Adjusting foundations

About this book

This provocative combination of inventive and deeply personal drawings and writings explores the dynamic relationship between the still life of the painter and the work of the architect. Renowned architect John Hejduk asks, "If the painter could by a single transformation take a three-dimensional still life and paint it on a canvas into a natura morta, could it be possible for the architect to take the natura morta of a painting and by a single transformation build it into a still life?". Hejduk presents a series of rich watercolor paintings, each cubist in spirit, each an assemblage and celebration of color and form. These explorations give birth to sixty-one project proposals, including serpentine structures, secret spaces, and houses constructed of horizontal and vertical mazes. Simultaneously investigated are the relationships between Eastern thought and the Western world (in terms of Hejduk's own intellectual and visual journey from the West to the East), art and architecture, and humans and nature.