A Loft, Aloft: John Hejduk at The Cooper Union: Text by Gary Fox

A Loft, Aloft: John Hejduk at the Cooper Union 19/10/16 19:39
A Loft, Aloft: John

Hejduk at the Cooper
Union
Text by Gary Fox
John Hejduk. Sketch, Cooper Union

Foundation Building renovation, c.
1970. DR1998:0136:001
http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/issues/20/the-other-architect/40312/a-loft-aloft-john-hejduk-at-the-cooper-union Pgina 1 de 12
LOFT SPACEon his personal

letterhead, among thumbnail sketches for a
reimagined Cooper Union, John Hejduk
jots the phrase in his characteristic all-caps
pen.
CITY ON THE HILLelsewhere on the
page, Hejduk pens this phrase in a similar
hand, the words askew, almost as if
performing their meaning. Hejduks city,
circa 1970, was a take on John Winthrops
1630 city upon a hill, a metaphor calling
upon the future British colony at
Massachusetts Bay to serve as a beacon of
morality. The eyes of all people are upon
us, the Puritan professed, referencing the
Sermon on the Mount. A trope of political
oratory well into the twentieth century,
Winthrops metaphor provided politicians
on both the left and the right with a
convenient shorthand for American
exceptionalism, alluding to the countrys
self-appointed role as democratic exemplar
on the world stage. But Hejduks
exceptionalism was not of the moral or the
nationalistic sorthis was of the
architectural variety.
Hejduk had graduated from Cooper Union

twenty years earlier, in 1950, and returned

there to teach in 1964. By the following
year he was the Head of the Department of
Architecture, and by 1970 he had begun a
redesign of the schools brownstone
building. Wracked with structural issues
and fire-code compliance problems, the
building was reduced to a shell: It was
decided, Hejduk writes, to take most of
the buildings insides out and put a new
building inside.1 An armature of vertical
trusses outside held the shell upright,
leaving Hejduk just about free to construct
his city on the hill within.
John Hejduk. Axonometric, Cooper

Union Foundation Building renovation,
c. 1970. DR1988:0088:014
Already a National Historic Landmark, the

sawn-off wedge of a building presented a
fundamental planimetric challenge: no two
sides of the four-sided building are parallel.
To negotiate this formal constraint, Hejduk
devised a dual system of orthogonal grids,
one nearly twice the density of the other.
The smaller grid, with its origin at the

buildings southeast corner, organizes the
schools administrative offices and public
circulation spaces; the larger, with its origin
at the buildings northwest corner,
organizes the schools workshops, studios,
laboratories, libraries, and classrooms. At
no point do the systems align. Instead the
grids collide at an obtuse angle, with their
collision marked by a thick boundary
establishing the threshold between public
and private, between exhibition and
instruction. Atop the composite grid
system, Hejduks language of abstraction
materializes in white plaster and grey tile:
piers mark grid points and partitions
suggest lines, all while the odd curvilinear
panel defies any sense of rectilinearity.
John Hejduk. Plan, Cooper Union
Foundation Building renovation, c.

1970. DR1998:0088:003
John Hejduk. Axonometric, Cooper

Union Foundation Building renovation,
c. 1970. DR1998:0088:005
Writing of the redesigned building in his

retrospective Mask of Medusa, Hejduk
remarked simply, Its a teaching device.
Hejduks building was to be a pedagogical
instrument, and in that role not unlike his
better-known teaching device, the nine-
square problem: And the students are
here, working on that problem within this
building, which is an example of that
2
problem.2 Caught in a pedagogical mise

en abyme, students at Cooper Union were
to benefit from a building conceived as an
object lessona beaconof architectures
possibility, as much as they were to benefit
from lessons taught within.
Hejduk is better known for the latter of

these pedagogical strategies. In an effort to
expand the disciplines toolkit, Hejdukas
Head of the Department from 1965, as
curricular Chairman in 1968, and as Dean of
the School of Architecture from 1975
recruited a cast of eminent poets,
playwrights, filmmakers, literary critics, and
novelists to lead seminars, studios, and
workshops at the school. Far less
frequently noted is the fact that among
these new hires was a robust lineup of
experimental psychologists, sociologists,
and cyberneticians, contributing in equal
measure to this critical expansion.
Prominent among these was John Zeisel, a
sociologist who promoted the use of
observational studies in research and
taught a seminar entitled Behavioral
Science in Architectural Practice in the late
1970s. Hejduk also hired the researcher
Allen Wallis to teach the two-semester
course Introduction to Environmental

Psychology and an elective, Planning of
Community, which dealt with theories in
the social sciences which attempt to
account for community behavior and
predict or control its changing character.
During the same period, the empirically
oriented Modern Classics in the Social
Sciences replaced World Literature as a
required course in architectures core
curriculum; the electives Socio-
Technological Studies, Psychology:
Learning and Behavior, Psychology of
Intelligence and Creativity, and Social
Psychologywhich foregrounded
experimental research on heredity and
the environmentcame in later years. The
likes of the psychologist Judith Sills, the
cybernetician Ranulph Glanville, the
parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, and
social researchers Sharon Garman
Pavlovich, Leo Kaplan, and David Koch led
3
courses at Cooper. All were committed to
a notion that behaviour was radically
dependent on the environment.
This sort of positivist behaviourism is not

typically associated with Hejduk. His
interest in psychology is well established,
to be sure, but that interest was more

clearly of the Freudian sort, often revealing
itself in forms of narrativity, unconscious
affiliation, and participatory fiction. On his
personal letterhead, Hejduk collides these
epistemological frameworksthe
psychoanalytical and the behavioural.
The CITY ON THE HILL is a Freudian

dream; registered amid sketches for a new
building, the dream alludes to a romantic
yet colonial fiction, recurrent yet repressed.
At first blush, LOFT SPACE appears
incongruous. But in the immediately
preceding years, New York artists had
begun to colonize disused loft spaces in
neighbouring SoHo, a practice which was
later legally enacted with the artist-in-
residence zoning law of 1977. In his 1970
compendium to Coopers redesign, Hejduk
argued that industrial loft spacedear
to the hearts of architects, planners, Peter
Cooper buffs, and anybody who is
continuously amazed by the foresight and
ingenuity of the Nineteenth Century
problem solvers and visionaries
promised the possibility of unlimited
versatility necessary to accommodate
4
the organic nature of a school. The
building was emphatically not a

monument but rather a loft uniquely
capable of promoting a new model of
5
educational openness. Increasingly a
signifier for creativity in this period, the loft
as a type was not simply a space in which
creativity happened but also a space that
was thought to produce creativity itself.6
Nothing if not an allusion to the kind of
behavioural possibilities that Wallis and his
colleagues were advancing, the words
LOFT SPACE sitting at the edge of the
page stand in for the idea that architectural
form might be congruent with its moral
effect, that the building might be an
instrument to make a certain type of
individual out of its user. LOFT SPACE
makes the CITY ON THE HILL possible.
In Hejduks hand, the Cooper Union

building becomes a beacon for the
possibility of architecture to condition
behaviour. As if to literalize this sort of
behavioural exceptionalism, Hejduk
sketches a fantasy city atop the building,
never to be realized. If the excess of pen
deposited there is any evidence, Hejduks
rhetoric translates directly to ink. Ink
translates to built form, and built form
translates to behaviour. This is Hejduks

dream.
Gary Fox was here as a PhD candidate for a research residency in

summer 2016.
1 John Hejduk, [untitled chapter], in Schools of Architecture, ed.

Bart Goldhoorn (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1996), 12.
2 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 19471983 (New York:

Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 1985), 70.
3 Ulrich Franzen, Education of an Architect, a Point of View

(New York: MoMA, 1971); John Hejduk, et al., eds., Education
of an Architect (New York: Rizzoli International Publications,
Inc., 1988); Ulrich Franzen, Kim Shkapich, and Alberto Prez-
Gomez, Education of an Architect: a Point of View the Cooper
Union School of Art & Architecture 19641971 (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1999); Cooper Union Course Catalogs and
Course Descriptions, Cooper Union Archives.
4 John Hejduk, Cooper Union Renovation Project, 1970, 3.
5 Ibid., 1.
6 Sylvia Lavin, Creative Space, Seminar, University of

California, Los Angeles, Winter 2014. See also Sharon Zukin,
The Creation of a Loft Lifestyle, in Loft Living: Culture and
Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press),
5881.
Canadian Centre for Architecture

1920, rue Baile Montral, Qubec H3H 2S6 Canada
www.cca.qc.ca

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A Loft, Aloft: John Hejduk at the Cooper Union 19/10/16 19:39

A Loft, Aloft: John

John Hejduk. Sketch, Cooper Union

LOFT SPACEon his personal

Hejduk had graduated from Cooper Union

twenty years earlier, in 1950, and returned

John Hejduk. Axonometric, Cooper

Already a National Historic Landmark, the

The smaller grid, with its origin at the

John Hejduk. Plan, Cooper Union

Foundation Building renovation, c.

John Hejduk. Axonometric, Cooper

Writing of the redesigned building in his

problem.2 Caught in a pedagogical mise

Hejduk is better known for the latter of

course Introduction to Environmental

This sort of positivist behaviourism is not

to be sure, but that interest was more

The CITY ON THE HILL is a Freudian

building was emphatically not a

In Hejduks hand, the Cooper Union

translates to behaviour. This is Hejduks

Gary Fox was here as a PhD candidate for a research residency in

1 John Hejduk, [untitled chapter], in Schools of Architecture, ed.

2 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 19471983 (New York:

3 Ulrich Franzen, Education of an Architect, a Point of View

4 John Hejduk, Cooper Union Renovation Project, 1970, 3.

6 Sylvia Lavin, Creative Space, Seminar, University of

Canadian Centre for Architecture

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