Through an exhibition and an installation, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture proudly celebrates the work of 1950 Cooper Union graduate, architect and Dean Emeritus, John Q. Hejduk.

 

The exhibition Hélène Binet - John Hejduk Works presented seven of Hejduk's built works as photographed by Hélène Binet, a renowned London-based photographer who was Hejduk's photographer of record. Binet's photographs of both permanent and temporary structures were presented, including the Berlin Tower, Wall House 2, The Collapse of Time, Security and Object/Subject. The exhibition also included a chronology of the numerous realizations of Hejduk's design for the Jan Palach Memorial, which was permanently installed in Prague in 2016. Comprised of two structures - House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide - this work honors the Czech activist and dissident Jan Palach, whose self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 served as a galvanizing force against the communist government then in power.

 

As a companion to the interior installation, the School of Architecture installed the Jan Palach Memorial on the plaza outside The Cooper Union's Foundation Building. These structures, first constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1990, represent an architectural manifestation of a powerful socio-political act, the ultimate personal sacrifice at a critical moment in the ongoing global struggle for individual freedom against autocracy and centralized control.