I wrote “Dear John” as a narrated text for Nuno Cera’s video titled “Symphony of the Unknown II.” Cera invited me to write about Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and, instead, or in-between, I decided to pay homage to John Hedjuk, one of my oldest sources of inspiration. The full text was later published in a book (Documenta, Lisbon, 2021).

Image Credits: Still image from Nuno Cera’s “Symphony of the Unknown II” featuring John Hedjuk’s Towers. Courtesy of the artist.

Krrr… bzzz… khhhh… bzzz… krrr…

As soulfilaments

released

from undersea

volcanoes

the moon became

an ellipse

before collapse

the flames of the sun

frozE (1)

Krrr… bzzz… khhhh… bzzz… krrr…

Dear John,

I climbed the clear tower as quickly as I could. Your words echoed in the immensity of the void, colliding with the undulating surface like omens. At this altitude, electromagnetic waves create sound mirages travelling through the vacuum. My vision is as stone in the light mirrors of the facets of your tower and the planes of glass of the masses that rise from the thick layers of the earth like giants roused from a deep sleep by hidden tectonic forces.

Peter [Eisenman] always explained this constructed mountain as the result of superimposing fragments taken from the natural landscape, from the world of symbols and from that other world of abstract thought that, despite being both brought together and distorted by computer models, create what he called the metaphysical nature of the site. This predates any manipulation and will resist the passage of time, even when this place is no longer inhabited and the weeds, sprouting vigorously between the flagstones, cover all of its surface and restore the once violated nature. Fragments and traces (in the Derridean sense referred to by Peter [Eisenman]) exist prior to the time of the form like echoes of a (collective and never lived) virtual memory that have been given new configurations between obtuse angles, sometimes disguised as sinuous curves, preserving in a latent form that power to produce allegories and similarities. Yet what I find here are those other forces that came before those of the medieval morphology of the old town’s narrow labyrinthine streets, pilgrim routes and the striated lines of scallop shells, produced by a subterranean wrinkling that, as it surfaced, was frozen in geometric planes with undulating torsos and sheer sides, where sky and earth are reflected like the last layers of that other age.

the stone sea shell

envelops a granite

window pane (2)

The form attempts to allegorically rebuild those tectonic forces of Earth’s formation and to restore the link between the natural landscape and its reinvented mimetic topography and the great eruptions of constructed mass that surround the sloping planes of glass, in which the landscape is duplicated. Yet simulacrum and simulation inevitably collide, producing instead this arid, strange landscape, reminiscent of some post-apocalyptic setting, where everything seems to simulate not nature but a sense of déjà vu.

Still image from Nuno Cera’s “Symphony of the Unknown II” featuring Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture. Courtesy of the artist.

The harsh, angular geometry consumes every plane, leaving only the crumbling edges of this no man’s land, which reveal, even now, the primordial topography and the composition of the ground, resisting. The mass emerged from algorithmic twists, tons of removed earth and colossal planes of excavated rock. The enormous scar is still partly open to the sky, concealed by a pool of water fringed with luxuriant purple wildflowers, like some corner of a never-built opera house

The convulsive design fills everything, reproducing itself through the external planes of glass in the negative spaces of the inner skeleton that supports them, and in the thresholds of occupation it establishes as it invades and contaminates the interior. The interior space becomes ever more fragmented between the bones (or structural grid) and the half-planes, stairs and sloping walls, distorting and preventing any single vision of the bodies that inhabit it, which themselves become fragments, filling the residual interstices and seeking an equilibrium that does not defy the laws of gravity. Contrasting with the horizontality of the exterior, the interior space moulds itself to this imposing verticality. In the library, for example, this allows a strange and serene light to enter from above, falling on the bookshelves, which create another imaginary topography on a lower level, enveloping the reading bodies. Above, the numerous lines of this topography appear to be duplicated, as if the sky were a double of the earth, or vice versa. Voices rise in the air – in this space too – while the sky descends to the earth. The junction of these two planes consists of an enormous void, a box of air or breathing space, underpinning the design that has been placed above our heads, while the melodic interweaving of the steel girders vibrate and sing in the immense void.

it is the absence

of a wall

that penetrates

figures perpetually whispered to be silent (3)

Dear John, what a joy to hear you through the radio interference.

When the sun sets, the constructed mountain disappears against a black backdrop, like the ruins of a civilization erected at the illusory height of the economic boom, demolished by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and only visible in the jagged outline of your towers: on one side, the opaque tower, whose rocket-like silhouette sets its sights on the infinite and, on the other side, the glass tower, disappearing against the backdrop to reveal its slender structure. I often discover the ideas of figure and ground, or positive and negative, in Peter [Eisenman]’s own work, but your towers are like Egyptian tombs, time capsules constructed to resist the destruction of civilizations. It was time itself that Peter wanted to build when he revived your project for one of the city’s parks on this site. In doing so, he crystallized not only your memory and the friendship between the two of you, but the persistence of time, once the image, revealed by the setting sun, is finally completed and only your towers remain.

The design was born in the past, in the enthusiasm once felt by a generation of architects for digital manipulation, from which the work will never escape, enduring in a between-times, in a future that was always past, a future robbed of what is to come. The city remains distant and the two fabrics will never mesh. On my walks, around what might be the sparse forest surrounding two stone giants, I meet no one. And if I shout at the wind, even the echo fades rapidly away in the immensity of the void.

The unspeakable must

fill our lungs

so that

in our exhalation

we blow and breathe

outward

an unearthly lamentation (4)

Notes

“The Hesitation of Orpheus,” John Hejduk. In Hejduk, John; Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953-1996. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, Writing Architecture, 1998, p. 2.
“Bacchus,” John Hejduk, Op. cit., p. 6.
“Bus Ride Through,” John Hejduk, Op. cit., p. 44.
“Victims II,” John Hejduk, Op. cit., p. 59.