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Writing Architecture #5
Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953-1996
The poems of an architect whose affection for urban reality and imagined space is as evident in his writing as in his buildings and drawings.
The poems of John Hejduk are almost nonpoetic: still lives of memory, sites of possessed places. They give a physical existence to the words themselves and an autobiographical dimension to the architect. Architect Peter Eisenman likens them to "secret agents in an enemy camp." Writing about Hejduk's poems in 1980, Eisenman observed, "Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire's writings on Paris were often more real than the experience of Paris itself. Both drawing and writing contain a compaction of themes which in their conceptual density deny reduction and exfoliation for a reality of another kind: together they reveal an essence of architecture itself." This is the first comprehensive collection of Hejduks poems to be published outside an architectural setting.
The poems of John Hejduk are almost nonpoetic: still lives of memory, sites of possessed places. They give a physical existence to the words themselves and an autobiographical dimension to the architect. Architect Peter Eisenman likens them to "secret agents in an enemy camp." Writing about Hejduk's poems in 1980, Eisenman observed, "Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire's writings on Paris were often more real than the experience of Paris itself. Both drawing and writing contain a compaction of themes which in their conceptual density deny reduction and exfoliation for a reality of another kind: together they reveal an essence of architecture itself." This is the first comprehensive collection of Hejduks poems to be published outside an architectural setting.
- GenresArchitecturePoetry
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 11, 2016
The poems by John Hejduk were fine, but the introduction by David Shapiro was just awful. Jargon-filled academic-speak that waffled on and tried to sound important; the work would have been stronger without it. For example:
* His last masterpieces are his most simple, yet still oracular, in the sense in which Gershom Scholem said Walter Benjamin spoke always with a grammar of revelation.
* In these elegiac houses, Hejduk discovered himself as a wild original of the American anti-sublime.
* If one challenges the normal architectural historian about the lack of subtle critique to date of this giant’s work, one usually finds that the critic is lacking in the vital synaesthetic sense that would respond to these fused exercises in spirit.
* His fecundity is principled, and these poems stand as rather condensed illuminations of a vaster terrain of building and thinking.
Sure, it's an intro to a book of poems so perhaps there's some room for pretentiousness, but it's really over-the-top.
* His last masterpieces are his most simple, yet still oracular, in the sense in which Gershom Scholem said Walter Benjamin spoke always with a grammar of revelation.
* In these elegiac houses, Hejduk discovered himself as a wild original of the American anti-sublime.
* If one challenges the normal architectural historian about the lack of subtle critique to date of this giant’s work, one usually finds that the critic is lacking in the vital synaesthetic sense that would respond to these fused exercises in spirit.
* His fecundity is principled, and these poems stand as rather condensed illuminations of a vaster terrain of building and thinking.
Sure, it's an intro to a book of poems so perhaps there's some room for pretentiousness, but it's really over-the-top.
August 8, 2007
Not a great poet, maybe, but interesting to see what a practitioner of another art form (architecture) does in the genre. Preface by David Shapiro.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews