The Confounding Issue of Collaboration Between Architects and Artists [The University of Oregon Science Complex]

Kent Bloomer Ever since the seventeenth century, when the modern age of academics began, works of architecture have been thought to possess certain properties of art, even as diey incorporated other art forms in the fabric of buildings. Meaningful compositions of color, sculpture and the subordinate crafts were considered to be a part of architecture. During the same centuries, the study of architecture was institutionalized as one of the fine arts and located in schools alongside painting, sculpture, music and drama. Simultaneously, and, perhaps, schis- matically, architecture was also studied in schools of technology as a property of engineering. Nevertheless, it was not until the radically atomized academics of the late twentieth century that the confounding notion that art and architecture are categorically different professions was established. How else could the present notion of collaboration between artists and architects be explained? Collaboration implies a joint project between distinct and even hostile parties. To make matters even more puzzling, the call for collaboration is occurring at die very time architects are designing buildings that are often promoted to the status of artwork and whose drawings and models are frequently exhibited in art museums. Coincidentally, many painters, sculptors, graphic designers and artisans, whose work has been traditionally exhibited in museums, are now resisting the autonomy of exhibit space and seeking specific landscapes, streetscapes and buildings as environments in which their work might achieve greater significance and public orientation. Is there a confusion of tongues? Admittedly we all pretend to know why the divisions exist. Architects are licensed to design buildings, painters apply colors-of-the-mind to flat surfaces, sculptors make three-dimensional things that can be moved from place to place, and artisans fabricate practical things in a particularly virtuoso manner. But these partial distinctions fail to suggest why one con- The C o n f o u n d i n q I S S U e 0 f stituency produces art by artists while the other does not; nor why one constituency is expected to engage the imagination dra- matically while the other is expected to solve realistic problems. I think it is fair to say that, excluding the goals of pragmatic and specialized self-interest, that is, professionalism, many of the theoretical divisions between art and architecture, as well as between art and problem-solving, are the fossilized remnants •SbOrfltlOll M Between A r c h i 5 t ^ e c t A s a n d Artists °f obsolete theories of knowledge. P L A C E S