ARTIST ARCHITECTS

This article is part of a larger company-wide publication titled 3198, a magazine meant to encourage, grow and inspire design dialogue at Anderson Mason Dale Architects. It is one venue housing a laboratory of ideas. Through writing - much like drawings - we find our voice, we develop ideas and we honor the notion that this is an iterative practice.

Co-authored by Paul Haack, AIA and Kirsten Walsh

We thought it would be rewarding and fun to expand the discussion of drawing to include a short introduction into art and architecture, specifically, how architects use art as a way of visualizing and informing their own work.   

Art as a tool has the capacity to expand our perception of the world. Because art takes place within the psychological, cognitive, and perceptual realms, it puts forth a better version of our experiential reality. We believe that art, as part of an architect’s toolbox, can be thought about in one of two ways - the representational and the inspirational.  

Within the representational realm of art, the ultimate purpose is to see the world anew. Merleau Ponty describes this phenomenon best when talking about the process of art for Cezanne as, “taking the world, making it new and giving it back almost unchanged except that it has been observed”. Art has the capacity to edit down the complexity of the world and helps us to focus on the most meaningful aspects - art has a way of revealing what truly matters. This is evident in the work of artists as well as architects. Who can deny the clarifying purpose of art when experiencing the power of light in a Vermeer painting,  the phenomenological prowess of Hopper, the aura of Turner’s landscapes, and the animating color of Van Gogh? Art enables us to see the world through an unclouded lens that is not available to us when we are doing architecture.    

The inspirational aspect of art stems from the feelings and creative yearnings that haunt us; those that we are unable to crystallize in any conventional approach to architecture. Art, in the inspirational sense, is our inner self reconciling the feelings, emotions, aspirations, and symbols that are meaningful and generative but are difficult to explain within the context of architecture. Art can give presence to the personal and the elusive whereas architecture functions in the accessible world of the public realm - something outside of ourselves. However, it is this personal aspect of art that enables us to find the seeds of inspiration and the ill-formed embryonic gestures that can become the basis for architecture. The work of artists such as Picasso, Malevich, Klee, De Chirico, and Albers explored the potentials of the unseen utilizing the techniques of form, transparency, layering, geometry, and symbolism. Their enigmatic paintings have been a fruitful point of departure for many architects exploring, through art, these same principles in hope of discovering resources for architecture.  

We thought that in lieu of further discussion a dialogue using examples might proffer a more interesting discourse. The following two pages represent pieces of art by architects followed by buildings by the same architects. See if you can match the art with the architecture. We realize that most if not all, are familiar to you, but we thought it would be a great starting point for a more in-depth discussion in one of our Design Fridays.