John Hejduk's Pursuit of an Architectural Ethos

Reflected, artistic practices and design-based research are drastically expanding fields within architectural academia. However, the interest in uniting theory and practice is not entirely new. Just a few decades ago, before a ‘death of theory’ was proclaimed, questions of architectural epistemology, of the language(s) of architecture, were indeed of profound interest to the discipline. This essay returns to and examines the investigatory practices of John Hejduk in an attempt to identify a poetic method asserting difference through repetition and primarily grounded in the medium of architectural drawing; a method which, when approached on a more general and conceptual level, might even have the potential to inform design-based architectural research today. The author argues that the conceptual framework of such a method is not a theoretical pursuit of logos, but more a matter of character – an embracing pursuit of an architectural ethos.