9

Art in (and of) Architecture: Autonomy and Medium

Bart Verschaffel

The business manager of St. Peters: Well, young man, our boss, Pope Julius II, recommended you as being quite gifted. You know we are in difficulties in building the cupola; those architects dont know how to proceed. How many cupolas have you built? Michelangelo: Cupolas? None, I am a painter and sculptor, Sir, but Business Manager: What? A painter and a sculptor? Oh my dear fellow I am sorry, we want an expert cupolabuilder. This conversation would have happened if Michelangelo were alive today; but he was wise enough to have lived in the sixteenth century. And so he built the cupola, without ever having studied architecture; because the confidence of Pope Julius II in an artists versatility showed real understanding of a creative mind. (Kiesler 1929, 15) Tafuri already said so: The World of architectural culture grows even more distant from architecture itself. This ideological fog appears in all possible forms, the most dangerous being the legitimization of architecture as a form of direct service to the ideals of a certain society, a kind of political commitment, the fundamental misconception of the modern movement, or at least of its theoretical

rigidity. Architecture cannot be legitimized by society, unless by that societys need for the Other within itself, the need to transcend itself by plunging into the unknown, by breaking its habits and certainties. Architecture simply stands outside constituted society. (Bekaert 2003)

INTRODUCTION
Architecture is well institutionalized as a discipline, but the field of architecture has a weak identity and is in constant need of legitimization. In architecture and architectural education many different competences and positions are involved, and these cannot easily be synthesized or be mastered by a single person. Architecture is related to but also differs from art, and lives somewhere in between the incompatible extremes of art and engineering. This manifests itself first on an institutional level: in some countries architecture exists as an independent field, but more often it is either considered as a technical discipline and integrated in a faculty of engineering, or it is considered an art discipline and integrated in a school of art. In many countries both traditions co-exist, but not without conflict. The heterogeneity of the

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field of architecture also shows in the social persona of the architect: I find myself involved in a variety of fields architecture of course but also in urban masterplanning, exhibition installation, furniture and product design, as well as writing architectural thought and criticism. Nevertheless, I identify myself as an architect (Ito 2003, 250). The artist and the engineer have strong identities that are opposites and mutually exclusive; the architect seems too much of an artist to be a reliable engineer, but professionally too much dependent on programmes, external forces, and limitations to be considered as a real (that is, a free) artist. The identity of the architect is traditionally unclear and hybrid, and today our young students acquire a confused picture of the architects responsibilities as well. The architects persona nevertheless defines what is possible for architecture today.1 Is it so that nowadays the modern architect no longer requires any knowledge of management, the building site, organization, the construction process, or the materials used, so that the only thing left for architects is the creation of images of the construction to be realized, preferably with a general and flexible client brief (Coenen 2003, 142)? The architect as a socially well-adapted artist? The relevance of architecture as a social and cultural practice is dependent on what is, in the current circumstances, institutionally accepted or expected from an architect as distinct from what is possible for an artist, for example? Looking into this may help to decide what an architect is in todays society, what the architects responsibilities are, and whether, or how, architecture can in the present circumstances be considered a cultural and critical practice (see Hunch 6/7, 2003).

history one ought to relate to (that is, familiarity with the canon of architecture), a social position and responsibility linked to and representative of the discipline (a legally protected professional position restricted by an initiation procedure), and a certified building production (not everything that is built is considered as architecture).

A body of knowledge ...

In the history of the West, and from antiquity onwards, architecture has been considered as a science. This basically implies that architecture stands above the knowledge of the artisan or the practice of mere craftsmanship, but it also implies that the science of architecture proper is specific to itself, and different from the building sciences. What characterizes architecture both as different from mere craftsmanship, and as different from the techniques of building and construction, is drawing or design.2 The design, or the process of selecting and representing information and spatial constellations, exploring and deciding on possibilities through visualization be it with pencil and paper or with three-dimensional renderings of the layout, structure, form, and aspect of things to be made or built, has long been considered to be the heart of architecture and architectural education. The importance attached to drawing brings architecture nearer to the arts. But as much as architecture has done to be considered as an artistic discipline, it has also claimed an exceptional position among the arts, as being productive and not imitative, and as being the mother of the arts.3 The artist and the architect make a different use of disegno, and this difference lies at the heart of the divergence and conflict between the myth of the artist and the myth of the architect, both of which are still effective today. Architecture has become a specific discipline, by distancing itself not only from artisanship but also from the other arts. The architects manual labour is strictly

ARCHITECTURE IS
The institutionalization of architecture as a discipline is based on a certain body of (technical) knowledge, a tradition and/or

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limited to the art of drawing or disegno. The architect is a designer and not an executive.4 As long as this person draws or makes modelli, even beautifully and creatively, the architect stays within the intellectual discipline of architecture. When he makes sketches as a preparation to paint or to carve, the architect will also be an artist, as many classical architects have been. It has proven much more difficult for sculptors or painters to emancipate completely from mere artisanship because they must themselves still do at least part of the manual labour of painting or carving. That is why the mythology of the artist and art theory have developed the distinction between two different kinds of making: the skillful production of the artisanimitator, whose production is individualized but not marked by their specific hand, and the real artist, whose making is creative and exceptional, because it is virtuoso (spontaneous, effortless, non-repetitive) and inspired.5 The handwork of the genius is not craftwork but, rather, creation. The architects competence and skill, on the contrary, resides in the intellectual activity of making plans and models, and directing and supervising their execution. The architect does not practise building directly. It is remarkable and significant that the myth of the architect and the myth of the artist, in spite of their similarities and historical relation, break apart here. Even todays star architects are never portrayed, and they rarely pose themselves, as romantic inspired genius figures who create something from nothing: such great architects are more like adventurers, or leaders of a team, exploring the new and the possible and pushing them to the limit, stealing the secrets of nature from the gods in order to achieve their own ends. The architect is not a god but more a hero Daidalos who risks being punished for his hubris by failure or being struck by madness. But the architect as such is not an artist. The architect may also be a painter and paint in the morning, as Le Corbusier did, but architecture is definitely something else.

A tradition and/or history one ought to relate to ...

The idea of architecture is linked to the classical, Aristotelian idea of perfection and/ or perfect work: the idea that human making (as an imitation and emulation of natural growth) can reach beyond its mere function, so that the functioning and use of things is integrated in a complex whole that is not just well-made and useful but also beautiful and perfect. Giorgio Vasari created the classical Gallery of great masters who succeeded in this endeavour and made perfect and therefore exemplary work in art and architecture. The discipline of architecture is founded parallel to how a scientific paradigm is formed (Kuhn 1974) not just by an agreement on theoretical principles or a body of knowledge but also by the acceptance of a specific set of normative examples: the canon of architecture. To be able to practise architecture one needs to be familiar with this selection of historical examples. To make architecture is to take part in to imitate and compete, or to emulate this endeavour of making perfect work.

A social position ...

It is interesting to note, even in light of todays concerns, that for Vasari and his contemporaries architecture is not yet a profession but a task and a responsibility not unlike the task of being a politician today. There are no schools where one can learn everything one needs to know to become a politician (see Hunch 6/7, 2003). It is a task that certainly requires specific competences and knowledge, but which can be assumed by people coming from very different backgrounds and training. The same is true for architecture historically, and is even true today: some highly respected contemporary architects were first carpenters, journalists, artists, actors, or engineers. It is true, though, that architecture has not only been institutionalized as a discipline but also become

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a profession. In most countries, one has to be trained as an architect and know about architecture in order to be permitted to practise architecture. At the same time, everybody will agree with Leon Battista Alberti that, although design may be the heart of architecture, the architect should not master a specialized and limited field of knowledge but know everything just as a politician should. This is, of course, impossible, and so there are at least fifty different curricula, each onesided and incomplete, that lead to the title of architect.

A certified building production ...

The institutionalization of architecture implies that not everything that is built is considered architecture. This has, in principle, nothing to do with the quality or meaning of a building. Architecture good or bad, success or failure is a building that is, beyond its functionality, somehow aware of the project of making perfect work, and somehow refers to the canon. The architect works, from Alberti onward, with a muse imaginaire of the discipline in mind: a collection of all the buildings including many famous unbuilt or destroyed buildings referring to the project of architecture, whose adventures are told by the history of architecture. The notion of architecture presupposed by architectural theory and criticism, and the notion of architectural history the development and the virtual museum of architecture are operative concepts. To become well grounded in architecture means becoming acquainted with this historical frame of reference and the valuation and hierarchy of reputations it commends. The notion of architecture itself is therefore ideological: it is used to exclude and to include a specific mode of building production, isolating a certain corpus of buildings by referring to aesthetic principles, and neglecting their material (economic, social) conditions. The notion of architecture is therefore also a cultural concept: the process of legitimatization relates

a certain building production to an intellectual and discursive tradition. Manfredo Tafuris critique of the discipline of architecture starts from the fact that in making or approaching buildings as architecture one inevitably probably purposefully abstracts the building from its real historical, social, economical, technical context, transfers it to the timeless, a-historical Gallery of Famous Buildings, and deduces its meaning and value from its place there.6 The building appears in splendid isolation in the ideological construction called architecture. One certainly has to agree with Tafuri that architectural history is operative, and that todays architectural journalism and criticism isolates just a small part of a huge building production, with the effect of leaving the social and economical impact of this total production, what is really happening, almost unnoticed and undiscussed.

THE SPECIFICITY OF ARCHITECTURE

The specificity of architecture compared to the work of art can clearly be seen in the fact that, with the institutionalization and the becoming-modern of the arts, the artist and the artwork function totally and exclusively within the art institution: to succeed, an artwork cannot be anything other than, or in addition to, a work of art. When it functions at the same time as a decorative object in an interior, or as an ornament on a building, or as an official monument, it loses its autonomy, and fails as a work of art. The status of being pure or autonomous art, guaranteed by a position inside the art institution, automatically lends each art work a kind of radicalism: being autonomous implies the radical negation of the world.7 The foundation of art as a discipline imposes a system whereby a certain class of images and objects are abstracted from their use value as objects of devotion, private or public commemoration, political propaganda, economical speculation and considered and

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interpreted purely as works of art, actually belonging in the history of art and the museum, even if de facto they hang in a church or a commercial gallery. One can argue that as far as a piece of architecture exists internally in the discursive space of the discipline of architecture founded by the history of architecture, and enacted in the space of architectural criticism, magazines and catalogues, exhibitions and tourism, school books and the canon the work of architecture is just like a work of art. But unlike the artwork which can only properly operate within the institutionalized, homogeneous space of the art world and has little use and meaning when it functions merely as an anonymous thing, image, sign or object the work of architecture is usually also a building. As such, it has a considerable mute presence and impact, an appearance and a meaning for its inhabitants and users, also when those are completely unaware of its status as architecture. This means that although Tafuri is certainly right in arguing that architecture is an operative concept, this ideological discursive operation never results in an effective isolation of the work of architecture from the world. And this fact is even although never elegantly acknowledged within the internal discourse of architecture. Paper architecture certainly exists, and some people will claim that architecture is nothing but design. But it remains very difficult to argue principally that it is wrong or improper to approach architecture also as a building-in-the-world, and that one should consider a project or a building exclusively as a statement in the conversation of architecture, or a move in the game of architecture.

and of some agreement or consensus of the canon (whatever power mechanisms may have played out in installing that consensus), the question arises of how the discipline of architecture can survive the erosion of its foundations. Architecture has been institutionalized, has become official, and is now protected by the existence of academies, schools, prizes, magazines, text books. At the same time, though, this whole development has also been criticized externally and internally, up to the point that, now, all the principles and presuppositions that founded the discipline of architecture have been radically put into question or have been deconstructed. I briefly point to three lines of critique.

The fall of the rules and the canon: subjectivism in aesthetics

Classical architectural theory follows an objective aesthetic: beauty is an objective quality belonging to work that is perfectly executed following certain rules and models. The perfection of the work can be ascertained, exactly like health or a physical deformation can be determined. After the subjective turn in philosophy and taste in the eighteenth century, however, beauty and ugliness are no longer considered to be objective qualities of an object or image, and cannot be known with certainty. They are a matter of sensation, perception and feeling experienced by the beholder. When beauty is not an objective quality but exists only as an experience, the idea of a canon of beautiful models cannot make much sense anymore. From then on, architecture is about causing effects in the beholder, and using and controlling the empirical qualities of the building to produce and stimulate sensations. When Edmund Burke discusses in his Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful the effects of magnitude and light in building, he explains that it is not the real or objective magnitude that counts, but the skill to deceive the beholders eye so that his or

EROSION OF THE FOUNDATIONS

If we agree that the institution of architecture is the outcome of the collective undertaking of making perfect or beautiful work (whatever the social conditions for this sharing may be),

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her imagination rises to infinity, just as darkness, certain types of disorder, and emptiness also cause it to do (Burke 1998 [1757]; see also Hipple 1957). He devotes lengthy pages to arguing that proportion is not the cause of beauty, not in vegetables, nor animals, nor in the human species, and it is clear that the next victim of his argument is architecture. When Burke writes that we begin to feel that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty, then the classical idea of architectural beauty is over. Burke introduces into theory ideas and insights that were in the eighteenth century explored in paper architecture by artists such as the Bibiena family and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, as well as tienne-Louis Boulle and other French revolutionary architects. His insights have later been used in literature and in cinema to transform closed, familiar and protected spaces such as interiors and cities into labyrinth-like, deep, infinite spaces, that are unheimlich or architecturally uncanny (Vidler 1992).8 Despite its prominence in the intellectual debates and cultural theory of the last decade, the meaning and usefulness of the category of the sublime for the interpretation of architecture or for architectural theory seems limited. This is because of something Burke himself already indicates: it is quite difficult for an object to represent or to suggest infinity. Architecture becomes uncanny in conditions where it loses its reference to the human body and human presence, or when this presence is threatened. These conditions can be imagined and visualized in drawings, theatre settings and movies.9 A few recent buildings canonized museum buildings and/or monuments such as Libeskinds Jewish Museum, the hall of Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the Holocaust Memorial of Peter Eisenman in Berlin making excessive use of void spaces and clashes of scale, may appeal to the sublime, but most examples make a poeticalsymbolical reference to the sublime instead of causing the natural experience of the sublime. One can try the monumental and

the colossal, but sublime architecture cannot easily be built. More relevant for architecture, as well as for understanding shifts in taste and in architectural culture, is the notion of the picturesque. The picturesque shares many presuppositions with the notion of the sublime, but happily lacks its metaphysical aura and strong connection to negative theology which made it much less popular in latetwentieth-century philosophy and cultural theory. The picturesque also refers not to a classical objective beauty but to subjective appreciation: the picturesque is a beauty that we like, and therefore like to represent or look for in paintings. The human mind finds pleasure in the new and surprising (not in drama but in anecdote); the irregular (but not in the chaotic); softness (not in darkness but in the sunset); the effects of time (the ruin) but not in history; the homely, peasants and old houses and domestic animals (and not in heroes and palaces and hunting). The picturesque is the world one would like to see from the window of ones house. The picturesque certainly is a weak aesthetic theory. It is only recently that its importance for understanding contemporary Western architecture and dwelling culture is being (re)discovered (Macarthur 2007). The picturesque undoubtedly is an aesthetic category crucial for understanding and appreciating important architectural movements such as nineteenthcentury eclectic architecture, the Arts and Crafts movement, the garden-city movement, and both the postmodern recuperation of commercial vernacular architecture as well as postmodern architecture.10 In a broader sense, the subjective turn has led to distinct forms of architectural theory that, though unrelated to the history of architectural styles, have a latent aesthetic approach to architecture. This is implicit in any architectural theory based in phenomenology or anthropology (for example Norberg-Schulz 1980). But does the notion of genius loci somehow imply feeling meaning? The subjective turn unexpectedly also leads to semi-scientific design theories

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that aim to cause feelings of well-being via architecture. Roger Scruton (1995), for example, suggests that good architecture ought to generate the effect of a feeling of comfort and a peace of mind.

The fall of rules and the canon: cultural relativism

The notion of classical architecture was regularly criticized from within, both in theory and in practice, when it became clear that Roman and Greek architects themselves did not follow the rules they supposedly invented. How then could one impose these rules on modern architecture? Besides, some genial artists had demonstrated that they were capable of freely inventing new rules at least in the arts, with Michelangelo as the famous case. Piranesi convincingly argued that Roman architecture is creative beyond the rules derived from Greek temple architecture, and even before that, Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach wrote a true history of architecture that clearly could not contain the variety of buildings within the classical canon. One cannot reject everything that is different as barbaric or primitive. Should not all buildings be considered equally true and beautiful certainly when those newly discovered exotic architectures often are very picturesque and pleasant to look at? Does all architecture not have the same rights? All this leads directly to architectural eclecticism as propagated by Csar Daly and others in the nineteenth century.11 Daly himself believed that eclecticism would somehow lead to a Synthesis, and that eclectic experiments would lead to a modern style, the universalist architecture of the future. The truth would somehow mediate between the useful and the beautiful. Dalys project of Synthesis, though, was never more than a programme, but his theory effectively legitimized playing with and finding pleasure in plain stylistic plurality and mixture. It took another century to realize and admit that not every culture

carries its own bit of architectural truth, as Daly thought: there is no set of truths in different architectural cultures that can be made compatible and consistent. More recent critiques of the traditional canon and the very notion of a canon, by vernacular movements, by gender studies, by postcolonial theory, have each widened the scope of buildings and projects now taken into account by the architectural discourse. Informal and vernacular architecture, industrial constructions and ruins, the follies of Las Vegas, cheap modernism, colonial architecture, web design the theories and argumentation of each new approach are very different, but the end effect runs along the same lines as Dalys eclectic argument: Tout est Architecture! (Le Corbusier). Alles ist Architektur! (Hans Hollein) (see Buckley 2007). The final question is, though, what does it mean to accept that architecture can be made without architects, and that antiarchitecture and even paper architecture must all be equally considered as architecture? That anything goes?

The fall of the rules and the canon: engineering as true architecture
A third criticism of the idealization of architecture invokes the truth that seems to reside in use and function. Authors writing in the classical tradition such as Philibert de LOrme or Marc-Antoine Laugier already made reference to pragmatism and the common sense of the master builders of the past as a reality principle. The prophets and pioneers of modern architecture, from Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc and John Ruskin to Adolf Loos and Henri Van de Velde, admired the unperverted authenticity and common sense of the craftsman and the farmer-builder. This role of the craftsman and the farmer, honest and unspoiled by culture, truthful because they are natural and uncultivated, is in the twentieth century taken over by the engineer. The antidote for the artistic Beaux-Arts tradition is the rational architecture of

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lesthtique de lingnieur. The engineerredeemer replacing the architect-demiurge (Schnapp 2008).

Engineers are the direct and immediate agents of human progress to a greater extent than any other social category. With their discoveries and painstaking tinkering with inventions, they improve everything that humankind has devised so that life may fulfill its potential for intelligence. Beyond the diversity of values and personalities, beyond disparities in social class and intellectual sparkle, one always recognizes in the engineer a quiet, level-headed, thoughtful human subject, a subject used to coolly resolving all situations with good will, perseverance, and a sense of duty infused with the best of popular virtues. (Bardi 1938)

The attractiveness of the engineer as a role model was certainly related to the process of introducing new building materials and adapting to the industrialization of building. The growing private building activity of the nineteenth century surely needed more technically-trained architects, and designing and building machines, including machines habiter, is what engineers do ... But this shift is accompanied by a cultural revolution: a choice was made to reduce meaning to function, to move to a design practice which did not bother with culture, taste, and historical reference, to a non-style with no memory. Engineering is expected to produce a natural beauty, residing in the elegance of construction and the economy of means (Colquhoun 1989). The ideal of engineering embodies the phantasm of tautological architecture: an architecture without ornament, a naked architecture: realism without fantasy. In this way, engineering is not just a field of specialized technical knowledge in the service of building and architecture. It also is a style, that whispers, that which is beautiful is true, and vice versa. It also whispers that architecture is a lie. One shouldnt trust those geniuses who disfigure the practical art of building into absurd architecture (Silber 2007). The figure of the engineer, however, is as ambiguous as technology itself is.12 Engineering traditionally stands for a sense

of reality and economy, matter-of-factness and sobriety, and opposes no-nonsense thinking against wild artistic fancy. But at the same time, the figure of the engineer comes dangerously close to the magician again, as the one who can make the impossible real. Engineering nowadays does not function only as the reality principle in architectural education, bringing the architect back down to earth, but promises also unlimited innovation and endless possibilities. The rationalism represented by industrial engineering of the nineteenth century could perhaps pretend to be necessary and true. But since postmodernity, with its many new materials, its lessons from Las Vegas and from consumerism, the roles seem reversed. Even engineers do not believe anymore that the form can simply follow the function. The engineer now challenges the architect to design what is technologically possible the highest skyscraper ever, and so on because engineering needs to actually build extremes to prove the possibilities of new technology. The architect feels hired just to invent a spectacular form and a story to sell it. After modernism, architecture relies on engineering for almost everything except aesthetics: the appealing outlook is what architecture has to add. Architecture is, again, ornament free style.

SURVIVAL WITHOUT A CANON

Architecture has lost its foundation, but curiously enough the discipline survives. One can do without a canon. One simply agrees to disagree, changes history for contemporaneity, and integrates deconstruction as a standard practice into the theory legitimizing the discipline. Contemporaneity is not a style, nor a religion or an esthetics. It is the moment we are living in. We can be enthusiastic or not about it, and we still, all of us, remain contemporary! (Katarxis undated).13 Institutional critique has now become mainstream theory. All this may not be so different from what

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has happened in the arts. Modern art also works against the canon and the museum as a matter of principle. A genuine work of art relates critically to the very notion of art and even more to aesthetic values, otherwise it becomes kitsch. But all this does not imply that the art institution is in danger. As Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have demonstrated, and Arthur Danto (1981) has theorized, everything that is said and done within the art institution, no matter how critical or transgressive, is automatically recuperated as art. With a zero event, an artistic superevent is staged, in other words art has begun to function like a performance (Baudrillard 2007). The same logic works, mutatis mutandis, in architecture. The loss of the canon, the absence of rules and the many disagreements of principle are not threatening. The institution does not rely on consensus anymore.

THE QUESTION OF AUTONOMY

Historically, the idea of the autonomy of art first appears in the principle of lart pour lart and the idea of absolute beauty: art should not be used in any way (Davies 2007). This positive strategy, however, is ideologically suspect because autonomous beauty silently accepts the world outside as it is. Aesthetic admiration and aesthetic pleasure are intrinsically affirmative. But then, as Georg Simmel wrote in 1897 in Jeinseits der Schnheit, then the great slaughter began: With the great negation sign as its only weapon modern art negated everything everybody else used to affirm (Simmel 2008, 329). Not only aesthetic ideals or the idolatry of the canon, or retinal pleasure, but the art institution itself should be negated. Aesthetic qualities, along with objective perfection, become irrelevant and even suspect. For a work of art, being beautiful is a problem. A work of art should be a deceptive object (Cauquelin 1996, 106).14 Expanding Theodor Adornos critical stance, variations

of deconstructionism have radicalized this principle of negation to the point that every statement and every image that succeeds in evoking a presence is wrong as such, because it covers the unbearable with representation. This leads, in political thinking, to the impasse of a Heideggerian waiting or a Giorgio Agamben-like empty messianism, and turns in art theory and criticism into aesthetisizing the imperfection of the work: the work of art should almost not exist, it should not be more, bigger, more solid, better made, or be more interesting than necessary to express a no. And this consequently leads to an art production consisting of small gestures, subtle rearrangements, fragile and temporary constructions, and anorectic images, where the critical stance gives way to aesthetisizing the experience of the void in small doses, and to an overall aesthetics of the sublime. Architecture cannot follow here. What is possible for the artist in art is not possible for the architect in the world. Compared to the radicalism of the arts, architecture will always be half-hearted and ideologically unreliable. Architecture can perhaps be radically positive there are indeed a few very dangerous examples of totalitarian architecture. But it is more relevant that a work of architecture can never be just or fundamentally a no. One might provocatively call the September 11 terrorist attack on New Yorks World Trade Center an artistic statement, but it can never be considered as an architectural statement. It is of course possible to negate a building radically, but no building can express radical negativity. The Belgian architect and theoretician Wim Cuyvers made a 45-minute walk on a huge rubbish dump filming with a hand-held camera his stepping feet in one long shot. The video shows the exposure of a human body to an original chaos the world without or before architecture. These images of the zero degree of world-making, though, may make good art, but they are nothing more than the In the beginning ... of the founding myth of architecture. The video is not architecture. A work of architecture,

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because it exists as a fact or an object before it functions as a sign, before it means or says anything, and because it is always somehow useful for humankind, is fundamentally an affirmation. This is what Giorgio Grassi (1976) has called the intrinsic realism of architecture: architecture is always sustaining, necessary, positive, affirmative. The problem with the prevailing discourse of architectural criticism is this inability to recognize that there is in the deepest motivations of architecture something that cannot be critical (Rem Koolhaas cited in Kapusta 1994). This is why the complete and sudden demolition of a building has a strong mythical dimension, and why its destruction can be recuperated as an artistic gesture: the destruction of a building always is a pars pro toto of the annihilation of the world itself, and announces the return of the condition visualized by Cuyvers. The position of architecture is therefore ambivalent. Architecture takes part in the critical-creative production of culture. Architecture is not neutral economic production like baking bread or cutting hair, but is like saying something: every piece of architecture implies a statement, it implies political and social choices, and it implies responsibility. But the architect also never operates in the clean and autonomous discursive space of the institution of architecture. That is why making a building in the world is different from creating an art work or installing a sculpture in public space. The institutional space of architecture is not closed and selfcontained. A building or an environment is always also a matter of use, pleasure, beauty, and money, and not just of architectural meaning and significance. Certainly, architecture has its own institutional space and discourse, its own gallery of fame. There even exists a kind of architecture that is clearly made for this gallery, and doesnt want anything more than to exist and be discussed in architectural magazines. But a building is never just architecture and always more than a subject of architectural discourse. It always has a second life in the

world and in time, outside the disciplinary space. One can rightfully consider art as a game, with its own playground, time, and rules a game so creative and imaginative that, finally, the constant re-invention and changing of the rules is what this game is now about: not just being creative by making a work of art never seen before, but constantly radically redefining what art can be. Architecture, on the contrary, is never really a game. Rem Koolhaas has made a lucid and despairing analysis of the artistic irrelevance that conditions contemporary star architecture. The game of money and power and the development of a global building industry have disconnected the discipline of architecture from the project of making the world. The market economy has taken away most of the basis of architecture and the vast majority of the grounds for its claims. The architect no longer works for the common good nor for a public administration with good intentions. Clients are now individuals and companies, who have all kinds of interests but are rarely connected to morals. Architectures claim to dignity and moral value, which used to revolt us so much, has already evaporated (Van Winkel and Verschaffel 2004). One could expect that, in these circumstances, Koolhaas would quit architecture and start a new life in philosophy, for example, as did Ludwig Wittgenstein, or as an artist. But rather than quit architecture and opt for artistic purity, in parallel to his activities as a building architect (in the firm OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture), activities which are necessarily full of compromises and frustrations, he founded AMO. AMO is a study centre that operates independently of or in cooperation with academic institutions, and practices architecture and design as a purely intellectual discipline, unconnected to building and independent of the building industry. Koolhaass shadow office where the same people use the same competences and intelligence to think about the same issues as those on which OMA is working, but now disconnected from the real

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world of money and power defines a model exactly because AMO does not look for shelter under the autonomy of art. This pragmatic solution has a general relevance. AMO institutionalizes, next to the unreality of architectural schools and academic discourse, but within the discipline of architecture itself, a position for architectural thinking or design. Being aware of the impurity of architecture, being aware of the effects and seriousness of architectural practice, can perhaps lead to strategies that use the inevitable presence of architecture in the world for a cultural production that is not artistically but politically motivated. The so-called radicalism of the arts goes along with splendid isolation, arbitrariness, and irrelevance. Artists nowadays can say what they want but cannot be critical anymore. Architects on the other hand can perhaps still manage this, a little, but only if they are smart enough to play the double game.

is probably happening is that art is locked up in its playpen, and the museum, transformed on the outside into a sculpture-like artistic object in the city, is really the site of fratricide.

NOTES
1 For some classical overview studies on the history of the architect and the making of the persona of the architect, see Kostof (1977), Ricken (1977), Ackerman (1991), Callebat (1998), and Saint (1983; 2007). 2 For a recent overview, see Burioni (2008), especially Chapter2, Die Architektur und die Knste des disegno (15501568). See also Williams (1997). For a recent discussion of Vitruvius as Ur-text see Patterson (2006). For an analysis of modern design practice, see Cuff (1991). Also of interest is Niels Prak (1980). 3 The question of mimsis in classical architectural theory is very complex and runs into twentiethcentury theory in a way too complex to be dealt with here. See Rykwert (1972) and an overview of recent theory stemming from Walter Benjamins thought on mimsis in Hilde Heynen (1999). 4 Jeffrey T. Schnapp interestingly remarks that architects are portrayed with regular design tools as accessories, to stress the intellectual side of their profession. This is mitigated, however, by the common alternative of smoking an object-type-pipe or a cigar, indicating a position in between artistic frivolity and rationalized pleasure. Cf. Schnapp (2008). Prak (1983) made it clear that, even if the architect identifies primarily with designing, the studio work is only a limited part of the job. 5 Cf. the classical compendium by Sillig (1827) and Kris and Kurz (1979). See also Wittkower and Wittkower (1963) and Soussloff (1997). 6 For a recent discussion of Tafuris theoretical heritage with an extensive bibliography, see Leach (2007) and Sol-Morales (2000). 7 The most radical versions of this thesis stem from the critical theory of Theodor Adorno (2004). 8 Vidler argues that modernist architecture, detached from its social-political programme and aesthesized into a style, is experienced as unheimlich or uncanny: one feels the repression of the political. See also Vidler (2000). 9 Some will argue that it is the basic anthropomorphism of architecture, or the recognition of the presence of the scale and Gestalt of the human body, that lends meaning. See, for example, Rykwerts recovery of classical anthropomorphism in Rykwert (1996).

TO CONCLUDE
The most privileged case, the test to check how art and architecture relate, is the modern-art museum.15 The museum is the test field for what art and architecture can possibly be and do for each other. The recent boom of museum architecture is therefore significant, and indicates the problem. The new contemporary-art museum has to solve the problem of assigning a place to the arts today. The solution is a standard solution: a lot of open, undefined, wide and high whitecube-like closed spaces, flexible, without architecture, where everything is possible; with spectacular entrance and circulation areas and a rooftop restaurant, along with an icon-like outside. In other words, a decorated shed. This gives the impression that there is a neat labour division, and that architecture respectfully holds back and retreats to secondary spaces and the faade, to give art as much freedom as possible. In reality, what

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10 Charles Jencks (1977) explicitly presents postmodernism as a strategy of radical eclecticism, integrating vernacular or populist and historical references. 11 On the recent rehabilitation of Csar Daly, see Schoonjans (2007) and Geert Palmaers (2005). 12 Cf. Saint (2007), particularly Chapter 6, A Question of Upbringing, for a discussion of the architectural school culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For historical examples of imaginative engineering and technology, see Scott (2007). 13 Katarxis is a new webzine dedicated exclusively to a New Traditional Architecture and Urbanism: one that in its vernacular and classical expressions, incorporates a re-evaluation of the many World Cultures; includes the humanist heritage of the West and the East; and acknowledges the evidence of New Sciences, and the positive logistics of the contemporary world. 14 Anne Cauquelin (1996): la provocation ne vise plus le public, mais lart lui-mme dans ses aspects tablis: cest lart tel quil est encore sujet de croyances que les artistes sattaquent, et cest en cela que le dcept, le fait de dcevoir, est pour les artistes un outil appropri. 15 There has been a boom in publications about (art) museums, almost as much as a museum boom among the many, Davis (1990). For a critical evaluation of museum architecture from Centre Pompidou to the Tate Modern, see Davidts (2006).

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