I was doomscrolling on Instagram recently when I was triggered by the title of a book: Is Architecture Art? Let me settle this once and for all: No. Architecture is not art. An architect is an artist in the same way a Subway employee is a sandwich artist. The descriptor is a gimmick that obscures the true conditions of the work. The affront summoned a choice line from Q-Tip in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime”: “Rap is not pop / If you call it that, then stop.”
OK, fine—architecture can be artful, but so can many other tasks when done with thoughtful attention. Historically, perhaps architects were closer to artists or artisans. These days? Not so much. Surely architecture is its own Thing with its own medium specificity, but rather than the half-century–long quest to establish (and defend) architecture’s so-called autonomy, it feels healthier (and more realistic) to acknowledge how the act of designing buildings is deeply enmeshed within the cultural and economic flows of our society at large. Every time the stock market flutters, someone fires their architect.
The question of “What is architecture?” is a timeless query because of the field’s inspiring endlessness, which makes the collection of responses from our annual readers’ survey so fun.
Appreciating the changing (even generational) concerns of architects is a worthwhile activity. It’s even useful to draw diagrams to understand these alignments. Charles Jencks did it in 1969, and his “evolutionary” chart made a splash when published in 1970. Its legacy remains compelling enough to power an exhibition, Chronograms of Architecture, and related eflux series. About nine years ago, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal assembled architecture’s “political compass” to map the moment’s emerging practices. (This was after Zaera- Polo was accused of plagiarism and before his dismissal from Princeton.) In this issue, Kyle Miller stirs the pot with a diagram of the last 30 years of capital-p Projects in the U.S. architecture academe. Here, time flows from top to bottom and practitioners and offices are grouped by critical affiliations. His hope is that this serves as a conversation starter.
On the spreads that follow Miller’s, read about architects completing hardworking education projects, from Leers Weinzapfel Associates in Cambridge across to DLR Group in San Jose, and VJAA in Toronto down to Lake Flato in Houston.
Ahead of the ASLA conference in New Orleans, which takes place October 10 to 13, witness our annual landscape Focus section, which is seeded with informative case studies, products, and resources.
More broadly, this issue engages middles as places of occupation. You can call the in-between liminal space or, more geographically, flyover country. Stephen (Chick) Rabourn reports from Marfa, Texas, on the long journey of restoring Donald Judd’s Architecture Office by SCHAUM Architects; Anjulie Rao chronicles the pitfalls and promise of working as a landscape architect in the Midwest; for his story, Sebastián López Cardozo floats on a kayak in the middle of the new mouth of the Don River in Toronto to assess a flood protection and park project by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates; and in the midst of the maelstrom of mind-boggling executive orders coming from the White House, check out the transcript from a roundtable discussion about how to resist.
In Kearney, Nebraska, Timothy Schuler visits the expanded Museum of Nebraska Art (MONA) by BVH Architecture. The ambitious project, a boxy mass-timber addition to a U.S. post office, brings contemporary design to a small Midwestern city. Remember how the topic of museum storage powered projects like MVRDV’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s V&A East Storehouse? BVH now enters the conversation with an art vault that is faced in glass and visually accessible by visitors, a design decision that puts conservation on display. MONA is another example of architects using their skill to give form to “interdependence,” as Schuler describes it.
A similar spirit of local can-do was out in full force in Columbus, Indiana, during the opening of Exhibit Columbus. Its highlight was a parade of architecture enthusiasts who marched around downtown to appreciate installations created in dialogue with the town’s rich modernist history. Afterward, the joyous affair was tempered with unfortunate (and avoidable) disagreement over Sarah Aziz’s work, which resulted in its removal.
On the steps in front of I. M. Pei’s Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, Akima Brackeen presented Pool/Side, a rectangular wading pool ringed by a blue-purple bench/plinth. Brackeen brought her research interest in water access to a city full of courtyards and likely the world’s best conversation pit (at the Miller House), so she was thinking about resilience, cultural identity, and exclusion. Her goal was to “reclaim the library as a site of joy, celebration, collectivity, and healing.” If architecture is sculpture plus plumbing, then this is most definitely that.
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