Drawing Parallels by Lucas Ray;

Author:Lucas, Ray;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

5.3Making present

Figure 5.1 is from John Hejduk's 1991 work Thoughts Upon an Uccello Painting16, part of the Soundings series of works. Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) made use of three-point perspective as early as the mid-1440s, laying the groundwork for later developments in this form of representation.

Figure 5.1John Hejduk, Soundings: Thoughts Upon an Uccello Painting, 1991; ink on paper 22 × 28 cm; DR1998:0129:076, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

The drawing is notable in that it includes two angles for the presumed upright elements: conventional 90° angles in the upper and lower third of the composition, with the central section setting the vertical lines to 45°; a further constellation of objects on the right of the page maintain their 90° orientation throughout. This combination of different forms of parallel projection in a single drawing is typical of Hejduk in this period, but it would be a mistake to think of these as mistakes or as sloppy draughtsmanship. The shift is deliberate and consistent within the drawing. One option is to understand the drawing as a single convention—a flat, frontally oriented axonometric drawing looking from top down; then the form takes on a curious character, sharply angled in the central section of the form. There are various mental exercises which the viewer can engage in, to extract a form which would conform to a single set of projection rules (see figure 5.2).

The second option is to accept that the form is drawn in more than one convention: Elements which begin in with 90° verticals retain that convention, so the cylinders which originate below the line of the shift maintain their internal consistency. Hejduk is making himself present within this drawing, the hand is clearly autographic, not the clinical coolness of the Texas Houses, but a proposition which relies upon the scratchy hand-drawn lines and frantic cross-hatched shading.

This is consistent with the poetic turn in Hejduk's work; by placing himself at the centre of the works, he is underlining some of the aspects of personal discovery at the heart of his oeuvre. The projects increasingly represent processes of inquiry, ways of finding out about the world, and these increasingly abandon any attempt at universality. Instead, Hejduk comes to realise that his architecture is always both relational and personal, operating at one level to explore fundamental aspects of being through his own encounters with the world, and making use of common myths and understandings in order to allow others to access a little of his insights. These encounters generate further knowledge, and are not static.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.