A4558 Architecture and Art: autonomy, discipline, limits
History/Theory SeminarStan Allen
INTRODUCTION
Simultaneously social, technical and aesthetic, architecture is inevitably enmeshed in a complex web of affiliations. Architectural theory and practice have continually imported concepts first elaborated in other fields. Philosophy, sociology, linguistics, political theory and art practices have all been drawn into architectural discourse in the recent and not-so-recent past. Yet almost by definition, architecture sees itself as a discipline without need of outside support. Uniquely concerned with limits and boundaries, architecture assumes the authority to organize and define the spaces and territories of all other practices. What is at stake in the forms and varieties of affiliation? Does this poaching at the margin indicate a weak center? Alternatively, is there a strong architectural condition which persists above and beyond the varieties of theoretical description or institutional compromise. What are the politics disciplinary and ideological of these affiliations? Are there productive strategies for interdisciplinary exchange? Or would a critical counter-move require a return to the intrinsically architectural?
This seminar will investigate the terms and implications of one of architecture's most significant elective affinities : the relation between architecture and the visual arts. Architecture and art share a critical discourse, formal vocabularies, conceptual territories and institutional affinities. But their relation is characterized as much by desire as by mutual suspicion and confusion. Beginning from a critical perspective of contemporary practices, readings and discussions will consider the historical and theoretical context of the exchanges between architecture and art under modernism and postmodernism. This theoretical material will be extended to a specific series of case studies of architectural and artistic practices in the present. Necessarily implicated in this research is a discussion of the question of autonomy and the specificity of the discipline. While maintaining an openness appropriate to academic exploration, the seminar seeks to establish a more rigorous basis than the ad-hoc exchange that presently characterizes architecture's relation to art. The intention is to allow the student to formulate a clear position which might guide them in their work in the future.
TOPICS
- Architecture s Expanded Field : Introduction and overview of contemporary practices
- Historical background: Lessing, Winckelmann, and the modern idea of the discipline
- Cubism: Simultaneity and Transparency
- Montage Practices: Photomontage and Architecture
- Greenberg and Adorno: Postwar theories of autonomy and formalism
- Sculpture s Expanded Field : Minimal and Conceptual art in the 60s and 70s
- American neo-avant-gardes: Venturi and the New York Five
- Autonomous architecture and neo-rationalism
- Critical practices in the 80s: the emergence of the therapeutic institution
REQUIREMENTS
Student presentations of case studies will take place in the remaining weeks. In addition, students will be expected to contribute to discussion by the presentation of selected readings. Visits to local museums and galleries will be mandatory. Some guest lectures or studio visits may be arranged as well. There will be required position paper, argued from specific readings and case studies, due at the end of the semester.