Architecture's place in art history: Art or adjunct?

In a community discussion of the direct the eye of Chicago led by a working collection of three faculty and three visiting journalists from the University of Chicago's Franke Institute for the Humanities, WJT Mitchell observ that he and his comrade faculty tend to take the local built environment for granted, depending upon newcomers to provoke them to notice its qualities. Invoking Walter Benjamin's observation in his essay of 1936 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Mitchell conclud that Benjamin remains correct in claiming that we receive architecture in a state of distraction. (1) In this case, however, distraction was not working from one side architecture in the sense in which Benjamin imagined it working, to redemptive revolutionary event Here it was the contemplative reporters for Time, the of recent origin York Times, and the Chicago Tribune who had the greatest in quantity to say about how buildings engage moot points of visual culture, while the faculty related to their have built environment in a fashion of distraction unharne ssed to empowering revelation. (2)

The oftenness of situations in which architecture falls on the outside of art historical focus makes it important for art historians to think about by what means buildings and constructed landscapes fit within the generally received practice of art history, the one and the other in terms of disciplinary traditions that continue to inform teaching and research and in bourns of how the discipline is changing as it broadens its geographic and cultural object to span the globe, its range of media to include camera- and computer-based works, and its artifactual range to reach forth beyond art history's "finest." The questions I wish to attitude here are what accounts for architecture's eccentricity within art history and whether inquiry of the built environment might make a uniquely valuable contribution to art history's examination of visual tillage This essay focuses on the implications of the singular status of buildings as three-dimensional phenomenons that, unlike sculpture or paintings, constitute occupiable environments. I begin with the question at issues this characteristic pose s for several persistent traditions of art history.

First, Mitchell's remark that architecture does not accommodate with itself to the contemplative attention upon which art history has drawn out been predicated. Benjamin's explanation of that claim, many times cited these days in architectural circles, was that "buildings are appropriated in a duplicate manner: ... by touch and by the agency of sight.... On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation upon the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not thus much by attention as by dint of habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large expanse even optical reception." (3) The inescapable physical condition here is that a building is a three-dimensional phenomenon at habitable scale, such that it may and ofttimes does constitute our environment. Consequently architecture can solitary be grasped--it is more a matter of proprioception and cognition than of literal fingering. The impossibility of at any time seeing a building in a single synthetic view returns it resistant to art history's traditional techniques of visual analysis. Skills of sp atial imagination are extremityed to collate a variety of disparate visual experiences, as well as technical drawings of aspects invisible to a visitor to the building, in order to understand a building synthetically. If this is authentic for a single beholder of a building, in what manner can we effectively teach inexperienced pupils to accomplish such a thing solely from one side pictures in a classroom? This difficulty points to ways in which architecture is at unevens with the pictorial orientation of art history.

In reflecting upon the relationship between pictorial and three-dimensional works, I have turn rounded for insight to the somewhat more manageable situation of plastic art (insofar as sculpture does not take for granted habitable scale), consulting a new collection of essays on the ways photography translates plastic art into pictorial terms. (4) In an essay upon Andre Malraux, Henri Zerner considers this proposition of the former French minister of culture: "For the last hundr years art history has been the history of that which can be photographed." (5) Zerner watchs that ever since Heinrich Wolfflin's formative patterning of art historical discourse around pairs of contrasted pictures in the early twentieth hundred photography has been the primary means of converting percepts into terms for which a for the use of all set of similarities and differences can be adduced, permitting a discussion of turn of expression and aesthetic impact. He continues: "In other words, statuary needs mediation; it profits particularly from photography, not be cause this medium is more faithful to plastic art but, on the contrary, because photography acts more forcefully on objects that demand to have a point of view imposed upon them" (123). Thus, photography changes the old-fashioned (because three-dimensional) art of plastic art into the two-dimensional realm of painting and pictures, which Malraux meteed "our art"--that is, the late art of his twentieth hundred Zerner rightly recognizes the tension within Malraux's stance, and through extension, within art history's traditions, between the insistence upon the ontological presence of the unique reality and the need not sole to preserve and circulate it on the contrary even to view it from one side pictures. It is useful in this light to recall that Wolfflin began his art historical career by the agency of attempting to fit architecture into a framework of psychological aesthetics, and later maintained that the comparative categories he formalized in 1914 in his Principles of Art History worked in the way that well for architecture that architecture constituted "th e greatest in quantity express embodiment" of the Baroque ideal of the "painterly." (6) in what way intriguing that the tamer of three-dimensional existences began with architecture only to unfold a pictorial basis for visual analysis that effectively reinforced the eccentricity of buildings within art history. And that the belonging to all ground Benjamin found some sixty years ago between architecture and film, ancient and novel media, has not replaced the divisive issues of Wolfflin's pictorial method upon the subject matter of art history.