The question has been often raised but rarely resolved: is architecture an art? Architects and writers have tended to respond more according to their wishes than to their judgement and experience in practice.
The practice of architecture has mutated endlessly over the course of some millennia, and many thinkers have contributed to these changes in reconceiving the discipline in line with their interests. Since the Renaissance theorists have trained architectural discourse away from the technique of building and towards aesthetics, a shift that gave rise to the idea of architecture as an extrapolation of art rather than of construction. This is seen in Le Corbusier’s integration of the visual themes of Purism in his work, and more recently in Eisenman’s theory of formal operations drawing from rigorous analysis of modern abstractionism.
There are arguably on one hand many architects who choose to think that what they practise is a form of plastic art. It is seen as part of their role to elaborate a visual or sculptural language for their projects, in the same way a painter develops an identifiable style. On the other hand are architects who treat their discipline as a sober profession with social obligations similar to those of a doctor or lawyer, concerned with function, programme, the life and activity within their buildings, and who believe that their colleagues have distracted themselves from these responsibilities.
Neither camp would seem yet to have appreciated the possibility of an art form within architecture, not a plastic art trading in space, light, masses and surfaces but one that takes our primary subject matter—the activity within a project—as its creative medium. That is, that the architectural artist’s philosophical and creative energies are trained towards manipulation of the patterns of movement and interaction within a building, not manipulation of the construction itself.
The visual concerns of architecture should be understood as arising not from an artistic programme but from a social one—ultimately, a complex of cultural expectations and the organisational demands of the building process. The formal appearance of a project should be elaborated not by our artistic impulses but by our social and technical sensibilities, and our artistic intentions, should they be appropriate, should be developed and expressed through the medium of activity.
Architectural Art
Architecture is not an art form; it is a social practice evolved from the human inclination to build. A definition of architecture must appreciate the diversity of roles fulfilled by architects throughout society; this totality could not be considered an art except in a romantic or metaphorical sense.
Nevertheless the work of a certain subset of architects can be identified as a form of Art in the most critical, contemporary and literal sense of the word. These are artists who use the medium of architecture to stimulate our perception in fundamental ways.
However, these artists are not to be thought of as plastic artists in the same bag as sculptors or painters. Just as we would not confuse a plastic artist with a performing artist, or with a writer, we should not confuse an architectural artist for a plastic artist. These four kinds of artists each communicate their intentions through fundamentally distinct media, and seek to arouse vastly different domains of our perception.
A writer uses a verbal medium to address our perception of human character and its relationships with the outside world. A plastic artist exploits the immediacy of our visual and sensorial perception to influence our internal psychic world of images.
Architectural art, on the contrary, is not a plastic art and is essentially not concerned with visual or sculptural expression. Pure architectural art is concerned solely with the structuring of human life, with the patterning of human interactions and activities. Its most direct aim is to influence our perception of our lives themselves, and the social frameworks and institutions we conduct ourselves within.
The architectural artist’s fundamental medium is not buildings, nor its forms and masses, but nor is it space, nor light, nor materials, nor any other of the thematic preoccupations of contemporary modernism. As simply as we can say that the plastic artist’s medium is imagery, and the writer’s medium is language, we can simply say that the architectural artist’s medium is activity. “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of human interaction and movement,” to paraphrase Le Corbusier.
(It is in fact to quote the architect Alexander Koll paraphrasing Le Corbusier, discussing the matter over a beer before the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de León.)
For the Philips Exeter Library, in undertaking to reconstitute the idea of a library from first principles, Louis Kahn chose as its origin the series of activities it consists of. Rising in to the atrium, being presented with the entirety of the collection, taking a book from the dimly lit shelves and moving toward one’s place in a window to read it; this sequence of movements was collected into a ritual that underpinned the complete design.
This reconception of the library based on its patterns of movement was repeated more recently in the project for the Seattle Public Library. But whereas Kahn created the library around the individual user, OMA/REX re-evaluated the movements and activities of the institution as a whole. Stable, familiar activities such as book stacks, administrative offices and meeting rooms were teased apart from the unstable, more innovative activities of the contemporary library like community spaces and technology interface zones. The stable and unstable were placed in distinct containing forms allowing each to evolve and expand without compromising the utility of the other.
In their project for Paris’ Parc de La Villette, OMA divided the fifty hectare site into thin parallel strips each containing one of the various thematic gardens, sports fields or activity centres required by the brief. Distending the programmes in this way such that they are perceived in close juxtaposition with others rather than as discrete foci allows the ensemble of the park to be seen as a broader societal instrument beyond our individual interactions with it, and provides a structure in which to dynamically reconfigure this instrument. A pétanque strip might be replaced by a science park or market gardens as the city’s demographics shift over time.
This is a kind of proposition that bears no relationship to what are considered architecture’s traditional media of space, light, form or materiality. It is one expressed almost solely through the medium of activity, and as such might be viewed as a pure work of architectural art.
For the Saishunkan Seiyaku dormitory, Kazuyo Sejima organised the building plan to intensify the surreality of communal life in this environment where the Japanese cosmetics company trains its all female staff full time for their first year of employment.
Each bedroom is screened with translucent glass from the common living space, in which ranks of washbasins and toilet cubicles alternate with kitchen benches and dining tables. Showers and traditional baths are reached by a bridge flying over this central space, making an awkward parade of a normally private routine. The material qualities of this building are, like so many of hers, white steel and glass to neuter its physical properties and concentrate all critical meaning of the architecture upon the activities of its inhabitants.
The contemporary art forms
Just as architectural artists form only a subset within the wide scope of architectural practice, similarly only a small number of works of architecture may also be classified as works of art. This is not a value judgement but a distinction based on the intentions of the work. We might say that the Philips Exeter and the Seattle Public Libraries are works of art, whereas the British Library or the Library of Congress are not. The distinction is similar to that between writing and literature – some writings are works of literature, while others are expressly intended as works of journalism, non-fiction, scripts, text books, etc.
However, architectural art also needs to be appreciated as a subset of our contemporary art forms. To understand the scope of these, hazard the definition that art is the aestheticisation of the objects of play.
Play is an instinctive behaviour, how we naturally explore our surroundings, learn about new things and discover new ways to exploit them. The things that we manipulate are the objects of our play. As we develop our intellectual faculties, the objects of our interest move from tangible things to more abstract, less immediately defineable phenomena.
At some point a mental trigger changes our relationship to these objects and motivates us to reorganise or reconstruct them in a more meaningful way. Aestheticising an object in this way gives rise to the works and practice of art.
In the highest forms of this activity, what we might call the contemporary or critical forms of art, this process of aestheticising and of asserting meaning to an object are governed by the desire to express precise philosophical sentiments through the transformations carried out.
At the centre of play is a deliberate opening up of our senses and the channels of perception in our minds, a conscious receptivity to learning. An artist is a master at observing this process; the mental act of playing with an object, the object in return playing on the mind – these games of perception are the artist’s domain.
All human interactions – with the physical environment, with other people, within social groups – reside ultimately in mental activity, and are thus all modulated by filters of perception. Our faculties of perception tend to differentiate themselves according to the general classes of these interactions.
So we have tools for seeing, for interpreting our spatial environments, inferring meanings from visual cues, for noticing things in advance and preparing for their approach, from all of which develops a dynamic library of imagery within our minds. We have tools for communicating, to talk to and to coordinate with other people, to appreciate tone and body language, to interpret and convey underlying emotions, ultimately to manage our place in the world of human relationships. We have tools for moving, tools for feeling and handling, to develop control of our body in space and negotiate physical masses and forms.
From this differentiation of the tools of perception develop the various corresponding forms of art. From the art of seeing and the perception of imagery come the visual arts; from the perception of forms and space sculpture and other plastic arts. From the perception of language and communication comes literature. From the perception of movement and time comes, originally, dance, followed by music and the other performing arts. The various art forms hybridise as artists explore the overlapping of our perceptive faculties, and develop new technologies to manipulate them, giving us theatre, photography, cinema, pop music, etc.
We have, on top of all of these, tools for the perception of our own lives, for appreciating our daily routines, how we organise our activities, how we fit into social structures. From the perception of our activities derives the art within architecture. An artist who works in the domain of architecture, in the medium of activity, is thus one who seeks to aestheticise our interactions and movements, to recompose them and present them in such a light that we are especially receptive to their significance in our lives.
Similarly, just as a work of literature is a construct of language, and a visual work a construct of images, a work of architectural art is a construct of activities, rather than a construct of spaces or materials.
The medium of activity
Study in the medium of activity is already central to the training of an architect. Whatever the discursive tendencies of the school, students learn to analyse the programme, study the social and urban context, organise the functions in the plan. This training creates a unique set of aspirational values for what can be expressed or achieved through the medium, for example, that by the way movement is staged through a building we give to the act of reading a book, arriving at one’s desk at work or dining at home a particular sense of dignity or dwelling. These are quite distinct from the aspirational values a plastic artist learns to harbour for the moving power of an image or form, which we architects are unlikely to understand other than very superficially without their training.
What we learn to understand about activity is not merely the intimate gestures of individuals but the occupation of communities at any scale of organisation – families, businesses, public and private institutions. We learn to appreciate the interpersonal structure of these groups, the distribution of resources, information flows and evolutionary patterns, their yearly movements as much as daily. The libraries of Kahn and OMA demonstrate how diverging these considerations can be.
What we need to develop is the conceptual vocabulary to sustain critical expression through our medium as powerful as the established media of image and word.
The architectural artist might begin, like a poet assembling phrases, with the painterly composition and juxtaposition of programmes and activities. We see the fundamentals of this language in OMA’s “universal modernisation patents” in Content – the parallel bands of the Parc de la Villette, the monumental voids scooped from the repetitive floors of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the fruit-cake heterogeneity of Beijing’s Television Cultural Centre.
We see the syntax of this language taking form in Sejima’s dormitory, in Kahn’s Library, as well as in the patterning of served and servant spaces in his Salk Institute. We see this also in typological study of traditional architecture – balconies, loggias, attics and eave-spaces, bay windows and hearths in residential buildings, or in public architecture arcades, aisles, courtyards, colonnades.
The legacy of the modern movement not only deprived us of the romance of these elements, but prevented us from understanding such compositions as constructs of human activity just as much as physical structures. A balcony, for example, suggests a certain set of activities according to its dimensions and degree of enclosure, its proximity to other rooms in a house. The circulation spaces of apartment buildings or office towers can offer rich patterns of interaction and cohabitation according to the disposition of stairs, lifts, entry doors, natural light and furnishings. We need to develop the ability to re-imagine and re-generate new kinds of constructs such as these and integrate them to create buildings that suggest new ways of living for our age.
The place of aesthetics in practice
The pervasiveness of aesthetics in architectural practice is less a result of an artistic element in architecture than of the direct relationship between aesthetics and society. Humans are visual creatures, engendering societies with forcefully visual cultures. The act of building, being a communal act and always carried out in the public eye, must contend with this setting, and cannot occur without negotiating the accord of its social context. As a result, the visual aspect of much of the built fabric tends to express the consensual values of the community that generates it.
Strictly speaking, the architect has often only a very shorthand control over a building’s appearance, since most of the vocabulary of a construction is governed by its social, historical and technological setting. In developing a project, decisions are made in collaboration with authorities, clients, engineers, industry, who for the most part lean on established principles and regional customs. The apparent style of a building is more often the result of this technical consistency than the authorship of a lone architect.
The imposition of a visual style too often disturbs the synergies of these relationships, causing indefensible waste and complication. Where this occurs, there is again a misinterpretation of the architect’s intellectual function. The craft of directing technology and expertise toward a visually harmonious construction is not a form of art but a strand of the design discipline. The harnessing of these synergies, the resolution of new technical possibilities is the most durable way of extending the visual language of architecture.
The beautiful life
A building is not an object, it is an establishment. More than the result of a design and a construction, the raison d’être and the significance of a building are the rituals and habits carried out within it long after those early phases are forgotten. An architect must appreciate in its fullness what kind of phenomenon a building is. If we are to be artists, it is through all of these dimensions of a building that our intentions will be expressed, and the complex beauty of our visions felt.
To reflect on the personality of an architect in the roundest sense, this is exactly how we live our own lives. Good architects all seem to share similar appreciations for good cooking, authentic music, where best to place a drafting table, how to spend a Saturday morning in the sun. The unabashedly calculating way with which architects make the most of their time on earth is a very powerful system of thought which should be more fully applied to the development of our work. The greatest beauty in architecture is not the beauty of the building but the making of the beautiful life.
Kerwin Datu, Paris, January 2007