John Hejduk, Diamond Museum C sketches, c. 1962, Fig. 1
For the chapter entitled Encounter from his book, Architecture’s Desire, Haye’s discusses the concept of spatial compression via Hejduk’s sketches for the Diamond Houses (Fig. 1). To put it more clearly, “This compression of deep space onto a flat elevational surface is homologous with both the picture plane onto which the perspectival space of the Renaissance is projected.”[1] There is a beautiful ambiguity which surrounds this concept as illustrated through Hejduk’s sketches. If the most basic ‘making of space’ can be done through the joining of two walls at right angles, then the square becomes the most primitive condition of architecture. When this space is constructed isometrically, the diamond serves as the governing shape- making it prior to, or more primitive than the square.
When looking at Hejduk’s sketch, one realizes that multiple readings of space occur depending on their perception. If one perceives the closed corner nearest to them in perspective, they are seeing the space differently from if they perceive that same corner farther from them. In these cases, space is moving in projection and recession. This ambiguity in spatial movement creates an event. Hejduk based the possibility of event upon the moment in which the space is perceived between projection and regression (repose and tension) and is once again collapsed. He called this pivotal point the “moment of the hypotenuse.”
For the percept itself is located on the crease in time between the past and the future. “It is a beautiful distance,” he decalres of the space and time seen backward and forward from this plane. “As you go back into space it gets into deeper perspective, it gets less clear and you can never really complete it, because that’s the unknown, it isn’t fixed. so it gets darker. as you get to the present, it’s clearer. on the plane of the present is that horizontal armature, which is the hypoteneuse; you just speculate on futures[1]
[1] Ibid.
[1] K. Michael Hayes, Architecture’s Desire (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2010), 92.
