Abstract
Directly influenced by Colin Rowe’s essay “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947) and the Warburgian art historical tradition, John Hejduk’s nine-square grid studio exercise had an ambiguous relation to the instrumentality of architectural history. When the nine-square grid exercise was copied in many architecture schools around the world as a first-year studio project, initiating the novice student in the realm of architectural composition, the pedagogical interpretation of its relation to architectural history varied. This paper questions the relational model of architectural history to practice in the nine-square grid exercise, and subsequently investigates the reuse and reinterpretation of the exercise at the Versailles school and at Ghent University in the 1980s. It proposes a reading of the survival and return of this diagrammatic figure in studio pedagogy and villa architecture in the late twentieth century by reckoning with the history of its self-referentiality and the temporality of lateness.
Highlights
Influenced by Colin Rowe’s essay “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947) and the Warburgian art historical tradition, John Hejduk’s nine-square grid studio exercise had an ambiguous relation to the instrumentality of architectural history
When the nine-square grid exercise was copied in many architecture schools around the world as a first-year studio project, initiating the novice student in the realm of architectural composition, the pedagogical interpretation of its relation to architectural history varied
An important question in the late 1970s was to what extent history can serve as a toolbox for architectural design, as illustrated by a symposium held in Cincinatti in 1980 called “History in Architectural Education.”[1]. At that symposium, John E
Summary
Influenced by Colin Rowe’s essay “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947) and the Warburgian art historical tradition, John Hejduk’s nine-square grid studio exercise had an ambiguous relation to the instrumentality of architectural history. This paper questions the relational model of architectural history to practice in the nine-square grid exercise, and subsequently investigates the reuse and reinterpretation of the exercise at the Versailles school and at Ghent University in the 1980s It proposes a reading of the survival and return of this diagrammatic figure in studio pedagogy and villa architecture in the late twentieth century by reckoning with the history of its self-referentiality and the temporality of lateness. The new historicism, and the loss of faith in modernism’s anti-historical stance had radically changed the way architects and their students viewed the instrumentality of architectural history He distinguished three directions from among the diverse approaches: a comeback of history in architecture, with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction (1966); a flourishing of the history of architecture — Manfredo Tafuri’s Theories and History of Architecture (1968) is an evident candidate; and history for architecture. Colin Rowe’s Palladinized Miesianism Rowe did not invent or even teach the nine-square grid exercise at the University of Texas School of Architecture, he did play a crucial
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