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By Michael Killeen
The Metropolis Observed
January 2002
John Hejduk considered the Wall House 2, an architectural meditation on
the passage of time, to be his most important work. Originally designed
in the early 1970s for a rural site in Connecticut, it now rises on a lakefront
in Groningen, the Netherlands. In the mid-1990s town planners there asked
Hejduk--whose highly theoretical work exists mostly on paper--which of his
designs he would like to see built. He chose the Wall House. The Dutch site
changes one's perspective of the building. "The flatness of the
land and the lake brings even more attention to the idea of the wall,"
says his daughter, Renata Hejduk, a professor of architectural history at
Arizona State University.
The building is a hit: in the month following its September 5 dedication
it drew 13,000 visitors. Hejduk, dean of the Cooper Union's school of architecture
for 25 years, died on July 3, 2000. His designs dealt with basic universal
concerns: time, the social contract, how to make an idea into a reality.
"Passing through the wall is a representation of presence--one side
is the past, the other the future," says Hejduk colleague Steven Hillyer,
of Cooper Union.
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