Acropolis, now!
philosophy and the dialectic force of bringing opposite terms face to face. There is a parallel between the opposing elements of fire–water, sulphur– mercury, sun–ocean and the pairs of conceptual poles nature–culture, rational–irrational, machine–life, Apollo–Medusa, orthogonal–organic, vertical– horizontal, architect–engineer, day–night: reciprocally drawing value from their opposition, they sustain the duality in which Le Corbusier’s discourse moved.16 Le Corbusier was an important and influential figure throughout John Hejduk’s career. This is certainly true for that period he was associated with the so-called New York Five and the work that is exemplified in the Bye House and Wall House investigations, and continues through to the end of his career in less overt but equally significant expressions. The Unité represents a unique and unexamined case of this influence, and one that I believe is crucial in understanding the formal sources of Hejduk’s masques and of their relation to the masques’ alchemical ambitions. It begins with one of Hejduk’s largest building commissions: the renovation of the Foundation Building at the Cooper Union. The original Cooper Union Foundation Building was begun in 1853 and completed six years later; a forerunner of the modern skyscraper, it was widely acclaimed in New York for its innovations and design. In 1974, Hejduk completed a remarkable and prescient renovation of the interior space within the shell of the original building. At its time, it was one of the most complex construction projects in the United States because the historic shell had to be raised and preserved to accommodate the addition of a 6th floor within a previous five-floor structure. In Hejduk’s renovation, the ground floor of the building introduces you to a lobby occupied by a grand stair surrounding a round elevator shaft leading up to the second floor and facing the entrance to the library itself resting atop “The Great Hall.” The library and various others parts of the building appear to be inhabited by several object/figures, including several Corbusian fragments. At every floor the elevator shaft sits like a mute, obese figure too large for the column grid encaging it – in fact the whole renovation is placed within a structure that now appears to exist independently of the building shell that, barely, contains it. Journeying up the round elevator tower, you reach the roof and then pass through a small hallway, flanked by two square windows that create a play of reflections of the windows upon each other and the view to Manhattan that they provide. You arrive in the faculty meeting room and are confronted by a huge translucent clock face exceeding the height of the room and thus demanding that the ceiling of the room somehow accommodate it. From the center of the clock stems a thin steel rod linking the clock face with a machine (the clock mechanism) perched on squat anamorphic 323