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Located in Groningen, Netherlands, the Wall House II or the Bye House is one of the few realized designs to which the renowned American architect John Hejduk owes his fame. The residence was initially designed in 1973 for Ed Bye, a landscape architect and fellow faculty member at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City, to be built in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The plans were abandoned due to concerns over the cost of the building until a Groningen-based development company, Wilma, took special interest in the project and decided to fund the construction at 2,500 square feet. It was not until the unexpected death of John Hejduk in 2000 that construction on the house began. In contrast to traditional dwelling houses, this design has an enormous wall as its central feature, comprised with four organic-formed rooms and a long, narrow corridor. As an extraordinary intersection of Cubist painting, Surrealist sculpture and architecture, the Wall House II is one of the designs to which the architect John Hejduk owes his fame. == The Building == Constructed in the southernmost section of the new Hoornse Meer neighborhood, with a view across the lake Paterwoldsemeer, the Wall House II stands out with its exceptional appearance. As completed, the building is a structure of reinforced concrete for the wall and columns, with a steel-framed corridor, wood stud walls, and a stucco exterior. Organized around a central axis of horizontal and vertical plane, its three-dimensionality allows for experiencing the spaces. Accompanying these, a two-dimensional plane disconnects but at the same time groups the functional spaces which appear separate from one another while emphasizing the poetic nature of the residence. Use of light colors encourages visual distinction between volumes, which are accessible by means of a spiral staircase that sits at the backside of the wall. Dividing the space, the wall appears to be freestanding through the careful design of Hejduk, as it is supported with a glass connection to the volumes. Entering the house, a flight of stairs leads to the study, kitchen and dining room, all biomorphically shaped spaces with much character. The first floor contains a bedroom, and the top floor holds the living room. Each volume appears to be cantilevered, but in actuality the floating masses are supported by a grid of columns. This adds to the dramatic design of Wall house II, as the large wall becomes symbolic, not structural. The Wall House idea was a natural continuation from the earlier housing series by Hejduk, in which he accentuated the necessity of the wall to act as a free standing tableau and emphasized the symbolic meaning of the wall in human life as a toke of present and neutral state. “Life has to do with walls; we're continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the element we're always transgressing… The wall heightens the sense ofpassage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the “present.” Hejduk underscored how the element of time is brought to a standstill in the fleeting but extremely emotional experience of ‘passing through something.’ The wall embodies the neutralizing state between other experiences of time: past and future, which are embodied in a specific program and materialization to the rear and the front of the wall respectively. The past is fixed in the utility core and collective spaces containing bathroom, scullery, staircase and elevated corridor with closed and geometric forms. The future corresponds to the everyday living program that is vertically subdivided into separate rooms for sleeping, eating and living, designed as biomorphic volumes. The difference is further emphasized by the color scheme: colors on the rear side are more subdued than those at the front. The fact that the house is to be painted colors relates mainly to Hejduk’s experience in Le Corbusier’s La Roche House in Paris, where he spent several days last year installing an exhibition of his own work. “After that experience,” he says, “I could never do another white or primary-colored house.” In the La Roche house, the colors “were hardly apparent st first, but after you were there awhile you saw not only that they changed constantly, but that they were delicate and muted, and also saturated at the same time.” From a distance, the Wall House looks like a still life tipped on its side, a tableau d'architecture on which various three-dimensional volumes are arranged. Even though a cursory glance at the drawings shows an obvious reference to the vocabulary of Le Corbusier, especially in the construction techniques and in the freed walls and bands of windows, it might be more accurate to seek the deeper influences within the broader view of the Cubist movement itself. The house is essentially a piece of Cubist sculpture. Every element is detached from every other element; each is exposed, analyzed, and clarified in and of itself. While this exposition maintains throughout the structure, from every angle, the integrity of the overall composition remains intact. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wall House II」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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