Learning from A.E. Bye and John Hejduk: Reseeing the Bye Wall House as Landscape
Rouse Gallery, Pennsylvania State University | 2015
Collaborators Thaisa Way, Eberle Family Special Collections Library, Students from the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Architecture
Trees (X)
The exhibition explores the unique synthesis of landscape and architecture in the "Wall House," the home that architect John Hedjuk designed for landscape architect A.E. Bye. The exhibition draws on archival materials in the A.E. Bye Collection of the Eberle Family Special Collections Library and field research that re-discovered the rocky outcrop in Connecticut that was the site for the house. Wall House is widely known for Hejduk’s drawings which represent the house as an autonomous, site-less, investigation. This exhibition challenges scholarship of the project and, instead, demands that it be considered as a site-specific landscape developed in collaboration with Bye, whose site plan (drawn by Ted Ceraldi) was re-discovered in the archives.
Wall House 2 (A. E. Bye House) is the second in a series of projects that John Hejduk began in the mid-1960s to explore what he called the "first principles" of architecture. Designed for the landscape architect Arthur Edward Bye in 1971, it investigates the wall as the original architectural device. Wall House 2 reinterprets the traditional configuration of a house: instead of being enclosed within one shell, rooms and circulation systems are physically isolated from each other. Kitchen, dining area, bedroom, and living room are stacked in curvilinear volumes, linked vertically by an independent circular stair and connected to a study by a corridor. The wall—which Hejduk sets between the rooms and the circulation systems, so that one has to pass through it to move from one room to another—becomes a line of passage, a boundary. A palette of yellow, green, black, brown, and gray reinforces the division of function, corresponding respectively to the energy of cooking, the nourishment of dining, the dark of night, the earth of life, and a realm of reflection.
