Fine Art and Commercial Architecture
Architects are touchy about whether they are making art or not. At a conference in Santa Monica several years ago Cesar Pelli was very concerned that his architecture be considered art. This is an ambiguity of European usage. As one of ‘the arts,’ architecture is an art. Visual art is another ‘art,’ but in ordinary usage in North America art is painting and sculpture. Function and a necessarily public use partly define architecture. It’s a big and elementary mistake to try to turn architecture into art, into sculpture. Almost all public buildings built as status symbols—museums, concert halls, Olympic buildings, fairs, airports, hotels—pretend to be sculpture, to be ‘creative’, ‘individual,’ ‘imaginative,’ ‘unique,’ all that art is supposed to be. A building as a sculpture is a bad idea to begin with, but architects know very little about the recent history of sculpture. The derivation is so ignorant that it would never occur in first-rate art. Old forms that are considered finished by first-rate artists are revived by architects as if there is no history, as if sculpture has no meaning.
This text is extracted from Donald Judd’s essay Fine Art and Commercial Architecture published in 1992.
