hey aaron I agree with you, but don't forget that the architect is trained to think in a different way than a sculptor. And the overlaps are there, and we need to expand our views of the practice from incorporating nanotechnologies, to chemistry, to sculpture. Architecture is a broad field, but a the end of the day, the architect has a esponsibility in my opinion greater than a sculptors.
And so does arhcitecture. Once again we are bricoleurs, using all that is there for us to use. From strcutural enginnering to sociology, to make a product for society as a whole.
Let me ask something for the sake of argument, because ther is an overlap in hte instruction and training of a nurse and a doctor,
how many want to be taken under the knife by an RN? A doctor is a professional, that has undergone countless training to do what he or she does. Not to say he cannot learn from the nurse, but their responsibilities at the end of the day, are worlds apart.
That is how I feel about architecture, we a reprofeccionals traned, we can seee possibilities everywhere but it is our responsibility to create beautiful structures.

IMO, the Vietnam War Memorial lives in the fuzzy undefinable (and therefore far more interesting) world between/among disciplines. It's architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture etc all at once. Expanded Field! Architecture and LImits! (still-frame, the Tschumi articles rely on the other two that I mentioned to make sense in this context, but it's the easiest to find...)

Monuments are an interesting kind of architecture...

Here is a question: to what extent is a monument about what it "represents", and to what extent is a monument about how it is used?

Henri Lefebvre, in the 'Production of Space' says something about monuments, that they are places where physical space ("spatial practice"), mental space ("representations of space"), and lived space ("spaces of representation") all come together... But I think for him, its the lived part that is essential... The space that is constructed through lived experience.

The Washington monument and the Vietnam Memorial mentioned above are not just representations of something, they are also very much things defined by how they are used, or how they shape the space around them to accommodate a type of use...

Both the washington m and vietnam m have developed rituals of use. The Washington monument, aside from being an obelisk with all of the symbolic connotations of that, also operates as a viewing tower where tourists basically flock in and out of... And from a distance, it can be seen as gathering space around it, defining a territory. The Vietnam Memorial has become associated with a number of rituals... People bring flowers and gifts to the wall, almost a kind of pilgrimage of walking along the wall, to the extent where they are talking about building a museum to house the objects that have been left at the wall...

But where is the "meaning" in these monuments? Does anybody who actually visits these places really care about, or even try to understand something about the symbolic significance of a descending V shaped wall that is a "scar in the earth", or the symbolic meaning of a white occupiable obelisk? Will anybody really care that the Freedom Tower is 1776 floors high? Or that it is supposed to reference the torch of the statue of liberty? Isn't how the monument used just as important as what it is supposed to represent, especially given that what things represent is culturally variable...