The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of the voided center in John Hejduk's architecture and to identify his architectural contributions to his time. This study attempts to reveal the architectural significance of the voided center by analyzing the New England House (1979) in which the voided center has been employed for the first time as an architectural concept, and then interpreting its meaning in the Lancaster/Hannover Masque (1982-1983). Interpreting the meaning of the voided center as ‘keeping center under the state of emptiness’, i.e., ‘establishing void as center’, this paper suggests that the void generates an uncanny affect that de-centralizes the subject of space in the New England House, and that the void as nothingness reveals the abyss of existence in the Lancaster/Hannover Masque. This paper arrives at the following conclusion: “collapse of space” intended in the Wall House (1968 - 1974) and which figured as an outcome of Hejduk's early works extends, through the concept of the voided center, to a “collapse of (individual) existence” and eventually to “collapse of the (actual) world” in his Masques, the pinnacle of his later work.
This paper argues that Hejduk’s architectural contributions lie in an authentic program which he created to confront himself with his time by employing the concept of the voided center, and takes it as a two-fold task: examining the voided center in order to employ it as a basis for architectural exploration in our time, and explicating the notion of “architecture as fiction,” arguably the most important architectural legacy which Hejduk left to us. The first part is the subject of this paper; the second part remains for future research.
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