detail.

proportion
program

Thanks for your imput--i was wondering if you could be a little more specific, especially in terms of detail and proportion.

a velvet rope

makes a sculputre

make it architecture.

if you have any sculptures you need made into architecture, give them to me, and i will make them architecture before your very eyes.

agfa8x - Actually I happen to be looking for someone at the moment to turn some architecture into sculpture. Are you able to do this or are your methods one-way (sculpture to architecture) and therefore irreversible?

The architecture I have is boring and uninspiring. I believe that if I turn it into sculpture it might become more useful and intellectually engaging.

the difference is purely semantic: architecture being just very large scale sculpture which has an interior?
also maybe architecture is that which is the setting for sculpture

I've always thought the difference between architecture and sculpture is its habitability... but again, there's Frank Gehry (and that's why I don't like him as an architect).

john, semantics! Consider a cave. It's architecture and it's not sculpture

there has been a lot written about this since the whole material guided minimalism of the 70's. Rosalind Krauss wrote a good article called "sculpture in the expanded field" which addresses this very question quite rigorously, and Ignazio de Sola-Moralas' paper "Weak Architecture" is also in line with this theme.

For more on what makes certain minimalist sculpture very architectural, check out anything written by Robert Morris.

oh, and Richard Serra (and others) make plenty of occupiable sculpture (that is, sculpture with a humanly occupiable interior). So that isn't really a criteria.

James Turrel used to make spatial sculptures out of planes of light, wrap your head around that one!

more recently, he's been making architectural spaces that aid one in seeing or perceiving the sculptural form of light...

I guess my point is that this isn't a cut and dry conversation, which makes it an interesting one. The notion of an expanded field suggests that there are no absolutes in this discussion, no explicit boundaries.

for continued reading on this fascinating notion, check out Tschumi's "Architecture and Limits" series.

Architecture is built space. If an object doesn't take into consideration its impact on its environment or the quality of space, than it can't be considered architecture. The Statue of David is going to be the Statue of David no matter what museum you plop it down in. You'll get the whole package and the sculptures impact on the space is negligible.
The question you ought to be asking is if a sculptor makes environmentally altering artforms (such as aaronUF's buddy, Serra), is it still architecture if an architect didn't have a hand in it? Think about it, cuz your answer may cheapen you as a professional!

Plenty of architecture is created without the help of an "architect." The favelas of Rio or any makeshift shanty-town in Thailand attest to this. Some may suggest that there is a purity to this type of architecture that the profession hinders (think primitive hut, walden and the like).

I definitely don't think it cheapens the profession or any one's role within it. On the contrary, our continued movement in this direction (as an aesthetic culture) will only add richness to Architecture, sculpture, landscape arch, landscape art etc. The Expanded Field. We live in it.

Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, another example of a work that blurs the boundary btw sculpture, landscape arch, or arch...

(this was looking like it would have been a good discussion???) hello?

my personal thought on the nature of architecture is quite vague, but i believe it is necessarilly so;

i personally define architecture as "an intentional modification of space";

having said that, the sculpture as an object itself does not create architecture; however, its installation in a public space (or gallery space for that matter) is architectural.

i always thought of Serra's occupiable sculptures as architecture. Very strong architecture, actually.

just semantics. one can be the other and vice versa. which category it's put in depends on the reputation of the designer.

simples: your definition sounds like it fits in the "Orderly arrangement of parts" category (usually the 3rd or 4th definition in the dictionary). However, your use of the word "intentional" adds something else to it...

trace: surely there is overlap, and yes, if someone known as a sculptor does something, typically we identify it as sculpture. I don't think it's a matter of semantics. Sola-Morales and Krauss (in the articles mentioned above) talk about "grounding without a ground" or no longer trying to fit things into closed systems.

sorta relates...but is architecture art?

the difference is that architecture / design and art is related to use. art is by its nature useless.

but thats not to say that architects dont produce art, or that artists dont design...

art is by its nature useless? Art to lift the spirit is not useless, and often is psychologically beneficial.

cultivation of aesthetic experience - by defamiliarization or some other method - is applicable to art and what Corbusier would have considered architecture, not mere building.

The real difference, to me, is that in sculpture stays in an abstract place, space becomes a "thing" rather than a complex system. Architecture not only takes into account space, materials, details, but the architect is a bricaleur, bringing together society, material, design, and nature in a seamless collage.
Basically, I thing sculpture is more concerned with strictly formal concerns about shape, color, experience, in architecture that only begins to scratch the surface as we deal with social and environmental concerns, and bring them all to a boil and serving them to all in he community.

so if art is "usless" (or whatever distinction) what is product design? (i.e. a chair...)
that is really my distinction if a chair is art and product design...then architecture is art (sculpture)...

don't know if i have made that distinction yet. i would say since some of the artists that took everyday objects and made them art...blurred the line of art and design

Explain,
what was discussed?, is there a website?

I dont mean useless is bad... But I think the distinction between design and art is related to the nature of what they mean to us... An uplifting painting has value, but it is not "useful."

Not saying that they have to be necessarily separate from each other, or that architecture cannot be art, but design has to offer some kind of utility, art doesn't have to.

“Not saying that they have to be necessarily separate from each other, or that architecture cannot be art, but design has to offer some kind of utility, art doesn't have to.”

bRink - of course it does. The utility or ‘quality or condition of being useful’ can be defined in art by the response to the work. If you feel nothing you either don’t understand the work or there is nothing there to feel. Your response to beauty is the use. If there is no utility to art in the emotional sense it’s not art.

You can’t measure this beauty as you can measure the usefulness of a building or a bucket. The true value / price of art would be for another thread.

How do you feel about building follies as Architecture or Art?

potmeririon

Paxton's tower

i <3 portmeirion. that clough williams-ellis was one of a kind.

and in its own TV series

i worked my way through the entire series on dvd.

"i am number two."
"who is number one?"
"you are number six."
"i am not a number! I am a free man!"

and i loved rover...

in a number of dailies online under the Entertainment section, architecture is often paired with art under "Art & Architecture". this might give a clue that in the newspaper reading public at least, architecture is quite separate from art, perhaps because the former has distinct technological, social dimensions which are nonexistent (or to a much lesser degree) in art alone. Putting sculpture under art we can perhaps infer that the two are quite different for these reasons. (???) Anyone care to knock this down? Please do.

sculpture can also have technological and social dimensions, and quite often, it does. When discussing sculpture and architecture, The differences aren't as important as the overlaps. I want to re-assert this notion of the "expanded field." anyone really interested in this discussion should read the article by Krauss. It's a good foundational essay for this topic, and from there the Sola-Morales article that I mentioned, "Weak Architecture." This topic is very interesting, but I don't think we're doing it justice...

"The utility or ‘quality or condition of being useful’ can be defined in art by the response to the work. If you feel nothing you either don’t understand the work or there is nothing there to feel. Your response to beauty is the use. If there is no utility to art in the emotional sense it’s not art."

BOTS: What about contemporary art? Beauty is subjective, and then not all art is intended to be beautiful or even necessarily to evoke an emotional response. Or what evokes a response in one person might not hvae the same or any response in another person... I mean can anybody really say whether art "works" or not? Art doesn't have to work, it just IS... Design on the other hand actually DOES something. The fact that we can talk about "understanding the art" is evidence that art is open to interpretation.

I think architecture can be art, and it is most often design, and it thrives when its somewhere in the overlap.

serra and gehry have discussed this at great lengths. if you told serra his sculpture was architecture or gehry his architecture was sculpture, they would both tell you how wrong they thought you were. even though they've been volleying the same formal language for over a decade now, they both know they operate in two very different mediums.

but why is everything so compartmentalized? can't things bleed the gap. what is the statue of liberty?
Is architecture always a literal inhabitation?
the usefulness of art is subjective. A painting could be very useful. Is it art or is it an inkblot?
Bots, good question on folly. I mean, one definition I found is an extravagent useless and fanciful building.
useless?
aaronUF--where I can find the Krauss and Sola-Morales articles?
And what about the washington monument? What do you think that is?

or memorials? the vietnam?


at sciarc there is a class called wearable architecture.

still frame:

wearable - very cool...Issey Miyake?

I received them as handouts in a theory course, but the Sola-Morales article shouldn't be hard to find on the net, I think it was printed in a pamphlet sized book by him (part of one of those theoretical series). As for Krauss, your guess is as good as mine. I will contact my prof to ask... glad you're interested.

wearable architecture - please expand