi­nary and nor­ma­tive of archi­tec­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions: mea­sured plans, sec­tions, and ele­va­tions drawn to scale. Absent are the agi­tat­ed marks, quick sketch­es, and painter­ly ges­tures that char­ac­ter­ized Hejduk’s draw­ing of the indi­vid­ual objects dur­ing a masque’s ear­li­er development.

These draw­ings pro­vide a con­trast­ing and com­ple­men­tary ground­ing to the vibrant, fable-like world of the masques, and they place the masque objects in the real and ordi­nary world that archi­tects who wish to build inevitably inhab­it. This ordi­nar­i­ness, how­ev­er, is as decep­tive as the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Magritte or Moran­di, and is a con­tribut­ing, coun­ter­in­tu­itive source of the Masque Projects’ mys­tery and pow­er. For the stu­dents, archi­tects, and aca­d­e­mics who engaged in their con­struc­tion, they rep­re­sent­ed, and con­tin­ue to rep­re­sent, a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge and an invi­ta­tion for imag­i­na­tive engage­ment with Hejduk’s work.

Although drawn to scale and mea­sured and approach­ing the speci­fici­ty of con­struc­tion doc­u­ments (the draw­ings made to guide the con­struc­tion of build­ings), clos­er exam­i­na­tion reveals these draw­ings to sig­nif­i­cant­ly lack the full speci­fici­ty of con­ven­tion­al con­struc­tion doc­u­ments, which by their nature are high­ly spe­cif­ic and pre­scrip­tive. And just as some­one from out­side the world of art might assume that Magritte was an ama­teur or naïve painter, these draw­ings of Hejduk’s might be assumed to be those of an ama­teur drafts­man or begin­ning student. 

As opposed to con­ven­tion, where mul­ti­ple line weights each car­ry their own cod­i­fied sets of infor­ma­tion, these draw­ings are drawn with only one line weight – a del­i­cate but obscur­ing sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, impor­tant infor­ma­tion is left ambigu­ous. Mechan­i­cal con­nec­tions, for exam­ple, are indi­cat­ed only by a sim­ple small cross — indi­cat­ing a point or inter­sec­tion — but not the spe­cif­ic type of con­nec­tion [ 8 ]. One might assume they indi­cate a bolt or a coach screw, but that would be an assump­tion, as nei­ther is drawn as it eas­i­ly could be. The notch­ing of a wood­en tim­ber is an indi­ca­tion of a kind of con­nec­tion, but the addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion that would be nec­es­sary to indi­cate the nature of this con­nec­tion is absent. 

Col­ored pen­cil is applied as a sim­ple tone and used to indi­cate mate­r­i­al or col­or, but in a painter­ly way rather than an archi­tec­tur­al man­ner. Col­or is rarely used in con­ven­tion­al con­struc­tion draw­ing; the spec­i­fi­ca­tion of col­or is often lim­it­ed to the detailed, writ­ten build­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions. In these draw­ings, blue may stand for glass, brown for wood, green pos­si­bly indi­cates pati­naed met­al or pos­si­bly paint, black or gray­ish black may indi­cate met­al or paint­ed wood, but it is unclear and open to some inter­pre­ta­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, col­ors may change if the object is drawn in mul­ti­ple masques, as many are.

When part of teach­ing exer­cis­es, the mea­sured draw­ings are par­tic­u­lar­ly vague, giv­en the cus­tom­ary nec­es­sary clar­i­ty in a teach­ing exer­cise with sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal (build­ing) con­tent. Fur­ther, some of the mea­sured draw­ings, par­tic­u­lar­ly those for the Lancaster/Hanover Masque, are delib­er­ate­ly obscured through the con­found­ing super­im­po­si­tion of plan, sec­tion, and ele­va­tion, which Hej­duk referred to as X‑ray draw­ings [ 7 ].

Like a paint­ing by Magritte, Hejduk’s mea­sured draw­ings require one to be drawn into them as much as one might draw out of them. They present an inter­pre­tive space that oscil­lates between the pro­scrip­tive and inter­pre­tive and between the objec­tive and sub­jec­tive. In oth­er words, the draw­ings are less about the speci­fici­ty of con­struc­tion as would be nor­ma­tive in draw­ing of this kind, as they are an open work that requires its audi­ence to accept its mul­ti­plic­i­ty of mean­ings and unfixed con­clu­sions. Like a paint­ing by Moran­di, the view­er or inter­preter must embrace the sub­tle metaphors and hazy depic­tions that are part of the project’s con­tent and cre­ative­ly adjust to the elu­sive content’s impact on the process of building.

The speci­fici­ty demand­ed in con­struc­tion is thus a prod­uct of the interpreter’s/co-author’s efforts. And as such, the mea­sured draw­ings invert the usu­al and pre­scrip­tive use of draw­ings in archi­tec­ture: ini­tial sketch­es advanc­ing in a lin­ear direc­tion toward a con­clu­sion (in the com­plet­ed build­ing). Rather, these are draw­ings whose inter­pre­ta­tion demands build­ing (as a verb) or con­struc­tion (as an inter­pre­tive act) to be faith­ful to the com­plex world of drawing(s), poems, and fig­ures that pre­cede them: Hejduk’s world of alle­gor­i­cal complexity.

This demands a cer­tain space, an open­ness for the inter­preter or view­er, and a cer­tain delib­er­ate ordi­nar­i­ness, just as is the case in a work of art by a Magritte or a Moran­di. And it may require a cer­tain nor­ma­tive — even ​‘dumb’ — way of draw­ing and even a rather ​‘dumb’ way of build­ing, but a clear­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry know­ing sort of dumbness.

In Hejduk’s col­lab­o­ra­tive project, this open space is essen­tial — an invi­ta­tion to build the extra­or­di­nary world that lies with­in the draw­ings or nar­ra­tives and to build a frag­ment of that world beyond. One hon­ors rich­ness not by bois­ter­ous and artic­u­lat­ed speech (the over­ly artic­u­lat­ed detail or self-con­scious mas­tery of build­ing) but by allow­ing silence and the view­er to try to fill that silence. As such, the mea­sured draw­ings allude to con­struc­tion rather than spec­i­fy its exac­ti­tude; they are more like signs or cyphers than draw­ings used for the spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es of con­struc­tion. The mea­sured draw­ings are in their way: mute…and hazy…their details cov­ered in dust as it were…using their rel­a­tive anonymi­ty and ordi­nar­i­ness to invite the view­er into their mystery.