OBJECT/SUBJECT

John Hejduk
OBJECT/SUBJECT
John Hejduk

1. Subject & Object in Schopenhauer

2. Hejduk’s architectural objects as a machinery of subject construction
3. The Philadelphia Object/Subject
SUBJECT & OBJECT
IN SCHOPENHAUER
 Object: Building as an inanimate and passive entity
Object/Subject
in building
Subject: Building as an animated, active and conscious entity.
“For philosophers, the distinction between
subject and object is broadly concerned with
understanding human experience by
considering what exists (objects) and how we
(subjects) perceive those objects to exist.”

Jane Anderson and Colin Priest

 1
Descartes
Mind/Body

2
Kantian
Noumenon/Phenomenon

3
Schopenhauer
Inter-dependance
 ACTIVE OBJECT - PASSIVE SUBJECT

Body (res extensa): Object that fits neatly with subject’s individual empirical experiences.
Descartes Dualism
Mind (res cogitans): Subject that observes the object and can influence it.
 PASSIVE OBJECT - ACTIVE SUBJECT

Noumenon: Object as it is in itself.

Kant Dualism
Phenomenon: Object as it is perceived by subject’s epistemological capacities.
 Sensible Intuition: Time & Space
Kant
Trascendental
Subject
Conceptualisation: Categories
“The subject doesn’t cause the object and
the object doesn’t cause the subject.
They are inter-dependent.”

Arthur Schopenhauer
 Subject: That which knows all things and is known by none
Schopenhauer
Object: That which is known
The world as idea consists of two essential and
inseparable halves. One half is the object, whose
form consists of time and space, and, through these,
of multiplicity; but the other half is the subject.

But let this single individual vanish, and the whole

world as idea would disappear. Each of these
halves possesses meaning and existence only in
and through the other, appearing with and
vanishing with it.

Arthur Schopenhauer
“Object and subject are indelibly conjoined
in a dialectical relationship. They form part of
each other while not collapsing into or being
subsumed into the other[...].

John Tilley
HEJDUK’S ARCHITECTURAL OBJECTS AS A
MACHINERY OF SUBJECT CONSTRUCTION
 1. The Wall
Object/Subject
2. The Character
John Hedjuk, Wall House II, 1974
“The viewing subject of architecture is not
just the observer of an object focused as an
image and arrayed before him or he on the
plane of perception.”

Michael Hays
 John Hedjuk, Wall House II, 1974
(The wall operates behind the scene of encounter in between subject and object)
“The Wall is all-encompassing”

“It is an expanding universe. It is emanating

from a center; it is an explosive center”

“And you are not just looking at it: you are in

it, you become an element of an internal
system of organisms”

Michael Hays
[subject’s formation]
“Rather, the subject is also produced by the
architecture, in the moment of encounter,
inasmuch as the architecture [...] exerts a
defining, identifying force back on the
subject, and in the same vertical plane.”

Michael Hays
 Character - Ethos

Fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people,

corporation, culture, or movement
 1. Related to the aesthetic appearance, legibility and surface of an edifice.
Character according
to Dalibor Vesely
in architecture
2. Related to the depth of architectural reality through inexhaustible layers of meaning. (1970)
 1. Masks permits someone to become someone else.
2. Mask protect and shelter .
Hejduk’s Mask (1980)
3. Masks are like houses (architecture).
4. Masks blur the identity of a person by establishing a new character.
The animistic, anthropomorphic, or
architectonic, Hejduk's troupe of
Object / Subjects is composed
largely of archetypal forms
“Hejduk’s embodiment of the subject/object
duality in gendered and spiritualized
architectonic figures takes the question of
human divideness out of philosophy and
places it in the world of artifice”

Michael Hays
 Quatremere de Quincy’s types
(evoques classicism’s authority)

vs

Hejduk’s types
(Redeem types from its authoritarian vocation)
John Hedjuk, Security, 1989
“Hejduk objects seem, impossibly, to be
aware of us, to address us. And yet we see
not the gratifying reflection of ourselves we
had hoped for but another thing looking back
at us, watching us, placing us.”

Michael Hays
John Hedjuk, Jan Palach Memorial, 1974
 Hejduk’s Object/Subject

Ambiguities between architecture and its inhabitants

THE PHILADELPHIA
OBJECT/SUBJECT
John Hedjuk, Object/Subject, 1974
John Hedjuk, Object/Subject, 1974
“To look around these two tall structures equals
the quiet sensation of reaching a place where
architecture is beyond its role of being only a
physical shelter for man. In looking at the two
structures we are certain that inside there is
a part of ourselves.”

Meton R.Gadeiba