The ground is a datum, a plane of reference, but it does not ‘ground’ the house in place. I think already there is something animated about the stance of the Bye House-like a dancer planting herself on the floor just before lifting off. Nor is it floating above the ground as, for example, in the Farnsworth House or the Villa Savoye, Hejduk’s modernist precursors. Yet the house does not sit heavily on the ground. It’s just there, always a straight line at the base of the elevation, not unlike a model on a table. ![]() SA: What is strange and interesting to me is the very deliberate way in which Hejduk addresses the ground. The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence. Graphite and colour pencils on tracing paper on board, 203 x 206 mm. Bye House) project, combined plan and elevation, 1973. How do you see the house’s engagement with the ground and the horizon? Fig. The interplay between fixed, controlled geometries and moving, sinuous profiles are also heightened. A progressive, mysterious revealing, paired with a predominant sense of isolation is elevated by the presence of the landscape. The placement of the house on the lot also masks the inhabited rooms from the moment of arrival to the property. That separation mimics the threshold during the crossing of the wall. Despite the flatness of the ground, a gap between floor and roof slabs emphasizes a sense of suspension and detachment among the stacked volumes. ![]() Yet, it keeps the horizontal coordinates continuous from one side of the wall to another, so a horizontal by vertical opposition is maintained. Marina Correia: Among the variations we discovered in the landscape insertions, the one that appears to be most definitive for Hejduk (as later published in Mask of Medusa) shows the house centred on a topographic axis. Stan Allen: If the Bye House, as you have written, is about movement, procession, and the crossing back and forth across the threshold defined by the wall, how does this change when we look at the house in the landscape, in this very specific landscape? What follows is a conversation around that question, and the way in which seeing the Wall House in landscape profoundly alters our understanding of this canonical project. While assembling material for a recent lecture in honour of John Hejduk, architect Marina Correia suggested I look again at the relationship between Wall House Two and its proposed site. The house and landscape seen together make up a whole, and this synthetic whole provokes a new reading of Wall House Two. ![]() They established and re-framed views, and they created a dialogue between built form and the features of the site. Together, architect and landscape architect choreographed the approach and the gradual revealing of the house in the landscape. The house was designed as a residence for Bye, to be constructed on a plot of rocky ground in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Less often noted is the fact that Wall House Two-The Bye House-emerged out of an extended conversation with Hejduk’s friend and colleague at The Cooper Union, the landscape architect A. The free-standing wall marks out a virtual picture plane against which the push/pull of sculptural volume and attenuated movement can be understood. Like the Diamond projects that immediately preceded the Wall Houses, this is an abstract architecture in dialogue with painting-a ‘still-life architecture,’ to use Robert Slutzky’s term. ![]() In an axonometric drawing, there is no horizon to locate the viewer in space. The images most often reproduced-model photographs or Hejduk’s characteristic 90-degree projections-show the house as an intricate, self-referential object, floating in an expansive spatial field. In these projects, space pivots around the wall, which serves as a threshold between past and future, between movement and stasis, contemplation, and action, and between body and mind. The Wall House series is an unprecedented re-imagining of the space, form, and programme, of the single-family house. The series of Wall Houses designed by John Hejduk between 19 are widely recognised as a decisive moment in the evolution of late-modernist formal languages in the final third of the twentieth century. ‘Life has to do with walls we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Graphite and colour pencils on tracing paper floated on back mat, 876 x 1054 mm.
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