In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: On John Hejduk’s Texas Houses

John Hejduk’s Texas Houses are a set of drawings for seven houses executed in graphite pencil 8H and 9H between 1954 and 1962. All the houses are variations on the ‘nine-square grid’, a design methodology that Hejduk used as a didactic device in his teaching at the University of Texas, Austin and later at Cooper Union. Hejduk conceived of the series as an effort to comprehend basic principles in regard to “architectural commitment.” In 1980, Peter Eisenman curated an exhibition of these drawings at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IUAS) in New York and produced a small catalogue. For this publication, Eisenman penned the essay “In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions,” a formal close reading of Hejduk’s houses, which is republished here. This essay can be considered one of the most intense and rigorous examples of close reading in architecture. Originated in literary criticism, close reading consists in the careful interpretation of a text in which its formal characteristics are described in detail. In his approach to architecture, Eisenman embraced close-reading to suspend the more commonplace aspects of architecture — use and program — in order to focus on what he called work on language. The republication of this essay is a teaser for a book that Pier Vittorio Aureli and Michael Robinson Cohen are preparing on John Hejduk’s houses, focusing on the period from 1954 to 1974. This body of work represents one of the most important reflections on the nature of architectural form.