Pep'rJack
Active Member
“Art is inherently different from architecture.†The greatest architects have often aspired to create art through their work ... Art is not just found in paintings and statues, nor is architecture just a craft. I guess I don’t see what is inherently different in achitecture that excludes art.
Just to clarify: I can't say exactly what Bogtrotter meant with that statement, but I didn't take it at all to mean that architecture can't be art, or that architects are never artists, or anything like that. Gehry, Calatrava and others are pretty clearly artists first and architects second, if you will. What I understood the statement to mean was that as a (potentially) artistic medium, architecture is quite different from painting, dance, music, or whatever else, because of its functional and civic roles. A couple of extreme examples to quickly illustrate what I mean: An Escher drawing is great on paper, where anyone can either choose to look at it or not, but an office building with a similar design, in which people were expected to do their jobs, wouldn't work terribly well. In this sense, there is a 'freedom' to drawing that really can't exist in the huge majority of architecture (the functional factor). Similarly, one could create a highly provocative, controversial, and to many extremely offensive sculpture, put it in a gallery where anyone could either choose to look at it or not, and that would be just fine. Creating a building in the middle of a city using the same design wouldn't fly (the civic factor). In other words, architecture is hugely more constrained and guided by its purpose and by its place in society than any of the other arts.
Those who reject Stern, implicitly subscribe to one canon, and are narrow minded in not accepting Stern’s contributions.
Not necessarily - one can reject Stern, or anything else, and not automatically be a one-canon-subscriber. It just seems that in this particular case, in this particular thread, that a great deal of the criticism of Stern apparently stems from rigid, single-canon-ish beliefs.