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THE ARCHITECT AS STORYTELLER:

Making Places in John Hedjuk's
Masques
James McGregor

Version of record first published: 28 Jul 2009

To cite this article: James McGregor (2002): THE ARCHITECT AS STORYTELLER: Making Places in
John Hedjuk's Masques, Architectural Theory Review, 7:2, 59-70

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 r
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Vol. 7 No. 2, 2002

THE ARCHITECT AS STORYTELLER:

Making Places in John Hejduk's
Masques
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JAMES MCGREGOR

John Hejduk died on July 3,2000. This essay celebrates his u 'ork, particularly
his later 'masques, 'for rethinking the division between theory and practice
that has occurred with the modernisation of architecture. Hejduk engaged
with his work through imaginath ~e more than rational processes and designed
with a narrative sensibility. It is this approach that gives the urban schemes
and individual buildings in his masques the texture of stories, rather than the
technical precision or theoretical abstraction often expected from architec-
tural designs.

One of the greatest challenges facing speculative architecture today is the division between theory and
practice. With the modernisation of architecture, theory became the preserve of the burgeoning
academies and professional institutions and practice was made its passive object, a conduit through
which theory imposed itself upon the world. In modernist urbanism especially, the detached powerof
theory contributed to a grandiose urban form destructive to the diverse everyday practices through
which a city is made and remade.1 Since the 1960s, when this problem wasfirstrecognised,2 one of the
tasks of architectural speculations about cities has been to recover in the act of making the rich and
varied relations between urban form and the multivalent possibilities of urban life. It is not surprising,
then, that one of the most interesting of recent engagements with this division comes from an architect
for whom practice is intimately linked with learning-the architectural educator John Hejduk.' In his
masque' projects especially, Hejduk submerges knowledge and production back into the rich process
of making so that the differences between them, and the point where one stops and the other begins,
becomes impossible to locate. And there isadouble movement to this: as Hejduk's originative authority
begins to diminish in each design, the creative work continues through the masques' strange ability to
promote the process of making in the imagination of the beholder. Thus each masque—each one an
imagined city—manages to bring architect, design and spectator together in a seemingly endless, and
indeterminate, creative process.
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Architectural Theory Review

This essay is as much a response to Hejduk's work as it is an explanation. Studies of the masques almost
inevitably become adventures into architectural epistemology and the masques themselves act not so
much as a guide through that adventure, but as an opportunity for it to take place. Therefore, any
reading of the masques is encouraged to be a liberated one: liberated from explicative rigour, from
utility and pragmatism, and from the conventional language of architecture. Here then, 1 won't be
seeking to deduce a few useful methods or techniques that can be transferred to various other fields
and projects because there is a more Important demand implicit in the masques: to think broadly and
freely about the field, and to look beyond its systems and standardisations. However, that said, there
are limits to such ambitions—convention always has some influence on thought even when thought
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positions itself in opposition. After all, one of the advantages of Hejduk's work is how it highlights some
of the limitations of the work that came before it—limitations that partly encouraged his work in the
first place. Thus, to some degree, I have tended to sort Hejduk's work into some sensible areas,
associated it with various traditions, and attempted to make it more accessible to others. Still, it is best
to think of Hejduk offering the possibility of extending thinking about architecture, to take it past the
theoretical and the practical, and to revive in it more primary stimulants for thought and feeling. This
essay is an attempt to illustrate these issues.

Hejduk built up a steady following during the publication of his masque projects over the 1980s and
1990s, but to be introduced to his work bya cursory glance at these will undoubtedly leave thespectator
baffled. Initially there appears to be a lack of substance, of clarity, of sense. The aesthetic quality of the
work appears uneven, despite occasional moments of stylistic brilliance. The scattered pieces of text-
poems, 'biographical' snippets about his characters etc.—only seem to compound the difficulty of the
interpretation. And this is almost all each masque gives you: drawings of various levels of crudity, vague
references (if at all) to a site or plan, a disparate collection of characters partially sketched out in line,
colour and text. But over time, when the multivalent relations between these different pans are
recognised, an idea begins to take shape. Then, what will emerge is not a design, an architecture, nor
a city—but something that encompasses all these things. What emerges is a story—and not a story with
a beginning, an end, and a line in between—but a story made up of various characters wandering in the
vicinity of each other, instigating various disaiptions and brutalities, and requiring continuous
negotiations about how best to share the same place. Hejduk might wax mystical about the process of
his work, but he is no essentialist, and it's these many threads to his stories, the indeterminate
relationships between them, and the incompleteness of the whole that makes the masques what they
are. If the masques have the character of childish fascination, of naive wonderment, then this is all part
of the attempt to keep the realm of possibility open.

The unique place of the masques in architectural thought occurs largely as a result of the dynamic
independence of their actors—which combine person and building—an independence that exceeds
any strictly architectural determinations. These actors have distinct personalities, their autonomy is
guaranteed, their sublimation never complete. Through these independent elements, the masques
strive to meet the complex and ever-shifting demands of identification, rather than to produce more
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Vol. 7 No. 2, 2002

persevering functions and representations. Hejduk's emphasis on the dilemmas of identity is motivated
by his distaste for the suppression of difference characteristic of modern and traditional architectural
preoccupations. His architecture doesn't produce collective values according to a preordained theory,
but only out of an amalgamation of individual experiences—experiences made only more profound in
a collective context. Tragedy, loneliness, pessimism: it's not accidental that these bleak moods are
common in Hejduk's work because they adequately convey the individual costs of a unity too easily
obtained. Unity isn't actual or given for Hejduk, but is a process in perpetual negotiation in the realm
of the imaginary. It is not stable, it is not permanent, and it is not pragmatic. It might be imagined in
abstractions, dogmas, idealisms, but it cannot be produced by them. Hejduk's thinking is more inclined
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to the less abstract or monumental concept of place: a nexus of space and time that remains fluid by
the guarantee of human activity. Hejduk's places are transient and impermanent. They exist in chance
meetings between strangers: between mechanical and portable units, each wrapped tightly around
their inhabitant, included in their obscure rituals, contributing to their personalities and intensifying
their troubles. These unusual places reveal an architecture that questions logic and eschews precision,
that injects a touch of mystery into a discipline hell-bent on explanation—but an architecture that
nevertheless remains strangely honest.

Craft, Theory and Practice

In his masques, Hejduk's drawings share pages with poetry,fictionalbiographies, lists and interviews.
This literary tapestry establishes for the overall design greater independence from forces external to its
own processes: the compounding of narratives helps generate the design in subtle, complex and
unforseen ways. The characters of the masques make their own city or, more precisely, the city grows
out of them, rather than out of some divine, detached process. Thus Hejduk's role is transformed: not
simply an architect juggling theory and technique to produce a static form, he simulates a set of
independent forces that create unique formal outcomes and produce their own meanings. This
mediating role—this coaxing into being that which already exists—positions Hejduk as much within
craft as architecture. This revival of craftsmanship is more than accidental to the bridging of theory and
practice that occurs in his work. As Daniel Libeskind suggests: "Hejduk has recovered a reality of
architecture that is impervious to the traditional distinction between praxis (knowledge) andpoiesis
(craftsmanship)."1 Here Libeskind suggests that Hejduk recovers an architecture that fuses and
transcends modern (praxis) and pre-modern (poiesis) techniques of combining knowledge and
action. Pre-modern craftwork grounded knowledge but constrained it by confining it to convention,
whereas modern production encouraged knowledge to develop by giving it autonomy but had
difficulty reinvesting it into practice. Hejduk's way out of this contradiction is a property of the format
that he works in: paper architecture—the drawn idea, the thoughtful mark. Through his drawings,
Hejduk brings speculation into the realm of practice and practice into the realm of speculation. He is
not producing a philosophy of architecture, nor an architectural object. His masques are both of these
thingsat the same time.and therefore neither in their traditional manifestation. By exploring afresh the
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Architectural Theory Review

possibility of an architectural craft, Hejduk pursues not the further empowerment of the architect, but
to revive the architectural object's ability to absorb thought and practice, to hold them together in a
richer, more independent life.

Hejduk's masques reunite craft and knowledge by remaining open to the various influences of their
'living' components. His masques have a will of their own. Theory and practice merge there like thought
and body (thought affects materiality; material change challenges thought). In them, theory overcomes
its own institutional separation through its engagement with design and through design's engagement
with life. Hejduk isn't rejecting theory outright, he simply wants it reconstituted in a less autonomous
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practice. As Stan Allen explains, Hejduk's attitude to theory arises "not out of anti-intellectualism or
antipathy to thought in architecture, but in recognition of theory's tendency towards reduction,
regulation, and repetition.'"1 For Hejduk, theory loses its impact as detached and abstract thought, and
only becomes effective when completely immersed in a sufficiently engaged design process. But while
his masques are not sites for abstract questioning, nor are they sacrifices to construction. They do not
constitute a transaction between the speculative labour of the architect and the manual labour of the
builder. Like theory, the masques have a speculative character and appear more substantial than
conventional plans, which always assume construction as the next step. But unlike theory, the masques
are much less specialised in their reasoning and, as Hejduk suggests, only human interaction can
ultimately determine their meaning. In his Victims project, for example, Hejduk openly invites the
citizens of Berlin to contribute to the design process, stating that "the arrangement of these structures
is only a suggestion. The concept of another structural ordering is open."6 Like all Hejduk's masques,
Victims is neither transparent description in the manner of a functional design, nor is it a transparent
interpretation in the manner of theory. Much of its work remains to be performed after the architect's
work is done.

Craft does not require theory to deliver its meaning. It does not build an institution for itself, nor out
of itself, and its knowledge is wholly manifest and transmitted in an object immersed in a network of
relations. The craft-object has no status outside its social function, no place in abstract thought, and is
less impervious to the forces of historical change. Time distorts and transforms its meaning. This is as
true of the masques as it is of that extinct craft that the masques most closely resemble—the oral story.7
Walter Benjamin has described the oral story's tendency to compound and alter its meaning as it moves
through several retellings. He writes.

Storytelling is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the
pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the
storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus the traces of the storyteller cling to the story
the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.8

The story loses its essence as it is passed down. It is profaned by the lives it touches, its origin is
weakened by the processes of its own perpetuation. like the collection of personal histories that
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Vol. 7 No. 2, 2002

compose Hejduk's masques, the oral story is a "slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent
layers" and precisely this process, rather than the authority of the original version, reveals "the perfect
narrative" within.9 Hejduk, like Benjamin's storyteller, allows the participants in his masques to remain
present and active in the work. The masques are theirs, not his. The masques are neither pure nor final,
they are alive, and therefore irredeemable to the isolated gaze of modern theory.

The Living City

Hejduk's storytelling-architecture reinvents the relationship between architect and city. He is neither
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visionary nor archaeologist: he seeks neither to propel the city into a dreamed future, nor to revive or
preserve a glorified past. No Utopia, no Golden Age. Past and future are always held within the critical
lens ofthe present in his work; history and progress are equally profaned by the action ofcontemporary
life. (Hejduk, in his Diary Constructions, has celebrated the present's power of obfuscation: "present
time cannot be seen... present time is opaque... present time erases."1") Thus, Hejduk treats the city
as a kind of existential poetics; its essence and design permanently obscured by the disruptions of
human interaction. He disregards the demands for pragmatics under which modern urbanism has
often laboured, because he sees the city as much more than a functional organism. In a similar vein,
John Berger has argued that communities are not absolutely expressed through the organisation of
space and form, but also through more ephemeral modes, through "opinions, stories, eyewitness
reports, legends, comments and hearsay."" These activities resist all kinds of reductive processes-
technological and sociological—and reveal that the settled community is not simply

...thesumofall the social and personal relationships existing within it,... it isakoaliringportrait
of itself: a communal portrait, in that everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays.12

This living portrait immediately evokes the necessity of storytelling, the craft that (recalling Benjamin)
retains traces of the lives it has passed through. Cities are like stories in continuous process:
perpetuated by each inhabitant yet encompassing those inhabitants within its folds. Hejduk, by
refusing to create absolutely predetermined designs, by transgressing the architect's traditional
prerogative as origin and conclusion of urban form, sublimates himself to this story. He occupies the
living portrait as one of its many incidental marks.

Hejduk borrows the term masque from a theatrical genre, extinct since the Enlightenment, which
brought nobility and gentry together in a kind of ritual acknowledgment of difference. Its form was
spectacle—in which each spectator was simultaneously a participant—and its function was to naturalise
class distinction. The demise of the masque as a relevant form of social expression coincided with
Enlightenment attacks on a mythologised social hierarchy and with the consequent emergence of
Utopian socialisms. With this, however, expressions of social organisation became increasingly abstract
in the Enlightenment: spatially, through regimented systems of order (Ledoux) and control (Bentham);
and temporally, through philosophies of progress (Hegel). Idealised city schemes, like Ledoux'sChaux
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Architectural Theory Review

(1804) and, much later, Le Corbusier's City for Three Million (1922), reduced urban space to abstract
qualities to enable modern progress to run its course. They envisioned and designed for a wholly
rationalised society, organised by the rigours of science, and maintained by systematic codes of justice.
These were schemes that severely compromised the theatre of the city. Hejduk's advice is characteristically
lyrical in the face of such Utopian generalisations: "hold onto your small possessions and run down the
street away" from them." His revival of the masque genre reveals his efforts to revive the theatricality
of urban life: the city as expression rather than suppression, as narrative unfolding rather than tabula
rasa, as life rather than institution.
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But Hejduk's revival of the masque is not a reactionary gesture, it is a means to move architectural
thinking beyond modernist urbanism and its preference for systematic organisation. Social divisions
were highly pronounced oppositional polarities in the masque's traditional celebration of class
structure, but Hejduk modifies its function to reveal human experience as truly multivalent. He
reproduces tensions occurring between individuals, not between groups of individuals. His work is
based neither on a collective history nor class, nor on other popular inclusive categories—race, culture,
gender etc. He instead ponders the thinking and feeling (living) individual, for whom separation and
isolation are categorical conditions. This not only distinguishes Hejduk from architectural modernism,
which tended to overlook the resistance of individuals to standardising universalisms, but also from
more contemporary, postmodern-historicisturbanismswhichcounter modernism by crudeoppositions:
vernacular versus universal, culture versus collective, style versus progress. Hejduk's approach is not
pure contest, it is not simply about a reverence for the opposite side of entrenched strategies, heinstead
changesfields,moving beyond modernism and its attendant dualities to uncover the condition of its
victims. His masques are therefore more poetic than historicist: they do not seek to recover an imagined
past, they merely seek a more profound condition of existence. If his masque-cities have a history at
all, it is a history that is and always has been in continuous condition of process, rather than a history
that stopped the moment that modernity began. This continual disruption of the boundaries between
groups of people, and between periods in time, is the guarantee of the continued living existence of
the masques.

The Character in Isolation

The components of each masque are treated as separate and unique, their grouping is not strictly
coordinated, and this works in antithesis to universalising or historicist tendencies in urbanism.
Hejduk's process is not about organisation, or even planning; if each masque has a general character
at all, it emerges through coincidence rather than schematisation. Chance is the principle affecting the
relationship between pans in his work, but chance is not an implement of philosophical critique here,
for Hejduk it is a principle of a truly human order. The meeting of his buildings resembles a clash of
personalities: urgent, tense, unpredictable. This is most apparent in the striking disparity between
forms, but it occurs fundamentally because the space between components is left raw (a quality quite
different from abstraction). Urban space, for Hejduk, is always a wilderness thickened rather than
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Vol. 7 No. 2, 2002

cleared by historical activity—its shape coincides with the seepage of character from each building's
core. The individual building is therefore essential to the overall character of the masque, and it is this
realm that occupies Hejduk from beginning to end in each project.

In the Lancaster/Hanover Masque, for example, components are treated as object and subject,
building and occupant—they are structures of steel, stone, flesh and blood.14 The combination of
drawing and biographical detail results not in a building waiting to be inhabited, but a building that is
a clear manifestation of occupancy. For example, The Time Keeper's Place is not an empty vessel nor
a vacant object, it is profoundly connected to its inhabitant. Hejduk condenses the relationship
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between house and housed by making it revolve around one tragic moment in the Time Keeper's life,
a moment which continually returns to him in memory and vision. The Time Keeper's Place—a Ferris
wheel with all but one seat removed—becomes an intense symbol of the inhabitant's silent, isolated
agony. Therefore, through this character driven isolation, this component resists being subsumed by
the urban fabric or appropriated as a public monument. Thus the Time Keeper's Place creates a rich
dialectic between separation and inclusion; the former through its close affinity to its inhabitant, the
later through its proximity with similarly distinctive structures. As a result, the masque as a whole never
manages to enable a reductive notion of the city. Jose Rafael Moneo agrees that "while they [Hejduk's
characters] may live in close proximity, they are inexorably isolated"1' and resist a Utopian drive towards
abstract space. Edward Mitchell's analysis of another of Hejduk's masques expresses a similar view:

...because of the obsessive nature of the objects and their respective characterisations...
Vladivostok appears to contradict the claim that it is a network.16

Clearly the supremacy of the plan is resisted by individual character, characters which Hejduk
determinedly distinguishes from each other.

This difficult relationship between separate components of the masque city is best exemplified by two
of Hejduk's most discussed pieces: The House of The Suicide and The House of The Mother of The
Suicide.1" Characteristically, each of these houses discourage welcome by theircompactness, suppressed
entrances, and excessively violent forms. Hejduk's notes state that the only door to The House of The
Suicide was welded shut after The Suicide's death, and the only other opening is a small eye-slit. During
his life, The Suicide saw but was not seen, he watched society but did not take pan in it. Detlef Mertins
goes so far as to suggest that this ultimately led The Suicide to take his own life:

Alone and isolated, the subject is no longerfiguredas a generator or producer of meaning and
reality; deprived of externalities this subject is left with only the possibility of death.'"

And, after his death, The Suicide is memorialised by a house that expresses the voyeurism and
confinement that outwardly characterised his life.
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Architectural Theory Review

The companion piece, The House of The Mother ofThe Suicide, is quite similar in form. Here another
eye-slit gives voyeuristic access to The House of The Suicide and further activates The Suicide's
objectification. However, as the built versions prove, this objectification is compounded when visitors
to the House of The Mother colonise her point of view. Our intrusion reduces human tragedy to a
novelty, to a pleasant experience of architectural function. The mother's grief and the son's neurotic
history—indeed the history of their relationship—is fetishised. This architectural pessimism recalls
Foucault's analysis of the panopticon, the ideal model of the modern prison. Foucault suggests the
panopticon functions "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures
theautomatic functioning of power."" This provides a "guarantee of order,"2" one which is established
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and maintained architecturally through entrapment, separation and surveillance. Certainly, Hejduk is
not interested in establishing order: as Mitchell states, the masques seem satisfied with the tenuous
unity established through "subsystems and affiliations" rather than any concrete, absolute order.-1
However, while Hejduk escapes traditional totalising ideals typical of the modernist urban plan, the
above examples imply that individual structures have an ordering tendency that is more difficult to
overcome. The Utopian fantasy of the purely functional city is more easily discarded than real problems
involved in marrying house and inhabitant. It is through individual buildings that Hejduk expresses his
concern about the distribution of power in society. Buildings translate subject as object; they make
character continually and materially present, and therefore encourage the objectifying gaze.

This antagonism between the reclusive inhabitants of Hejduk's cities may at first glance challenge the
possibility of place. Mitchell, for one, views "the citizen/subject as a nomadic character without the
property of name or place" describingone exemplary object as a "place that is by definition placeless."22
Therefore, Mitchell implies that the impossibility of conciliation implicit in Hejduk's isolation of
character precludes any possibility of establishing place on an urban scale. However, it is important to
remember that Hejduk's sense of place is more akin to Berger's notion of a living portrait' than it is to
any material sense of organisation. Hejduk's strong sense of characterisation lends itself to an
expressive (rather than scientific) portrayal—place is not a static location, it is a dynamic condition of
performance and contest. One piece from the Diary Constructions masque, a clocktower entitled The
Collapse ofTime, provides a particularly good clue to Hejduk's notion of urban place. The Collapse of
Time is portable, wheeled from place to place, from communal group to communal group, playing a
central role inritualsenacted by each. In Mitchell's sense it is placeless, but for Hejduk it indicates a new
concept of place—a place that occurs in the meeting of people rather than through the permanence
of their structures. This place requires a human rather than a material ordering of space. As David
Shapiro suggests: The Collapse ofTime "speaks against the reductive and false ways in which we divide
ourselves and time."23 Time bses its absolute status and becomes a domestic ritual; just as place
abolishes empty abstraction in favour of a peopled and distinct reality.
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Vol. 7 No. 2, 2002

Place and Technique

Hejduk's preference for place over space manifests itself as early as his nine-square and diamond plans
of the 1960s. In plans like his Diamond Museum C from 1967, the germ of Hejduk's dissatisfaction with
the modernist tradition is already becoming apparent. While his relationship to a Corbusian purism is
obvious here, he problematises the plan through the disconcerting junction of interior diagonals and
rectilinear boundaries, and the oddly flat axonometric. This tension between axes, angles and point of
view subverts the high resolution of the design tradition of modernist functionalism. Hejduk's drawing
technique transforms this tradition into a site for rigorous questioning. Critique and design merge as
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one; theory finds itself embedded in practice.

This questioning would soon lead Hejduk to abandon the supremacy of space established by modernist
functionalism. During the 1970s his designs become increasingly occupied with form. In the Seven
Houses Project of 1980 Hejduk begins to celebrate his communion with the pencil rather than with the
spaces that he is bounding. Creating a line becomes a mystical experience. He refers to his pencil lines
as X-Rays, images emerging from deep within himself.2' In Victims he claims: "[t)he architectural
tracings are apparitions, outlines,figments.They are not diagrams but ghosts."25 This reverence of line
rather than space is prophetic of his later approach. Markings represent affirmations, the expression
of his own character on the page, his personal overcoming of absolute and abstract space. By being
made numinous, Hejduk's lines signify not the creation of space, but the foundation of place.

This religion of the mark leads Hejduk to conceive the masques as phenomenal rather than technical
exercises. They are drawn expressionistically rather than mathematically; composed as traces of
experience rather than as objects of scientific purity. This process marries Hejduk to his subject and
reinforces his position as craftsman, a marriage disabled by more theoretical approaches. Hejduk's
communion with line demands freedom for his hand. His hand mediates for the imagination rather
than the eye. Through imagination he occupies the city—establishes the city's status as place through
that occupation—and communicates that status as form. From the moment he marks paper, Hejduk
becomes another occupant of the masque, a craftsman participating in the community rather an
architect deciding its future. Through this preference for communion over authority, "the speculative
and the practical, held apart in both the modern and the classical, are productively collapsed in
Hejduk's work." -6 This collapse of theory and practice is equivalent to a mutual presence of spirit and
action in Hejduk's drawing. Like ritual or prayer, Hejduk believes design "can express the ineffable,
which is ultimately translated as spirit."-'" But this is not spirit in a pious sense: Hejduk is not attempting
to reveal a morally pure or absolutely divine entity. The bleak temper of his masques could never allow
that. Spirit for Hejduk is quite simply a palpable human presence, real in all its foibles and graces, a
presence that needs to be revived from the suffocating entrapments produced by the urban dreamings
of modernists. Hejduk's task is to reveal this spirit rather than to build it. It is already present in the city,
despite being often hidden, and it is the process of revelation that is central to Hejduk's establishment
of place
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Architectural Theory Review

Place is a problematic notion for theory because it entails sustained, concrete experience. The
experience of place is not merely literal orempirical, it is felt—it is internal and external at the same time.
Place collapses time and space into living experience and, as an architectural concept, makes the
dualism of abstract space and speculation impossible. For Hejduk, place unites the physical and the
spiritual and therefore enables the fusion of design and concept. Hejduk's own external position is
overcome by the mystical act of drawing and by the introduction of more narrative genres into his work.
His designs are populated at the moment of their origin and they expand as characters mature and
multiply. Thus the architectural character of the city is utterly dependant on its inhabitants. Hejduk's
obsessive isolation of each inhabitant is an almost paranoiac response to the generalising and
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totalitarian habits of the modern architectural profession. Nevertheless, this resistance of Utopian
abstraction only communicates his notion of place more effectively to his audience, and thereby
emphasises the integration of architecture and life implicit in his work.

Notes
1 For more on this see Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
2 See for example, Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.
3 John Hejduk designed a limited number of built works, but his primary occupation between 1975 and 2000
was Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York.
4 Daniel Libeskind, "Stars at High Noon: an Introduction to the Work of |ohn Hejduk," in Kim Shkapich (ed),
John Hejduk, Mask of the Medusa: Works 1947-83, New York: Rizzoli. 1985, p. 9.
5 Stan Allen, "Nothing But Architecture," in K. Michael Hays (ed), Hejduk's Chronotope, New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996, p. 81.
6 John Hejduk, Victims, London: Architectural Association, 1986. (This text has no page numbers.)
7 While I link Hejduk and storytelling by the concept of craft, this link could also be shown to be more literal
by the peculiarities of Hejduk's methods. His poetry, drawings, and portraits of his characters all reveal
Hejduk establishing his position as storyteller, constructing a narrative, developing a plot—rather than
attempting to demystify his work by stripping the story away.
8 Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," reproduced in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 91-2.
9 Benjamin, "The Storyteller", p. 93.
10 John Hejduk, "Diary Constructions," in John Hejduk, The Collapse ofTime and Other Diary Constructions,
London: Architectural Association, 1987. (This text has no page numbers.)
11 John Berger, "The Storyteller," in John Berger, The White Bird: Writings by John Berger, London: Hogarth
Press, 1988, p. 16.
12 Berger, "The Storyteller", p. 16.
13 John Hejduk in "John Hejduk or the Architect Who Drew Angels: an interview with David Shapiro," in A+U
(Jan. 1991) p. 62.
14 The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, with its introductory list of characters and the buildings which house them,
is exemplary in its elaboration of the subjective and objective in individual elements.
15 Jose Rafael Moneo, "Ciphered Messages," in John Hejduk, Bonisa, New York: Rizzoli, 1987, p. 2.
16 Edward Mitchell, "The Nature Theatre ofjohn Hejduk," in K. Michael Hays (ed), Hejduk's Chronotope, p. 61.
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17 The House of the Suicide appears frequently in Hejduk's work but, in this instance, reference is made to its
appearance in the Iwicasler/Hanoter Masque (no. 59). The House of The Suicide and House of The Mother
of The Suicide have both been constructed by students of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
18 Detlef Mertins, "The Shells of Architectural Thought", in Hays. Hejduk's Cbronolope, p. 46.
19 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, p. 201.
20 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.
21 Mitchell, "The Nature Theatre of John Hejduk", p. 59.
22 Mitchell, "The Nature Theatre of John Hejduk", p. 59.
23 David Shapiro, "The Clock of Deletion: Time and John Hejduk'.s Architecture," injohn Hejduk, The Collapse
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of Time and Other Diary Constructions, (no page numbers).

24 Hejduk makes these claims often in his writings. See in particular John Hejduk, The lancasterlHanover
Masque, London: Architectural Association, 1992, p. 13, andjohn Hejduk and Peter Kisenman, 7Houses, New
York: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1980.
25 Hejduk, Victims, (no page numbers).
26 Allen, "Nothing but Architecture", p. 84.
27 John Hejduk, quoted by Howard Schubert in "Introducing Other Soundings'", in A+U (Jan. 1991) p. 75.