The Complexities of John Hejduk’s Work

As architectural practice and education keep turning into a formulaic pragmatism, John Hejduk's poetic pedagogy and artistic work, as well as his emphasis on drawing, craft and making, concretize an alternative approach of crucial value. His work expands the narrow expressive scope of contemporary architecture to the realms of fantasy and dream, ritual and narrative, fear and hope. As architecture is restricted by a shallow quasi-rationality, Hejduks view of the art of building as an ethical and poetic exploration provides a demanding and liberating alternative perspective. Kevin Story's book mediates the deep complexities of Hejduk's thinking, work and mental world through a successful method of multiple exposure. - Juhani Pallasmaa, Architect SAFA, HonFAIA, IntFRIBA, Professor emeritus (Aalto University, Helsinki), Writer John Hedjuk's crusade for a poetics of architecture seem even more urgent in our time of enormous corporate practices. Kevin Story's book, The Complexities of John Hejduk's Work, consists of concepts and stories underlying the extraordinary force of his convictions. John was an architect of ideas at a time when modern architecture had become rigid and unimaginative. In the midst of postmodern eclecticism, John taught that we should keep our umbilical cord connection to modernity. His amazing imagination gave wings to Jung's reflection that each of us is modern in search of a soul. From meeting him in 1974, to our last exchange when he wrote enclosing, Lines: No Fire Can Burn (1999), he kept the faith for architecture... a gift of future generations. - Steven Holl, Architect