Wall House II

Located in Groningen, Netherlands, the Wall House II or the Bye House is one of the few realized designs to which the renowned American architect John Hejduk owes his fame. The residence was initially designed in 1973 for Ed Bye, a landscape architect and fellow faculty member at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City, to be built in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The plans were abandoned due to concerns over the cost of the building until a Groningen-based development company, Wilma, took special interest in the project and decided to fund the construction at 2,500 square feet. It was not until the unexpected death of John Hejduk in 2000 that construction on the house began.

The Wall House II

In contrast to traditional dwelling houses, this design has an enormous wall as its central feature, comprised with four organic-formed rooms and a long, narrow corridor. As an extraordinary intersection of Cubist painting, Surrealist sculpture and architecture, the Wall House II is one of the designs to which the architect John Hejduk owes his fame.

The Building

Constructed in the southernmost section of the new Hoornse Meer neighborhood, with a view across the lake Paterwoldsemeer, the Wall House II stands out with its exceptional appearance. As completed, the building is a structure of reinforced concrete for the wall and columns, with a steel-framed corridor, wood stud walls, and a stucco exterior. Organized around a central axis of horizontal and vertical plane, its three-dimensionality allows for experiencing the spaces. Accompanying these, a two-dimensional plane disconnects but at the same time groups the functional spaces which appear separate from one another while emphasizing the poetic nature of the residence. Use of light colors encourages visual distinction between volumes, which are accessible by means of a spiral staircase that sits at the backside of the wall. Dividing the space, the wall appears to be freestanding through the careful design of Hejduk, as it is supported with a glass connection to the volumes.

Entering the house, a flight of stairs leads to the study, kitchen and dining room, all biomorphically shaped spaces with much character. The first floor contains a bedroom, and the top floor holds the living room. Each volume appears to be cantilevered, but in actuality the floating masses are supported by a grid of columns. This adds to the dramatic design of Wall house II, as the large wall becomes symbolic, not structural.

The Wall House idea was a natural continuation from the earlier housing series by Hejduk, in which he accentuated the necessity of the wall to act as a free standing tableau and emphasized the symbolic meaning of the wall in human life as a toke of present and neutral state.

“Life has to do with walls; we're continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the element we're always transgressing… The wall heightens the sense ofpassage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the “present.”

Hejduk underscored how the element of time is brought to a standstill in the fleeting but extremely emotional experience of ‘passing through something.’ The wall embodies the neutralizing state between other experiences of time: past and future, which are embodied in a specific program and materialization to the rear and the front of the wall respectively. The past is fixed in the utility core and collective spaces containing bathroom, scullery, staircase and elevated corridor with closed and geometric forms. The future corresponds to the everyday living program that is vertically subdivided into separate rooms for sleeping, eating and living, designed as biomorphic volumes. The difference is further emphasized by the color scheme: colors on the rear side are more subdued than those at the front.

The fact that the house is to be painted colors relates mainly to Hejduk’s experience in Le Corbusier’s La Roche House in Paris, where he spent several days last year installing an exhibition of his own work. “After that experience,” he says, “I could never do another white or primary-colored house.” In the La Roche house, the colors “were hardly apparent at first, but after you were there awhile you saw not only that they changed constantly, but that they were delicate and muted, and also saturated at the same time.”

From a distance, the Wall House looks like a still life tipped on its side, a tableau d'architecture on which various three-dimensional volumes are arranged. Even though a cursory glance at the drawings shows an obvious reference to the vocabulary of Le Corbusier, especially in the construction techniques and in the freed walls and bands of windows, it might be more accurate to seek the deeper influences within the broader view of the Cubist movement itself. The house is essentially a piece of Cubist sculpture. Every element is detached from every other element; each is exposed, analyzed, and clarified in and of itself. While this exposition maintains throughout the structure, from every angle, the integrity of the overall composition remains intact.

History

It is virtually without precedent that a house is constructed posthumously exactly as intended by the architect, 28 years after it was designed, on a different continent, and for a different client. Hejduk had originally designed the Wall house II in 1973 (the first was done in 1968) for landscape architect A.E. Bye, whom he had known for over 10 years as a fellow faculty member at New York’s Cooper Union. Due to the high estimated costs of construction in the wooded area, the project was put on hold. Passing from potential client to potential client, it was always being dropped before the beginning of construction due to lack of funding.

In 1990 the project was introduced in Groningen on behalf of the unique experiment “Making the City Boundaries”. On the basis of Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan - a virtual map of the city, called the Books of Groningen – people from various disciplines were asked to design signposts along the city’s most important arterial roads and thus tell the history of the city’s identity and boundaries as an integral whole. The selection of Hejduk was logical in the light of Libeskind being a former student and an admirer.

The realization of the Wall House II is a result of a convoluted process that was brought to successful conclusion by the efforts of Niek Verdonk, Groningen’s director of city planning, and Olof van de Wal, the head of Platform Gras, a city-sponsored architectural group. For 11 years Verdonk and Van de Wal remained committed to constructing this extraordinary design, even as one potential client after another fell through, until Wilma BV Developers and Kamminga estate agents were prepared to assume responsibility for the construction and sale.

The Berlin architect Thomas Muller was appointed as project architect. He was then working in Groningen under supervision of Kleihues, and as a former student at Cooper Union shared personal affinity with Hejduk. That was no sinecure, because the design makes light of every classic construction principle, and its realization proved to be extremely labour-intensive. Due to building codes and construction techniques-which required, for example, leaving space between the wall and rooms for hand plastering-the house was enlarged from its original size, to 2500 square feet. Thomas Muller redrew the plans with Derk Flikkema of Otonomo Architects in Groningen, with Hejduk reviewing the drawings in each phase up until his death. The construction cost was $600,000 in total, and it was sold with a proviso that the public can visit it one month a year.

Architect

John Hejduk was an American architect, artist and educator, Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1975 until his retirement in 2000. He was an architect who largely abstained from conventional practice, and the bulk of his work consisted of theoretical projects, executed in the form of drawings that were combined into poetic, often highly personal narratives. Hejduk is noted for his use of attractive and often difficult-to-construct objects and shapes; also for a profound interest in the fundamental issues of shape, organization, representation, and reciprocity. His influence on his students and others was also profound. His former students, some of today's most imaginative designers, include Daniel Libeskind, Elizabeth Diller, Shigeru Ban and Toshiko Mori.

For Hejduk, dwelling is a universal subject that touches the very core of human existence. On account of his fundamental pursuit of renewal and purification, the emphasis in Hejduk’s earlier work is on the investigation of the historic avant-garde of the early 20th century.

His interest in the roots of Modernism lay also behind the spontaneous creation of The New York Five in 1969 with Hejduk as one of them. However, from the beginning Hejduk more or less chose his own direction. From the mid-1970s his work started to display an increasingly personal and narrative character. The mobile objects (and personages) in Hejduk’s masques and their virtual journeys, reveal the mobile character of architecture as a counterpart of the intrinsically nomadic nature of human life.

Within his oeuvre, the Wall house II is an important reference and turning point. It condenses earlier, primary two-dimensional studies for houses into an autonomous building that derives its organization and form from the physical and symbolically charged presence of the wall. Through its urgent appeal to the spirit, and the meanings held secret in it, the Wall House simultaneously introduces themes that would take center stage in Hejduk’s later work. The emphasis here is on the nomadic, temporary nature of our existence and the ‘impossibility’ of architecture proposing a permanent solution for the way of life that this existence entails.

Commentary

Hejduk’s work stands in direct contrast to ‘normal’ architecture because of his fascination with the genesis of symbols, with the autonomous, self-referential thought, and with the ways in which this can manifest itself. As in the Wall House, Hejduk translated the ambiguous nature of human life and behavior in an architecture that as a whole is subject to a constant shifting between immobility and travel. In that sense, the Wall House could be a reflection of an existential dilemma wherein habitation itself has become problematic, owing to the fact that it is not living or life itself, but also the way of one thinks about it, that exhibit signs of displacement.

Hejduk always couples the term ‘habitation’ with the degree of ‘uninhabitability’, something that in turn refers to isolation and loneliness. The wall of the Wall House gives these two notions a spatial equivalent and architectural sensitivity. However, thanks to its thinness, literal and symbolic, the house’s wall simultaneously offers an escape to “somewhere else,” to an alternative. Thus, besides affording isolation, the wall affords solace or, as Hejduk describe it, deliverance or reconciliation.

According to Hejduk, people still need to learn how to live and dwell. It is a question of a continuous testing of one’s own possibilities and limitations, and this applies for the architect as well as the inhabitant. The staging of this architectural and existential challenge on the banks of Groningen’s Hoornse Meer constitutes part of the social contract as Hejduk put it:

“It is essential that the architect create works that are thought provoking, sense provoking, and ultimately life provoking. Or more precisely, giving life, to what appear to be at first inanimate materials. The architect enters into the social contract in the deepest sense. To search for human qualities and human values which give spirit.”

This social contract, into which-beneath the architect-enters a whole range of actors (city planners, politicians, commissioners, investigators, builders, future inhabitants,) has been of crucial importance to the fabrication of the Wall House.

References

• Wal, O. and Wolff, A., Wall House #2: John Hejduk in Groningen. Groningen: Platform GRAS, 2001.
• Hejduk, John. Mask of medusa: works 1947-1983; ed. by Kim Shkapich. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1985.
• Martin, Marijke. “Hejduk's Wall House #2 realized in Groningen.” Architecture and Urbanism 375 (2001): 102-09
• Sveiven, Megan. "AD Classics: Wall House 2 / John Hejduk" 06 Feb 2012. ArchDaily. Accessed 07 Oct 2012.

http://www.archdaily.com/205541

• Gorlin, Alexander. “Wall House, Groningen, the Netherlands.” [sic] Architectural Record 189 (2001): 150-53