Indovinelli compositivi. Esercizi di John Hejduk per gli architetti del nuovo millennio

John Hejduk’s theoretical legacy is contained in a system of 6000 verses composed in reference to images of artworks by Holbein, Tintoretto, Ingres, Rodin, Hopper, and others that the architect kept in front of him while he was working. Though these images act as references, all iconographic clues are hidden. What remains is the structure of the verses and the distance they represent between poem and image, a distance that must be retraced by the reader who seeks to decipher the hidden references. The process is that of architectural design and the visuality of images. Indeed, the didactic vocation permeates Hejduk’s work and there is a strong analogy between poetry and the Nine Square Grid Problem that the architect always presented to his students as a puzzle to be solved, but with the unknowns reversed. In the Nine Square Grid Problem, the constraints, the grid, are placed at the beginning, while in the poem, they have to be discovered in hidden images. The encryption exercise is only an initial barrier. Reconnecting the poems to their respective images has another purpose, that of making their content accessible so it can retreat further into its inaccessibility, increasing rather than diminishing the sense of mystery which it is the work's task to preserve and nurture.