Does Art have a purpose in Architecture? 2018

The design evolved further to express Minimalism – the reduction to basic essential elements in simple form, Modernity – the visible expression of current and forward-looking attitudes to design, and Performance – ensuring effective and theatrical movement for thousands of visitors a day.

Man seeks change thus change is a function.

Art can be subversive, and hence an instigator of change. Some architecture, like some art, is subversive. Subversion can take a purely political expression or can reflect society by providing a symbolic mirror image of itself; or, as in the case of the Centre Pompidou, it can transform our perception of architecture, in this case of art temples, by removing the steps to ‘high culture’  and embracing the concept of a society in perpetual change.

Returning to our glass support, both a tensile and compression version could demonstrate a scientific understanding of glass as a material and of the glass processing technology of our age. This raises the simple question ‘Why bother?’ Stone, concrete and bricks are good in compression; why go to the apparent extreme of using glass? It also raises the question of whether we should in fact search for a new architectural support.

I believe we should bother and we should search for change, to improve performance, and for the new though, paradoxically, this has not always made for an architecture which enhances the well-being of the human beings that inhabit it – architecture is often rightly described as being a reflection of the society we have.

As architects, we are creating the future, not the present. The information upon which we are helping to determine this future has until very recently come from the past. This is now changing due to the increasing speed with which new knowledge and information become available, and the fruitful, philosophically natural collaboration between scientists, architects and artists which has led to synchronous thinking and exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Architecture is, by its very nature, synthesis, not separation — the synthesis of ideas, intentions, people, materials into form and space in time and light, and the synthesis of the man-made with nature. As with any artist’s work, architecture will inevitably have the architect’s own personality embodied within and outside it. This is the unquestionable origin of the art in architecture and the characteristic that gives architecture its tangible humanity.