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John Hejduk, dean of Cooper Union's Architecture program (Photo by Jose Paletz; courtesy The Cooper Union) |
| The Cooper Cult, as it is called, runs wide, deep, and loyal.
by Philip Nobel John Hejduk is the lodestar in the dark sky of New York architecture. His work--a largely unbuilt body of architectural ruminations--attracts and repulses with equal force. In his role as resident seer at the Cooper Union architecture program (where he's been dean since 1975), he has created an expansive network of alumni and acolytes, many of them prominent architects. The Cooper Cult, as it is called, runs wide, deep, and loyal. For those outside the fold, and for the not inconsiderable number of architects with mixed memories of force-feedings by Hejduk-addled professors, his personal voyage is at best a useful check on banality--there is room for one black-winged angel--and at worst irresponsible solipsism. Since Hejduk's days as one-fifth of the New York Five, he has drifted away from the practice of architecture, as it is commonly understood. In its place, he substituted publication; with Mask of Medusa (1985) and its many successor texts--most recently, Adjusting Foundations (1995)--he has made regular efforts to bring commandments to his tribes of Israelites below. Now, he has handed down another tablet: a book of poems to be consumed, ridiculed, cherished, trashed, taken to heart, and unpacked by all interested parties. Such Places as Memory, published this month by MIT Press in association with the Anyone Corporation, contains 88 poems written between 1953 and 1996. Many are annotated with their inspirations--"Vermeer painting," "Venice"--and one can imagine how the verse (invariably free and unpunctuated) was born, as Hejduk waxed to bliss in some Old Masters gallery or rough-cobbled Italian piazza. Other poems, like "Yale Locks," are tantalizingly opaque: "Peacock architects of shrill voices / Piss on garden glass / Leather patches dirty weaves / Great Danes licking silver spoons / Suppose I were president / of the Ford Foundation." All of them host images from his mental toolbox--hearts, bones, violins, drums, plum-colored rooms, and peacocks. Alone, the poems are trifles. In aggregate, they complement Hejduk's larger body of work. "Florentine Grey" and "The Metronome" have already found form in his unbuilt Suspended Punctured Roof (published in Adjusting Foundations) and Security (a siege tower built in Oslo in 1989). The achievement of a signature style that can cross media so forcefully triangulates back to Hejduk's seething vision. The wider consequences of that vision remain unclear. |
Keywords:
John Hejduk, Cooper Union, dean
