Does Art have a purpose in Architecture? 2018

Every shared cultural experience is an opportunity to transcend polarisation. The sensuous nature of art has the power to evoke our human emotions and basic, shared language of visual and auditory and bodily sensations. Art reveals our humanity to each other, melding heart and mind. Art shows us the world through each other’s eyes, allows us to imagine ourselves in other skins, genders, countries, states of mind, helping us to identify with one another and expand our definition of who ‘we’ are. As the artist and philosopher John Berger said, “The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them.”

And just as art can create spiritual and emotional space, so can architecture at its best. Architecture has been defined as the art and science of construction for human needs. But what is the ‘art’ bit?

I suggest the art bit is what makes a building become architecture. Given that we seek to create architecture and not just buildings, we must understand what man seeks from art in architecture. To put it another way, if the purpose of architecture is to provide something for humankind, then art within that discipline can also be functional:

If man seeks beauty, then beauty is a function.

 Art can provide beauty and, accepting that notions of beauty are not consistent over time or cultures, and thus are impossible to prescribe over the life of a building, the idea of beauty does play a role in architectural design, which I think Vitruvius recognised in his three-part rubric “Firmitas, Utilitas et Venustas”

If beauty is a prerequisite of architecture, can art in architecture also raise a function to the level of beauty? I believe so. What sort of function, then, could be beautified to give us architecture from functional buildings?

Anyone can appreciate the beauty of a tree. If we choose it as a familiar model of support and shelter, our ability to extract its essential visual or technical elements will enable us to imagine/create a form from a scientific understanding, thus allowing it to function, say, as a support. We then search for a visual representation of the support, raising the support function to that of beauty. But this artistic expression is informed by our individual perception of the tree, as well as by the material we choose and the scientific understanding we have of that material.

Let’s assume we choose glass as the material. Why glass? For one thing, it’s unexpected. We know that glass is very strong in compression; it is also perceived as fragile, and in our current world the tree has become symbolic of our fragile co–existence with the planet.