6. “The elevator brought you up one of the five towers,” I’ll explain, “and now, we’re standing in the central tower.” You’ll look around the square white room, roughly six by six meters. Plain black carpet. Mostly unadorned.
7. “Hejduk was the architect. ...
15. I’ll try and remember this quote by Hejduk: “I cannot do a building without building a new repertoire of characters, of stories, of language, and it’s all parallel. It’s not just building per se, it’s building worlds.”
16. Building worlds.
17. You may be surprised that for someone of his stature, Hejduk built relatively few buildings. (Less than a handful.) However, he was prolific in other ways.
18. I’ll gesture for you to follow me. “We’re in one of the walkways between the big tower and one of the smaller towers.” It’s just 70 cm long, and about 50 cm wide. “Notice. Windows on both sides.” You will feel like you’re also floating somewhere between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. You will feel tiny and also immense because Berlin slices right through this anti-room.
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32. “Today, luxury living has come to mean expensive finishes, furnishings, bathroom taps, and ‘exclusive views.’ Things to display. This has come at the expense of any kind of original idea on how to live.” For Hejduk, the antithesis is the case. All the material finishes in this building are humane but basic, suitable for social housing. Linoleum. Square white tiles. Cheap grout. “The luxury Hejduk offers is a radical rethinking of the plan of a house or an apartment. Its received principles of sense. He forces you to inhabit through invention.”
48. I’ll then take you to the last part of this tour. We’ll have to go up the spiral stairs, which is inside the cylindrical tower, the fifth and final one. The view up and down the tower is a dirty realist Vertigo. “It’s always cold. It doesn’t want you to be inside it for long.” I’ll whisper to you that “I am convinced these stairs link heaven to hell.”
49. We’ll climb the industrial ladder to the roof.
50. Here, you will see the plan of the building, naked. You’re inside the drawing. The individual square and rectangular and cylindrical shapes connected by short bridges. Instead of carpet or linoleum, here you stand on large, smooth, grey pebbles. “It feels like a private Japanese garden.” You’ll nod.