Art in Architecture

Art in Architecture Robert Campbell and Jeffrey Cruikshank I think that the moral, the ethical dimension of art is mostly gone, and only in a newly significant relationship with a non-art audience can any ethical or social dimension come back to art. Scott Burton, artist In 1979, Kathy Halbreich asked six artists to collaborate with architect I . M . Pei in the design of the Wiesner Building at M I T . Six years later, the authors of this essay were given a rare opportunity to interview almost all who participated in the resulting collaboration. We spoke with the artists and the architects, with the many users and clients of the building, with the contractor, and with some persons who were primarily observers. Full transcripts have been placed in the M I T archive. The present essay is a commentary on them. Halbreich, Director of Exhibitions for the M I T Committee on the Visual Arts, originally conceived of the collaboration as a research project. It was an experiment, intended to find out how and whether artists and architects might collaborate on a new building. Such a notion isn't new, of course. It goes back to Palladio and Veronese at the Villa Malcontenta, and long before that. In our own century, much lip service has been paid to the idea of such collaborations, and there have been examples: the UNESCO Building in Paris, and the more successful Maeght Foundation in St-Paul-de-Vence. What makes M I T a departure is the fact that it involved artists of a new kind, sometimes called environmental artists, members of a generation that has become a presence in the art scene only since about 1970. Since that time, increasing numbers of artists have chosen to work not on discrete pieces, made of paint or stone or steel, but rather in such media as earth forms on the landscape, neon tubes, natural light and shadow, or carpentered environmental space. Increasingly, the work done by these artists has tended to occupy visible sites in the public realm, often in contexts provided by architecture. More traditional works of sculpture or painting, conceived as signed objects and contained in frames or otherwise delimitable locuses, can also be placed in an architectural context. The difference is that they do not aspire to become part of the architecture. They maintain, instead, a dialogue with it. To Halbreich, by contrast, the emerging movement toward environmental art—environmental art being a wholly inadequate term, as all admit—suggested that there might be a possibility of integrating the work of several artists and an architect into a single piece of built environment, one in which the artists' contributions would disappear as discrete entities and instead become part of the larger fabric of the whole. By thus removing art from its sacred places—the studio, the gallery, the museum, the display wall, the ceremonial plaza—and returning it to the world of public use and need, the collaboration might also, she felt, help to cleanse art of what many have seen as its current malaise of consumerism and preciosity. The Wiesner Building is a test of that hypothesis, and this catalogue thus the document of an experiment. As always happens outside the laboratories of science, the experiment is inconclusive. As People shouldn't look at our process and consider it an ideal example. It's probably an existence proof —if it could work here, it could work anywhere. Jerome Wiesner, Former President of M I T This article on the design process for the Wiesner Building at MIT is excerpted from Designing the Wiesner Building, a publication of the MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, and is reprinted with permission of the authors and the Committee. Places / Volume 3, Number 2