Among the merely 25 built works by John Hejduk that are listed in the wall text of “Hélène Binet–John Hejduk Works” at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery of the Cooper Union, where Hejduk was dean of the School of Architecture, the Jan Palach Memorial appears four times. Among Hejduk’s signature installations and handful of residential buildings—seven of them on exhibit, moodily photographed by Binet, to whom Hejduk was a muse—this singular project has had more than one life. In its latest incarnation, the two pavilions that constitute the memorial are installed, until June 11, at the tiny park south of Cooper’s Foundation Building in downtown Manhattan.
One of the pavilions is a nine-foot-square, 12-foot-high cuboid topped by an array of 49 12-foot-long obelisk-like spikes, gridded and splayed along one plan axis. It began as The House of the Suicide, one of many such structures—The House of the Prisoner, the Sower’s House, the Balloonist Unit—in Hejduk's circa-1985 Hanover Square Masque drawings. With the addition of a neighboring, near-duplicate structure, The House of the Mother of the Suicide—featuring the same spikes aligned upright, each cut with a tiny skylight where an obelisk would yield to its capping pyramidion, plus a low door, high window, and an interior altar-like platform—Hejduk reconceived the project as a memorial to Czech student Jan Palach. Palach died in January of 1969—in protest of the aftermath of the post-Prague Spring 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—by setting himself on fire.
The memorial’s first life began in in 1990. After a years-long fabrication process, overseen by Georgia Institute of Technology faculty member and architect Jim Williamson, it was installed in an atrium at that school’s Atlanta campus. After five years there, and a few more in storage, it was placed in 2002 into the sunken garden under the entry bridge at Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A long-term loan sent it to Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture, which after failing to find a more permanent site returned it to Georgia Tech in 2014—whence, in March of 2017 it reincarnated to Cooper Square. Meanwhile, other incarnations were built in Prague: a temporary version at Prague Castle in 1991; and a permanent version—the Suicide in stainless steel and the Mother in Cor-Ten steel—at what was once Red Army Square by the Vltava River in 2016. There are ironies. A memorial, which we think of as a single and solid object transcending the fleeting changes of life, has in this case an elusive multiplicity, appearing and disappearing from unexpected sites. While from Hejduk’s drawings we might imagine it in stone or iron, its materiality is mostly stagecraft: over a cedar timber-framed base, its visibly bolted-on walls are glue-and-sawdust fiberboard and flaking veneers; its stonework-evoking incisions, like the spikes above, are profiles of lightweight steel—like so much snipped tin. And there is the question of whether the reductive word Suicide, in the names of the two structures, accurately but only incompletely describes Palach’s political action.
Hejduk’s melancholy whimsy, his efficient solemnity, his visible piety, his latent classicism and piano-curve modernism, and especially his taste for tidy isometrics—are all newly and deeply fashionable among the coolest architecture students and faculty I know. At Cooper Square, something timeless about the complex simplicity of the Jan Palach Memorial makes the bombastic conceits and flourishes of Morphosis Architects’ neighboring 2006 School of Engineering look instantly obsolete—a reminder of how uneven a steward, since Hejduk’s own unimpeachable 1975 renovation of the Foundation building itself, the Cooper Union has been of its contemporary campus. But the memorial animates and enlists nearby similarly-scaled structures like Tony Rosenthal’s 1967 Alamo sculpture and the reproduction Beaux-Arts subway kiosk at Astor Place.
At Cooper Square, the memorial structures have a way of looking as if they have been there forever. They have a quality of inevitability and—if you don’t think too much about that glue and sawdust—gravity. It may be that this is what cool young architects are drawn to, in our disembodied and turbulent age. And to be sure, in Binet’s nocturnal and lunar photographs, Hejduk’s work—medieval ox carts, Victorian engines, Mycenaean ruins—look like magical manifestations.
And yet, for us architects, the most poignant documents on exhibit—not in the gallery proper, but pinned up nearby to supplement the installation of the memorial outside—are reproductions of all the working drawings, deeply annotated, that all those different incarnations required: a wobbly esquisse inked on a lined pad by Hejduk, a marked-up blueprint by Williamson, a marginal sketch in a letter, a circled question about nesting birds, a diagram converting Hejduk’s whole-number Imperial dimensions into inscrutable increments of millimeters, successive re-namings of details: all these, the tender duties of architecture, are a reminder of the human hands behind so many things that we often imagine happen by themselves: construction, conflagration, commemoration.
