The Half House was a masterpiece of architectural design penned by the architect John Hejduk
that was never fated to be built. But just because its not built out of wood, steel and
glass, doesn’t mean we can’t see what it would have been like to occupy or live
in. So, let’s explore the One Half House together.
Hey there, my name is Stewart Hicks and I’m an Associate Professor of Architecture at
the University of Illinois at Chicago where I teach lecture courses and design studios.
John Hejduk has to be one of the most influential architects at our school. You can probably
see a little of his work in every student project at UIC. Our director Robert Somol
is a devout disciple but almost everyone appreciates Hejduk uses shapes in rigorously geometric
but often very lively ways. Like they almost want to get up and walk around.
But the thing about John Hejduk is that most of his work lives only as drawings and models.
To make things even more difficult, he would often draw his buildings in ways that don’t
really give a sense of what it would be like to be inside of his designs. And to be clear,
that was part of his plan all along. He believed his flat drawings were an important means
to test architectural ideas and that it wasn’t necessary to walk through a building for it
to be architecture.
But, I want to walk through them anyway, so I decided to research one of his designs in
depth, and then model it in the computer for you and me to explore in a real-time walkthrough.
Better yet, I’ll leave a link in the description below for you to explore the building yourself
on your phone, tablet, or computer, without any software needed.
So, without any further ado, let’s dive into the One Half House starting with its
timeline.
Timeline The One Half House was designed by the Architect
John Hejduk in 1966 and was never built.
John Hejduk was born in 1929 in New York and would live to become arguably one of the most
important architectural educators of the 20th Century.
He went to school at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, the University of
Cincinatti, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. At Cooper Union, Hejduk
lists Robert Gwathmy, an artist the father of the architect Charlie Gwathmey, as an important
influence on his work. Teaching him important lessons about drawing and the abstract essence
of form.
After graduating from Harvard, he received the Fulbright fellowship to study in Rome.
Upon returning the United States in 1954, Hejduk was invited to teach at the University
of Texas at Austin, where he joined Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky and others as one of
the so-called “Texas Rangers.” -- recruited by Josef Albers not to “ train a student
to stimulate spiritual and intellectual growth, to develop intellectual faculties and to enable
them to grasp the meaning of architecture.”
Other members of the Rangers include Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, among others. The
curriculum developed here would shape architecture ever since with its focus on drawing and design
through what would be termed the 9-square-grid problem.
After leaving Texas he would work at IM Pei and Partners among some other firms before
beginning his own in 1966.
In 1964 though he began teaching at his alma mater, the Cooper Union where he would eventually
become dean in 1975 and maintain the position all the way until the year 2000 when he passed
away from cancer. And in this capacity he trained some of the most influential architects
alive today.
He would also become part of a group of architectural intellectuals called the New York Five that
were exploring ways of including historical elements in their designs during the 1970s.
But back in 1966, we are at a very early stage of Hejduk’s career but toward the end of
a particular thought process. Hejduk developed his ideas for the Half House after following
a ideas from a series of 9 square grid house designs. Here he was experimenting with rooms
that interrelate across the center. Then there’s a series of rotated square houses called the
diamond houses where the boundary edge of the house dissolves. After that the wall houses,
arranged around a giant wall.
And here we have the one quarter houses, half houses, and three quarter houses. Each defined
by a collection of simple shapes that are cut down by the amount their name implies.
Analysis The half house design was developed without
a client. Its almost purely an exercise driven by a personal architectural inquiry and therefore
it is not reacting to external influences like a budget, or a site that would put pressure
on the design. Its the result of John Hejduk working through a persistent recurring problem
like an artist such as Josef Albers who would paint the same shapes over and over studying
them in different conditions.
And oh boy, does Hejduk know his geometry geometry. The name of the house comes from
the use of half shapes, a square, a circle, and a diamond, which is, of course, a rotated
square. The shapes are sized so that the circle would fit in the square and the diamond would
fit in the circle so that they all nest together. However, in their placement in the house,
they are connected through a linear hallway.
Program isn’t actually arranged by the shapes, its more distributed by height. The entry
sequence begins way out at the corner of the site and follows a path down the center of
the building and the ground floor is all private with the bedrooms. Then you go up a core of
vertical circulation and the second floor holds the kitchen living room and dining/piano
room. And the third floor is a roof deck.
The roof decks feature objects that are made in the shapes that they sit on. So on the
half-circle, there is a circular skylight as a negative circle. There is a ¾ circular
room pavilion, and a ¼ circle chair. This motif continues for the square and the diamond
as well.
The
shapes are then composed in a very precise arrangement within an overall grid that is
9 bays by 9 bays whose size is determined by the walkways.. So, there is a nine-square
grid in there, but some of the lines are more distinguished than others. One other thing
I noticed is how the diamond is arranged so that if you extend its wall, it would be tangent
to the circle.
Each shape is structured with an internal frame with columns that are the same shapes
as their overall home. While the nine square geometry governs the overall geometry, a four
square breakdown governs each shape and since its only half of the shape, we only see two
of the four squared.
Construction Making the one half house in the computer
is pretty straightforward starting with the plans and working our way up. Hejduk also
made a number of three dimensional drawings for us to calibrate how the building would
have been extruded up into space.
The overall grid that governs the project is very useful for getting the model into
the computer. I think its important to note that this would never have been modeled in
the computer as part of the design process, that’s because it was designed before 2d
or 3d drawing programs. However, there were some physical models made that provided us
with even more information work from.
However, due to the fact the building was never built, various areas change from drawing
to drawing depending on when it was done. For instance, the main Stair in the middle
wasn’t always drawn the same. Is really the most important part because it is where
the three elements come together.
Walkthrough As expected, entry into the one half house
is highly scripted and your view is controlled as we pass through the tight hallway. You
notice the openingn and then turn down it where we’re given a glimpse into the diamond
shape but a wall gets in our way as we approach the house.
Entering into the first floor seems closed off and this theme of turning 90 degrees or
even turning all the way around along your path really sets in to become the norm.
Shapes coming together.
Bedrooms are quite private and outward facing.
Curvature of the wall diving away from us.
As we explore, I really
get the sense that each shape has its own personality. The square is always closed off
to us and open to the outside. Its also the most spacious and interior elements align
with its orientation. The diamond, on the other hand, is completely open to the interior
and closed off to the exterior. Its interior is tight and objects are rotated inside of
it making it awkward and cramped. The half-circle is in between the other two. It offers glimpses
of its interior from the hallway and then opens up as you go deeper into it.
Second floor - pushed left to the dining table which is exposed.
Piano room really opens up to us.
Roof is still very enclosed and almost crowded with shapes and volumes. Park or a landscape
of objects to be encountered. You also really experience the frame and columns as different
with their own shape. Elsewhere the frame is really presented, but here its liberated
as a separate element.
Takeaways The One Half House is rigorous in a way that
only an unbuilt house can be. The geometry remains perfect and doesn’t need to contend
with the variables of the built world. For instance, it has very little space for storage.
Walking around it, I was really surprised how much I could feel the personality of each
shape as being different and unique from the others. Each one is carefully crafted to have
its own relationship to the occupant and to each other. If you had told me that from the
plan, I wouldn’t have been able to see it right away.
Anyway, I think the one-half-house is a masterpiece in exploring geometric rigor and complex relationships
and I hope you enjoyed exploring it with me. Please leave your thoughts about the One Half
House in the comments below. I’d love to hear what you think about it, if you agree
or disagree with what we came up with. Also please give suggestions of other lost architecture
that you’d like to see built in the computer and explored.
While you’re doing all that, give the video a like and subscribe to the channel for more
content like this and stay tuned for more lost architecture! See you next time.