Over the last fifty years, many artists opened painting, sculpture, and film to the architectural space around them, and during the same period many architects became involved in visual art. Sometimes a collaboration, sometimes a competition, this encounter is now a primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy. Only in part is the importance of this conjunction due to the increased prominence of art museums; it involves the identity of many other institutions, as corporations and governments turn to the art-architecture connection in order to attract business and to brand cities with arts centers, festivals, and the like. Often where art and architecture converge is also where questions about new materials, technologies, and media come into focus; this, too, makes the connection an urgent one to probe.
I begin with an overview of the role of image and surface in architecture from the moment of Pop art to the present, and conclude with a conversation with a sculptor who has long advanced a different approach to building, one that relates material to structure and body to site. A leitmotif of the book, this division has become a battle-line between practices in both art and architecture today. Within this frame are three sections of three chapters each, which explore central aspects of the art-architecture complex. The first section considers three “global styles”—the design practices of Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano—which might be to our postindustrial configuration of modernity what the “international styles” of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe were to the industrial arrangement—signal expressions that are at once pragmatic, utopian, and ideological in force. If modernity has a look today, Rogers, Foster, and Piano are among its master designers.1
The second section turns to architects for whom art was a key point of departure: Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and a group of designers informed by Minimalism, including Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Not long ago, a near prerequisite for vanguard architecture was an engagement with theory; lately it has become an acquaintance with art. The connection is often significant, at least in a strategic way: Hadid launched her career with a return to Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro began their practice with a fusion of architecture with Conceptual, performance, feminist, and appropriation art. With designers influenced by Minimalism, the reciprocity of art and architecture is no less fundamental; just as Minimalists opened the art object to its architectural condition, so have these architects acquired a Minimalist sensitivity to surface and shape. As might be expected, recent developments in museum design come to the fore in this section.
All these involvements have altered not only the relationship between art and architecture, but also the character of such mediums as painting, sculpture, and film. The third section considers these transformations. “Sculpture is what you back into when you back up to see a painting,” Barnett Newman quipped in the 1950s, in the heyday of painting as the paragon of all modernist art. If sculpture is dismissed here, architecture is not even mentioned, yet a decade later it would be impossible to avoid. The critical role of architecture in the recent repositioning of the arts is a central topic in the third section, which surveys the sculptures of Richard Serra, the films of Anthony McCall, and the installations of Dan Flavin and others (including Donald Judd, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell). Like sculpture, other mediums have crossed over into the space of architecture, and in my reckoning the results are not always positive.2
One theme that recurs in the book is modernity, skeptical though I am of the notion. In our time, the sociologist Ulrich Beck has argued, modernity has become reflexive, concerned to retool its own infrastructure, and some of the projects discussed here do involve the conversion of old industrial sites to suit a postindustrial economy of culture and entertainment, service and sport.3 Recent art is hardly a passive object in this makeover; sometimes its expanded dimensions alone have prompted the transformation of disused warehouses and factories into galleries and museums, and in the process a few depressed working-class areas were reborn as stylish art-tourist destinations. Surely, by this point, the pretense that the cultural is separate from the economic is finished; one characteristic of contemporary capitalism is the commingling of the two, which underlies not only the prominence of museums but also the refashioning of such institutions to serve an “experience economy.”4 What relation do contemporary art and architecture have to a greater culture that prizes experiential intensity? Do their own intensities counter this larger one? Sublimate it? Cover for it somehow? Such questions also recur in what follows.
New materials and techniques play a role in contemporary design that is aesthetic as well as functional. Like the International Style, the global styles of Rogers, Foster, Piano, and others often feature heroic engineering, and once again technology is seen as a virtue, a power, in its own right, as though it were a fetish to ward away the unsavory aspects of the very modernity of which it is a part. (This new Prometheanism was bucked up, not knocked back, by the attacks of September 11: tall buildings in iconic shapes were thought to inspire moral uplift, not to mention financial interest and political support. Who can forget the phallic cry of “Build them higher than before!”?) Contemporary materials and techniques tend to be light, and this lightness, another leitmotif of this book, has affected art as well as architecture. In particular it has forced a revaluation of the old values of material integrity and structural transparency, the vicissitudes of which I also consider here. An essential ideologeme of modernity today, lightness has supported an abstraction beyond any seen in modernism—one said to be in tune with the abstraction of cybernetic spaces and financial systems. Yet this lightness comes with a conundrum of its own, for how is modernity to be represented thereby? If the machine age had its distinctive iconography, what is ours?
Even as Rogers, Foster, and Piano refuse the decorative symbolism of postmodern architecture (which is now discredited in any case), they offer muted allusions that sometimes have civic resonances (this is especially true of Rogers). At the same time, they re-signify some architectural types in ways that also have public implications (think of the airport terminals of Foster and the art museums of Piano). According to Anthony Vidler, the modern period produced three architectural typologies.5 The first, developed in the Enlightenment, proposed a natural basis for neoclassical architecture, with the mythical model of the “primitive hut” made up of classical columns hewn from tree trunks. The second, advanced by Le Corbusier and others in support of the International Style, reworked these references to natural and classical worlds in terms of the machine. A third typology, important to postmodern architecture as defined by Aldo Rossi, Léon Krier, and others, turned away from industrial models and toward the building types of the traditional city. With these global styles we might glimpse a fourth typology. Like the others, it retains a relation to the natural (now thoroughly acculturated as “green design”) as well as to the classical (this is most refined in Piano): technology is again central (particularly with Foster), and the civic is still considered (again, particularly with Rogers). Yet what is most characteristic of global style is its “banal cosmopolitanism”: even as its signal buildings respond to local conditions and global demands at once, they often do so in a manner that produces an image of the local for circulation to the global. (A familiar example is the “Bird’s Nest” stadium by Herzog and de Meuron used as the default logo of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.)
Imageability, then, is another theme of this book (especially in the second section), and here the architecture-art connection is explicit. One positive development is that some work is able to carve out spaces, within conditions of spectacle, for experiences that are not scripted or even expected. Another is that some work is able to site its structures in ways that resist any easy consumption as image-events. Imageability remains a tricky business, though, especially when it comes to recent designs of art museums. Some of these buildings are so performative or sculptural that artists might feel late to the party, collaborators after the fact. Others make such a strong claim on our visual interest that they might compete in a register that artists like to claim as their own—the visual. Architects have every right to operate in these arenas, of course, but sometimes in doing so they might neglect other matters (program, function, structure, space…) that they address more effectively than artists. These confusions, too, are considered in what follows.
Lest I jump my own gun, let me mention just one more concern (especially in the third section): the question of artistic medium. Debate on this subject long stalled over the opposition between a modernist ideal of “specificity” and a postmodernist strategy of “hybridity,” yet these positions mirrored each other, as both sides assumed that mediums have fixed natures, with artists encouraged either to disclose them or to disturb them somehow. My understanding diverges from such accounts. In the first instance, mediums are social conventions-cum-contracts with technical substrates; they are defined and redefined, within works of art, in a differential process of both analogy with other mediums and distinction from them—a process that occurs in a cultural field that, vectored by economic and political forces, is also subject to continual redefinition.6 Thus sculpture as practiced by Serra is a distinctive language, but one that partakes of aspects of painting and architecture (for example, its framing of sites) even as it articulates its differences from them (for example, its refusal of the imagistic). So, too, film as practiced by McCall seeks to be autonomous, yet it implicates drawing, photography, sculpture, and architecture in that search. This question of medium is not an academic one, for an important struggle is waged between practices like these concerned with embodiment and emplacement and a spectacle culture that aims to dissolve all such awareness. The dialectic of postwar art, I suggest here, has produced not only a move from pictorial illusion into actual space, but also a refashioning of space as illusion writ large, with important ramifications for architecture, too.
Although many artists and architects privilege phenomenological experience, they often offer the near-reverse: “experience” handed back to us as “atmosphere” or “affect”—that is, as environments that confuse the actual with the virtual, or feelings that are hardly our own yet interpellate us nonetheless.7 In the guise of our activation, some work even tends to subdue us, for the more it opts for special effects, the less it engages us as active viewers. In this way the phenomenological reflexivity of “seeing oneself see” approaches its opposite: a space (an installation, a building) that seems to do the perceiving for us. This is a new version of the old problem of fetishization, for it takes our thoughts and sensations, processes them as images and effects, and delivers them back to us for our appreciative amazement. This book is written in support of practices that insist on the sensuous particularity of experience in the here-and-now and that resist the stunned subjectivity and arrested sociality supported by spectacle.
I have used terms like “encounter” and “connection” to describe the recent relationship between art and architecture, so why opt for the semi-sinister “complex” in the title? I mean the word in three ways. The first is simply to designate the many ensembles where art and architecture are juxtaposed and/or combined, sometimes with art in (what was once considered) the space of architecture, sometimes with architecture in (what was once considered) the place of art. Such ensembles might be the rule in traditions in the West and elsewhere, and the modernist moment of a relative separation of the arts the exception. I also intend “complex” to indicate how the capitalist subsumption of the cultural into the economic often prompts the repurposing of such art-architecture combinations as points of attraction and/or sites of display. Although the “art-architecture complex” is hardly as ominous as the “military-industrial complex” (or its present incarnation, the “military-entertainment complex”), it, too, warrants our vigilance. Lastly, I mean “complex” almost in the diagnostic sense of a blockage or a syndrome—one that is difficult to identify as such, let alone overcome, precisely because it appears so intrinsic, so natural, to cultural operations today. Yet, as any neurotic secretly knows, a complex disables far more activities than it enables.8
Like its predecessor, Design and Crime, this is a book of cultural criticism as much as art and architectural criticism. It seeks a way between journalistic commentary and insider theorizing; it is not about the latest trends, nor is it post-critical in posture.9 I understand the fatigue that many feel with the negativity of critique, its presumption of authority, its sheer out-of-date-ness in a world-that-couldn’t-care-less, but it still beats the shallowness of flip opinion and the passivity of cynical reason, not to mention the other options on offer. (In lieu of criticality comes what exactly—beauty? affect? celebration? any other pills to pop?) One sometimes becomes a critic or a historian for the same reason that one often becomes an artist or an architect—out of a discontent with the status quo and a desire for alternatives. There are no alternatives without critique.
My thanks go to Sebastian Budgen, Mark Martin, and Bob Bhamra at Verso for their commitment, and to Mary-Kay Wilmers and Paul Myerscough, my editors at the London Review of Books (where preliminary versions of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared), as well as Tim Griffin and Don McMahon, my editors at Artforum (where preliminary versions of Chapters 1, 5, and 6 appeared), for their support. I am also grateful to Stan Allen, Tiffany Bell, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Richard Gluckman, Richard Serra, Anthony Vidler, Sarah Whiting, and Charles Wright for spirited conversations about some of these topics over the years. Thanks are due, too, to Ryan Reineck for his work on the illustrations, and to Julian Rose for his reading of the manuscript (if intellectual exchange is a potlatch, I am in his debt). Sandy Tait attended this book with her special grace.