Tuesday, August 8, 2017

[Updated] So long to those spiky structures outside Cooper Union


[EVG photo from March]

Workers today started to disassemble the representations of John Hejduk's pair of architectural structures, "the House of the Suicide" and "the House of the Mother of the Suicide," that honor the Czech dissident Jan Palach.


[Photo by Lola Sáenz]


[Photo by Lola Sáenz]

Hejduk, a Cooper Union graduate, was the founding dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union.

Known as the Jan Palach Memorial, which was permanently installed in Prague in 2016, this was the first public exhibition (via Cooper Union and the Department of Transportation) for the recently revamped Cooper Square plaza.

These were part of a month-long exhibit featuring Hejduk's work that started in March. The sculptures were expected to remain up through June 11.

Given how challenging they were to erect, maybe Cooper Union decided to keep them here longer.

Here were details from Curbed about the project from a post in March.

Over two weeks the Cooper Union team, using power tools and socket wrenches, assembled 400 pieces into both sculptures. They used a wooden yoke to carry each of the 98 spikes onto the roof of each structure, which is 12 feet off the ground. The spikes — which weight about 100 pounds a piece —then project another 12 feet into the air. The framing of both sculptures is made of cedar timber, while the spikes are made out of sheet metal welded together.

Updated 8/9

An EVG reader shares these photos from this morning ... showing what remains...






14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, thank you, THANK YOU, for taking those away! Finally, my sensibilities will not be assaulted by them every time I walk by them.

Gojira said...

Wait, so now where is Danaerys gonna sit after she takes the Iron Throne?!?

Anonymous said...

To each his own .. John Hejduk was a genius and the work is incredible.. I only hope that someday you make something incredible that will inspire so many.. but you probably won't

Anonymous said...

Art should always challenge one to think deeper, and that is how I reacted to the Hejduk pieces. I hope Cooper Union continues to use the outdoor space to exhibit large scale works by current and former faculty. I hope one day they do something with sculptures by Paul Thek who was one of my teachers when I attended Cooper. If these pieces annoyed Anon@5:30 PM, they I consider them successful.

Anonymous said...

"make something incredible that will inspire so many.."
inspire to what?
suicide?

Anonymous said...

Ugly, ugly, ugly. The only thought they provoked was "when are they gonna get rid of these things?"

Anonymous said...

I will need to speak about this to my therapist tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

Even pigeons didn't want to land on them never mind look at them.

Anonymous said...

The only thing challenging about these things was how to maneuver around them. I would have said that they destroyed the beauty of the urban landscape, except for the fact that the Cooper Square renovation project already took care of that for all eternity.

Anonymous said...

Bart Simpson's hair has left the room....

Anonymous said...

I liked the sculptures, but similar to 10:16, I found them oddly / poorly sited.

sophocles said...

I thought they were interesting pieces once you knew the backstory: a student in Czechoslovakia self-immolates to protest the Russian invasion; one house is the student, ablaze, the other is his mother, looking on. When they set up the pieces you could open a small door to enter the Mother and look at the Son through a slit. I assume Hedjuk designed it that way and it had more meaning when you could interact with the houses. They locked the door before anyone could move in.

Anonymous said...

I appreciate art but was never a fan of these. Aside from being in the way, I didn't like their energy. Every morning I leave my house: suicide. Every night I come home: suicide. Not only suicide, but the deep darkness of a mother overlooking her dead son. I don't require cheerful art but these were a bit much for that location.

Carol from E. 5th St. said...

They were ugly. Looked like two bad haircuts.