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VOICELESS REASON SILENT SPEECH John Hejduk's Berlin Night

Article · January 1993

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'The true poet is one who inspires' - Paul Valéry'

'There are musicians who compose on blank paper, in silence and immobility. Their eyes wide open, they create, 1 A s q u o t d In: Gaston Ba
Air and Dr ams. An Essay nthe
by a gaze that stretches into emptiness, a kind of visual silence, a silent gaze that effaces the world in order t o Imaginatie not Movemen The Dallas
institute f. blications 1988 P. 4,
2
silence its noises; they write music.' Thus Gaston Bacheiard begins his conclusion to L'air et les songes, essai sur
2 Gaston ach el a rd, Air a d Dreams.
l'imagination du mouvement. A n f « a y o i the Imaginati n o f
Movemen The Dallas Ins t u t e
'There are also silent poets,' Bacheiard continues a little further, 'silencers who start by quieting an overly noisy Publicatie s 19BB, p 247.

universe and all the hubbub caused by its thunderous sound. They also hear what they write at the same time as nly Bacheiard b
Roland 8a
they are writing it, in the slow cadence of written language. They do not transcribe poetry; they write it. Let
d e n Bergh, Se
others "execute" what they have created there on the blank page. Let others use the megaphone of solemn o n the Geometry of Pain. N e w York
199 J
public "recitals." As for them, they savor the harmony of the written page on which thought speaks and the
5 Roland art hes, SadetFo drierlLoyoU
word thinks.' Berkeley a i d Los Angeles 989.

Reading these evocative lines - while contemplating my essay about Hejduk's work and in particular his Berlin
Night Masque - I could not resist the temptation to think of John H e j d u k - i n analogy to Bachelard's 'silent poets'
- a s a silent architect. An architect who writes architecture-and also here Writing should be understood as the
idea of original creation 3 . A silencer who, in the case of architecture, starts by effacing the overly noisy world of ts acts like so many ins»

everyday building production and all the media hubbub caused by the 'protagonists of architecture.' Hejduk
doesn't produce buildings; he creates, he writes architecture. He is an architect who, on the blank page, 'Lives'
his architecture the moment he TOR it, thus creating %Wff pages on which thought EAPRVSSES and the HJVtf thinks.
As I already wrote in an other essay about Hejduk regarding his 'oeuvre' 4 , we can - in analogy to what Roland
Barthes stated about the work of Sade, Fourier and Loyola5 - consider him to be a logothete, a founder of lan-
guage. Hejduk shares with Sade, Fourier and Loyola the same practice of writing 6 . In his work we can see 'the same
sensual pleasure in classification, the same mania for anatomizing, the same enumerative obsession, the same im-
age practice, the same erotic, imagistic fashioning of the social system.' And as Barthes wrote of Sade, Fourier and
Loyola, Hejduk's work is not easily accessible either, he also makes pleasure, happiness, communication dependent
on an unrelenting order or a combinative.
The language Hejduk creates, like the languages that Sade, Fourier and Loyola founded, is obviously not linguis-
tic, not a language of communication. It is a new language; in Hejduk's case it is a spatio-temporal language that
is traversed by, or traverses, the language of architecture, but is open only to what Barthes calls the 'semiologica!
definition of Text.' And Text for Barthes is an object of pleasure, and the aim is to assimilate the Text as a kind of
imaginative fabric. In other words Hejduk is a Textoperator, a Form-ulator, and like Sade, Fourier and Loyola, the
inventor of a way of writing. In his work he liberates the spatio-temporal language of architecture from its
solid referential powers by isolating it, by revealing it, and most importantly by taking pleasure in it. This means
that he creates, he writes, architectural Signs by reading Signs as architecture. Which also means that, within the
space and language of architecture, Hejduk discovers and brings to life an extra dimension; a poetic dimension, a
dimension of 'poiesis,' in other words a dimension of original creation.
If we project Barthes's Reading of these authors on Hejduk's 'oeuvre' we can see that in their activities as logo-
thetes, as founders of new languages, Hejduk as well as Sade, Fourier and Loyola have each had recourse t o the
same operations.
The first operation, as Barthes lists it, is 'self-isolation.' The new language must arise from a material vacuum; an
anterior space must separate it from the other, common, idle, outmoded language, whose 'noise' might hinder it.
For Hejduk and his work this means that he retreats into such unaccustomed SPACES as those of painting, literature,
music, film, medicine, theater, geometry, etc., to Form-ulate his architectural language.
The second operation Barthes lists is 'articulation.' No language can exist without distinct FORMS, nor can any lan-
guage exist unless these signs are reprised in a combinative. And that is what Hejduk does in his work, he
deducts, combines, arranges, he endlessly produces rules of assemblage.
The third operation is 'ordering': not merely to arrange the elementary FORMS, but to subject the larger sequence
to a higher order, creating a kind of ritual to become the form of its spatio-temporal planning. In the case of
Hejduk's work it is the higher order of the idea, the 'eidos,' the 'Form,' that the larger sequence is subjected to.
And his new discourse is always provided with something to operate it. The OBIERVER can find those 'operators' of
Hejduk's 'oeuvre' in specific titles or in the invented programs, in the created institutions or its imagined Subjects,
and in his Masques one can imagine it t o be the 8BDA!NER- In this way the Reader himself acts as a kind of simulta-
neous DIÏèC?OR of the play, and thus inspires it, but does not regiment it.
The logothesis however, as Barthes says, does not - after these three operations - satisfy itself with the constitu-
tion of a kind of ritual or a style, because then the language founder would be nothing more then the author of
a system. To embed a new language, to found a new language through and through, a fourth operation is required;
'theatricalization.' Not meaning to decorate the depiction, to design a setting for representation, but to make the
language boundless, to produce 'Text.' Every logothete has to become a kind of scenographer, or better, a vir-
tuoso, one who loses himself in the framework he sets up and arranges 'ad infinitum.' And that is exactly what
Hejduk does in his work. Thus founding a new architectural language through and through, a vertiginous and
perplexing language, a - in its deadly 'silence' - subversive language that evolves by involving.
Like Barthes sees the 'victorious deployment of the significant Text, the terrorist Text' in the work of Sade,
Fourier and Loyola so we can see it in the virtuosity of Hejduk's implicitly subverting 'oeuvre'. Since in his case the
intervention of a 'Text' in the discipline is also not measured by the so called reality it contains or projects, but rat-
her by the 'virtus', the violence that enables it t o exceed the laws that a discipline, an ideology, a philosophy esta-
blish for themselves in order to agree among themselves in a fine surge of historical intelligibility. And this
excess for Barthes is called writing; it is an idea of original creation, the virtuosity in 'producing Text', the geni-
us and joy of 'Inventing.' Or as he would say, 'the ultimate subversion does not necessarily consist of saying what
shocks public opinion, but of inventing a paradoxical discourse. Invention, and not provocation is a revolutiona-
ry act, and it cannot be accomplished other than by setting up a new language.' So Hejduk's greatness lies not in
provocating or being radical, but in having invented a vast discourse founded on its own perplexing repetitions.
In this way an 'architectural vacuum' is created in who's virtual silence he constantly shows us the blind spots and
vanishing points of our discipline.

Ever since Hans Tupker brought me into contact with John Hejduk's work, back in the seventies, I have been fol-
lowing with increased fascination the development of his highly evocative 'oeuvre'. In that particular period
Hejduk's architectural investigations were entering a new 'space'. He had just started sounding the depth of the
'idea of the city' by means of his Venetian projects. Previous to these intriguing projects the architecture of the
city had not been a leading theme in his work. But in the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought, The Silent Witnesses
and The 13 Watchtowers of Cannaregio, one could see how his persistent search and carefully planned investiga-
tions of the basic condition of the idea of architecture, which in fact his whole 'oeuvre' represents, reached its
next phase. A phase that might be characterized as his first investigations into the 'hardware' of the city. A phase
in which the architectural pieces in their autonomous expression as nameable types - like house, tower, cemetery,
etc. - became elements that started to question the architecture of the city.
In an analogous way the autonomous and nameable elements of architecture, in the previous phase of his work,
started to question Architecture by becoming architectural pieces in themselves-like the Wall House, the Element
House, etc. Previous to the so called Wall House phase, or better previous to Frame 4 - as Hejduk himself calls this
phase of his work in the Mask of Medusa -, in Frame 2 and 3: the Texas and Diamond Houses, one can see that
here, too, Hejduk's 'ex-plicating architecture' is generated by isolating the 'architectural im-plications of an ele-
ment' and developing it as an architecture in itself. In the case of the Texas and Diamond Houses we can see how
geometry and abstraction are regarded to be crucial elements in the idea of architecture, t w o elements that we
can see coming back in a very intriguing way in his most recent works. But let's not proceed too quickly.
After the Venetian projects, which questioned the city's 'hardware,' the so called 'Masques' mark the next fasci-
nating phase in Hejduk's work. This phase can, in contrast to the Venetian projects, be characterized as his search
into the architecture of the city's 'software.' This is a phase in which the relations between the elements of the city,
the relations between the autonomous and nameable 'objects' and the 'subjects' - among each other and within
each other - are questioned and become an architecture of their own.

At first sight Hejduk's Masques - beginning with The Berlin Masque - appear to carry us back to the naive world
of play, the paradoxical, mysterious reality of the childlike imagination, in which fear is coupled to fascination and
cruelty to innocence. Yet if we accept this reality as it stands, it leads us into the space of amazement and imagi-
nation - the 'chora' of poetic thought, the liminal space of the feast and the game. In their festive and temporal
appearance Hejduk's Masques look a bit like abandoned fairgrounds, but in reality they are synthesis machines
with variable geometries, monuments not in space but in time; rare mixtures of symbolism and spectacle, chal-
lenge and simulation, seduction and biography. They are paradoxical, mythical configurations which confront the
order of r e a l i t y - t h e idea of architecture in general and the architecture of the city in p a r t i c u l a r - w i t h something
absolutely imaginary, with something that is absolutely useless on the level of reality, but which emanates such
enormous implosive energy that it absorbs the total order of reality. Like a poem, Hejduk's Masques have a logic
of their own. They have neither rational content nor aim, but they display a 'mysterious sense' which lends them
an intense evocative power.
Hejduk's Masques, his 'theater plays' on the architecture of the c i t y - b y there name referring to a type of theater
play that flourished in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and who's characteristic was that it had no
preconceived narrative action, climax or ending - are structured like free scenario matrices, with simultaneous se-
The Movement-Image. London 1!
quences of images and texts, of Objects and Subjects, thus generating the space of a 'virtual city' with its specific
'hardware' and 'software.' A Masque, however, should not be understood here as a closed set of Objects/Subjects
with predetermined and fixed relations re-presenting the city, but should be regarded as being a kind of Open
Whole presenting the 'idea of the city.'
'If one had to define the Whole,' Deleuze writes 7 , 'it would be defined by Relation. Relation is not a property of
objects, it is always external t o its terms. It is also inseparable from the Open, and displays a spiritual or mental
existence. Relations do not belong to objects, but to the Whole, on condition that this is not confused with a clo-
sed set of objects... The Whole is n o t a closed set, but on the contrary that by virtue of which the set is never abso-
lutely closed, never completely sheltered, that which keeps it Open somewhere...The Whole is the Open, and
relates back to time or even to spirit rather than to content and to space.' And although Hejduk's Masques at first
present themselves as closed sets of Objects/Subjects, in essence they are Wholes of relations, Wholes that are
kept open somewhere as if by the finest thread which attaches them to an ever changing reality of the city, or bet-
ter its idea, the city's existence in the mind. The Masque like 'the Whole creates itself, and constantly creates itself
in another dimension without parts - like that which carries along the set of one qualitative state t o another, like
the pure ceaseless becoming which passes through these states. It is in this sense that it is spiritual or mental.'
In concept Hejduk's Masques draw on the idea of play. An idea that, according to the famous historian Johan
Huizinga in his Homo Ludens, not only permeates culture in all its manifestations, but even precedes culture, and
its specific rational is deeply rooted in our spiritual being. All the great original activities of human society - archi-
tecture included - are, in his view, suffused with the idea of play. As also is the case with language, the tool we use
t o communicate, learn and command; t o make distinctions, define, record; in short to name things, and so raise
them to the domain of the spirit. In fact there is a metaphor behind every expression of an abstract thing, and in
principle every metaphor is a play on words. In creating language, we are playing constantly jumping from the
 material to the conceptual. And when the play is over, language is retained as a spiritual creation or treasure. It
remains in the memory and so can be passed on or repeated at any moment.
Playing is accompanied by feelings of excitement and pleasure, or better joy, and by an awareness that it is diffe-
rent than ordinary life. Like the Masque, the play is an end unto itself: it is free, beyond truth and falsehood, good
and evil. It is a Spiritual activity, but not a moral function; it is not yet virtuous or sinful - and this also defines the
essentially choratic character of the 'space' of play and of the Masques. In the same way Hejduk's Masques have,
in addition to their choratic spatial structure 8 , a temporal structure of their own - an extended now, a presence in
Masque. London/Montreal 1992.
pp.81-102. ecstasy. The time of the Masque is the time of fascination, a time experienced from within, a continuous time
which unites the eternal and the final, simultaneously internal and eternal time.
«York 1967, p. 24. For Huizinga, play stands apart from all other forms of thought. Because play takes place within specific bounda-
ries of time and place, it is isolated from ordinary life. It is not'actual' life, but rather a withdrawal into a temporary
sphere of activity with its own purport. As defined by him, play is a voluntary action or activity enacted within cer-
tain boundaries of time and space, following voluntarily accepted, but absolutely binding rules. In other words,
play not only introduces order, it is order. It lends a temporary, limited completeness to the incomplete reality of
the world and the chaos of life. And in this way, in his view, we create our expression of being from the idea of play.
We have to learn to lose ourselves in the Masques in order t o evoke the 'essential' and experience the 'joyful ter-
ror' of their architectural reality. To enjoy the terrific space-time of a Masque, its 'chora' of becoming and the sub-
limity of its 'voided center, one has to follow Rilke, in that fear can change into joy. 'Did you not know, then, that
joy is, in reality, a terror whose outcome we don't fear? We go through terror from beginning to end, and that
precisely is joy. A terror about which you know more than the beginning. A terror in which you have confidence.' 9
So to hear the voiceless reason which Hejduk introduces into the discipline of architecture as a form of con-
sciousness which is no longer, or not yet, subject to the censorship of reason - we have to surrender t o his terrific
festive parade of simultaneous Objects and Subjects, and be absorbed by the procession of images and symbols,
signs and texts. We have to become part of his labyrinthine choreography whose only goal is the feast or the play
itself.
As such Hejduk's Masques, his 'theater plays' on the architecture of the city have constituted their own genre as
Open Wholes, and his Objects and Subjects have reached the status of a 'troupe' of 'terroristic' characters, that not
only question the idea of the city's architecture, but also its 'life'. Berlin Night is n o w - as far as I k n o w - Hejduk's
concluding Masque, his last work using the 'format' of the Masque, thus not only folding itself back on to all the
previous Masques, but in particular folding back on to the first, the Berlin Masque, and thus together with
Victims completing his Berlin trilogy.

Berlin Night [?] Gaston Bachelard once said: 'We understand so quickly that we forget to imagine.' 1 0 So although
I don't know why Hejduk's last Masque is called Berlin Night, or to what this title refers, I see no problem in using
it as a kind of keyword t o some of the speculative thoughts it evokes in my mind, triggered by the multitude of
echoes it seems to contain.
In this Masque's particular relation to Berlin's Jewish history the title Berlin Night seems to echo memories of the
famous 'Kristallnacht.' In relation to the concept of the Masques in general as an idea of the carnivalesque - it
seems to me to echo some aspects of Max Beckmann's 'Fastnacht' paintings and as a premonition of the pogrom,
his 'Nacht' paintings of 1914-25. In relation to Hejduk's personal fascination with the idea of Angels, it seems to
me also refer to images of Wim Wenders's film Der Himmel über Berlin (which was, I think, even later). And in its
title's imagery it contains for me echoes of Prussian blue, the deep, dark blue color of the sky on a clear frosty
Berlin night. But other thoughts also cross my mind. When for instance I read the text of Passage through the
Streets of Berlin, my thoughts go to the ancient idea of the 'mundus.' A founding ritual in which the navel of a
new city, the 'mundus,' was a hole - made in the ground at the place that was imagined to be the 'center' of the
new city, its connection to the underworld and thus t o the souls of their forefathers - which was filled by each of
the founder citizens with a handful of earth that they brought from their place of birth, the land of their forefa-
thers, and which was then covered with a stone or an altar, thus symbolizing ideas of death and rebirth, of iden-
tity and of one's actual rootedness in time and not so much in space.

This idea of the 'mundus' in relation t o what I read in the Passage through the Streets of Berlin also brings to mind
the question if there is a relation between the word 'mundus' and the word 'mound' and by looking up both
words in my dictionary and trying to trace their etymology, a fascinating folding of the ritual in to the word
'mound' occurs. In a way there seems t o be no concrete etymological relation - since the Latin 'mundus' refers to
humankind, to world and the creation of a world-order, t o heaven and earth, or to universe and cosmos - but if
you take the word 'mound', which stands for: 'a pile of earth heaped for protection or concealment,' you find
that originally 'mound' meant 'an enclosing hedge or fence' and if you trace it further its Indo-European root
 seems t o be 'man,' which refers to the hand - 'manus' in Latin - and here in particular t o the hand in relation t o
guarding, to the hand that protects.
In contemplating all these fragments of distant echoes that Hejduk's Berlin Night seems t o contain the memory of
a photograph of Rotterdam after the bombardment, or better of its inner city after the clearance of the rubble,
also crosses my mind. It is a kind of aerial photograph in which one can see the matrix of Rotterdam's old street
pattern, after the almost complete devastation, with only a few buildings left like the St Laurens Church and the
Town Hall. This picture, strangely enough, it evokes the thought that the Germans saved a few of the institutions
Paris 1966. p. 1 0. as q u o t e d in Gaston
Bachelard, Air a n d Dreams. An Essay and public buildings on purposes as reminders, as monuments to their destructive power which now will become
on the Imagine ion of Movement.
The Dallas Irish u t e Publications 19B8, the crystallization points of Rotterdam's rebirth. The city one sees in this photograph seems to be abandoned, but
D 88
if you look closer you see small dots, people walking in streets without buildings, and then t o your amazement
you see that one of the empty plots, between the streets at the back of the Town Hall, is colonized by a fair or a
circus that put up its tents there. In a strange way it seems that the life of the city of Rotterdam started again with
a festival, or a fair, a monument of its own temporality. A kind of Masque?
A strange combination, an apparently 'dead city' and a fair or a circus, this 'embodied joy' of our childhood. My
mind travels further to a chapter in Air and Dreams called The poetics of wings, to one of Bachelard's beautifully
apt observations about the sky lark, this 'bird the color of infinity,' as being the 'embodied joy' - and doesn't lark
in English also stand for carefree adventure or play? I imagine being one of those dots in the photograph, one of
those people in the solitude of this vast open plain which once was a city, and then, like a ray of sunlight in the
blue of the morning sky, to hear the song of the first lark starting to fill the deadly silence of this 'city's' space with
new life. And I can imagine it later to be like in d'Annunzio's The Dead City: 'All the fields are covered with little
wild flowers that are dying; and the song of the larks fills the sky! It is marvelous! I never heard such impetuous
singing. Thousands of larks, a countless multitude... They flew up from everywhere, darting toward the sky with
the speed of arrows; they seemed mad, vanishing without reappearing, as if consumed by their own song or
devoured by the sun.'Then I realize that the sky lark is a kind of virtual Icarus, its counterpart at the other side of
the mirror, and that the words in Jules Supervielle's Le Matin du Monde: 'The sky lark died. Not knowing how t o
fall,' might have the deeper meaning here that the Icarus in us, the joy and adventure of our spatial and material
imagination, our flight of thoughts, is still alive. 11
'We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we per-
ceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. If there is no change, or
unexpected fusion of images, there is no imagination; there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present
does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance - an explosion - of
unusual images, then there is no imagination. There is only perception...' 12 With this statement Gaston Bachelard
opened his introduction to L'air et les songes, essai sur /'imagination du mouvement. This not only brings me back
to the actual quality of Hejduk's evocative 'oeuvre', but also to a particular aspect of the Masques, i.e. their'space' 12 Gaston Bachelard. Ai
An Essay on the imagina
in relation to the idea of the Masque as an Open Whole. So its 'multi-dimensional space', that not only incorpora- Movement. The Dallas In

tes Time as the 'choratic space of becoming' - t h e dimension of the Concept, the How; but which also incorporates
the Spirit, as the dimension of the Open Whole, - the dimension of the Idea, the What.
It is a specific kind of 'space' which in the later Masques - Bovisa, Vladivostok, Riga, Lake Baikal, and Berlin Night
- is investigated by Hejduk - so it seems - as a kind of 'pictorial or cinematic space'. In those Masques Hejduk not
only creates a set of Objects and Subjects, but he also generates a set of 'tableaus'. In these 'tableaus' - one of the
definitions of 'tableau' says: 'an interlude during a scene when all the actors on stage freeze in position and then
resume action as before' - one can see how he 'frames' constellations of Objects, how he brings them together in
a 'space' like objects in the 'space' of a still life.
One should keep in mind, however, that the 'space' of a still life is not a normal space, not a space of reality, but
an isolated space from which all real life seems to be extracted, a 'space' that comes to 'life' by carefully isolating
the essence of 'life' from real life. It is the 'space' of spiritual affects, the 'space' that includes the spirit of life by
carefully excluding real life, like it includes the essence of 'reality', its idea, by carefully isolating it from reality.
When I think about this aspect in the 'space' of Hejduk's Masques it reminds me of some of the things that Gilles
Deleuze said about the 'space' in the films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson. 'We pass from a closed set
that is fragmented t o an Open spiritual Whole that is created or recreated. Or take for example Dreyer, where the
Possible has opened up space as a dimension of the spirit (fourth or fifth dimension). Space is no longer determi-
ned, it has become the any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit, to the perpetually rene-
wed spiritual decision: it is this decision which constitutes the affect, or the "auto-affection", and which takes
upon itself the linking of parts.' 13 'Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any space-
whatever, (espace quelconque) to use Pascal Augé'sterm... Any-space-whatever is not an universal abstract, in all
times, in all places. It is perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its
 metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of
ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the insta-
bility, the heterogeneity, the absence of links of such a space, is a richness in potentials as singularities which are,
as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination.' 14
Like Dreyer explored horizontals and verticals, symmetries, high and low, in his film frames, so does Hejduk in the
'space' of his 'still lifes', the 'tableaus' of his Masques. Among the thirty tableaus/frames of the Berlin Night
ie Movement-Image. L
Masque published in this book, we also find Dreyer like cutting frames. Objects cut off by the edge of the frame,
and also frames exploring diagonals and counter-diagonals, pyramidal or triangular figures. All this 'framing' also
determines what Deleuze calls an 'out-of-field', ('hors-champ'), 'that refers to what is neither seen nor under-
stood, but is nevertheless perfectly present.' This 'out-of-field', this excluded reality, fulfills the function of 'intro-
ducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the isolated system which can never be perfectly closed.' And like
Deleuze says of Dreyer so also Hejduk turned this framing of the essence, or better this isolating of the idea, 'into
an ascetic method: the more the image is spatially closed, even reduced to two dimensions, the greater is its
capacity to Open Itself on to a fourth dimension which is time, and on t o a fifth which is Spirit...' 15

In the course of time it seems to me that it is especially Hejduk's 'oeuvre' that has become denser and denser; not
surrendering itself to exploitation as most of his contemporaries' work has done, thus becoming thinner and
thinner. Hejduk, as one can see from his vast and always fascinating work, is an architect of the 'long breath', a
stayer not a sprinter, not a shooting star that looses its energy quickly by burning up its matter, but more a 'red
giant' who's matter in the end implodes to become a black hole gathering all the energy it once emitted.
Not only as an architect in relation to his discipline, but also as a teacher in relation to his students, he creates a
kind of 'architectural vacuum' that one can only fill with the air of one's breath, one's 'anima', one's own Soul. A
'vacuum' who's absolute silence one can only fill with one's own 'architectural words'; inaudible words as long as
there is not enough air of one's breath to carry them. So maybe the most important lesson that Hejduk 'teaches'
us in his work, his 'living' work, the 'oeuvre' that he lives, is exactly that; that every cultural phenomenon, every
human occupation only 'lives' as long as this occupation is fed from within with the 'energy' that 'inspires' it and
is practiced by people that love their profession. It is the loveless professionalism, the production of 'lifeless',
uninspired works, that Hejduk opposes in his work and in his teaching, or better by his life's work. The same love-
less professionalism that Louis Kahn once criticized by stating that: 'If you are in the profession of architecture, it
is likely that you are not an architect. If you are an architect without thinking of the profession you might be
one,' 15 thus depriving most of the so-called architects of their professional identity.
Actually Hejduk's thoughts have a lot in common with those apparently simple, but in fact very dense contem-
plations of Kahn at the height of his career. One only has to compare Hejduk's introduction and statement for this
book with Kahn's following words: 'In us inspiration to learn. Inspiration to question. Inspiration t o live. 16 Louis I. K a h n . What Will B:
Always Been. The Words of Lc
Inspiration to express. These bring to man their institutions. The architect is the maker of their spaces. The insti-
tutions are the houses of the inspirations. The architect considers the inspiration before he can accept the dicta- 17 Louis I. Kahn. Writ
'nterviews; Remarks, f
tes of a space desired. He asks himself what is the nature of one that distinguishes itself from another. When he Thoughts, p. 314. New

senses the difference, he is in touch with it's Form. Form inspires design. I think of Form as the realization of a
nature, made up of inseparable elements. Form has no presence. Its existence is in the mind. If one of its elements
were removed its Form would have t o change. Form precedes Design. It guides its direction for it holds the rela-
tion of its elements. Form is what. Design is how. Design gives the elements their shape, taking them from their
existence in the mind to their tangible presence. In composing I feel that the elements of the Form are always
intact, although they may be constantly undergoing the trails of design in giving each its most sympathetic shape.
Each composer interprets Form singularly. Form, when realized, does not belong to its realizer. The most impor-
tant thing to teach however is to know that there is no such thing as architecture. There is the spirit of architec-
ture, but it has no presence. Architecture exists in the mind. What does have presence is a work of architecture.
Architecture has no favorites, it has no preferences in design, it has no preferences for materials, it has no prefe-
rences for technology, styles or methods, it just sits there waiting for a work to indicate again, to revive the spirit
of architecture by its nature.' 17

Comparing Hejduk's words in this book with the above of Kahn one senses how both are circling around the
same 'voided center', the same 'black hole' in the discipline of architecture; that is its 'Spirit,' or literally 'breath,'
in other words architecture's'breath of life' - i t s ' a n i m a ' o r ' a n i m u s ' - i t s Soul. And also the condition of the archi-
tect's mind that 'pro-duces,' that 'leads-to' its Idea - its 'eidos', its Form. Paraphrasing the foreword to Air and
Dreams one could say: what Hejduk and Kahn teach is that spirit is the heart of architecture and that architectu-
re is the ensoulment of spirit. For them the objective world of architecture is more than an inert scientific sphere.
It is 'alive' and responsive. It challenges the human being to participate. Through interaction with the world we
 not only learn about our soul's desires, but also that architecture can mirror some of our spiritual aspirations by
engaging our imagination, seizing on images of 'architecture,' exploiting them to express innermost being. Not
simply representations or reproductions of architecture, these 'architectural' images are the reality we single out
from all the multiple possibilities of animation surrounding us.
In the end it is characteristic for Hejduk and his work that he, even in comparison to the poetics of Kahn, dares to
18 Galton Bazhelard. Air and Dreams go further and to take an even vulnerable position in the architectural debate of his time. As he also proves in the
An lisayon the Imagination of Move-
ment The Dallas Institute Publication* Architect's Statement for this book, in not using some of the generally accepted or fashionable phrases of the dis-
1988, p. 239.
cipline's debate, but by employing the metaphorical and poetical qualities of the idea of breathing t o express
what for him thought means as an architect. Or as Bachelard opens his chapter called Silent Speech: 'In its simp-
le, natural, primitive form, far from any aesthetic ambition or any metaphysics, poetry is an exhalation of joy, the
outward expression of the joy of breathing.' 18

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