It seems unique to this modern era that architecture and painting have become closely related, not as physical items, but theoretically; inspirationally. Perhaps the change from the traditional role of art – architecture and painting – in our lives has allowed this to happen. Painting was always a part of architecture as an applied surface delineating a decorative pattern or some pictorial vista, always suggestive of something if not symbolic, when not just a wall hanging. With art becoming more a matter of personal expression, a position that tradition labelled as dangerously ad hoc, it appears that it is this different understanding that has allowed perceptions to envisage some common ground in these two aspects of art, and propose something like a shared mystic relevance to the circumstance. Sometimes one sees sculpture, and other art forms too, being mysteriously involved in architecture just as painting has been; one might say ‘esoterically.’ One can see this theory being developed in many modern texts; perhaps most clearly in the writings of Sigfried Giedion, especially in Space, Time, and Architecture, published by Harvard in 1941. Giedion was always happy to draw subtle relationships between the arts throughout this influential publication, just as he did between physics – space and time - and architecture, and the arts. Einstein called it a lot of rubbish.
This abstruse relationship between the arts has, in modern perceptions, become very intimate and certain; almost a cliché. The connection is not straightforward, as, for example, where painting and sculpture are simply used in and on buildings, as decorative infills; what is suggested is that these arts mysteriously help inform architecture in some spirited, ‘creative’ manner. This connection can be exhibited either in some sense of communal ‘school’ order, where everyone is working with common aims; or be the output of one person. The Russian Constructivists come to mind as an example of the first relationship, with architects like Melnikov and Tatlin, sculptors like Noam Gabo, and painters like Malevich; Le Corbusier is an example of the latter circumstance, being an architect, painter, and sculptor.
Painting and sculpture are seen to be inspirationally informative for architects, allowing architects to ‘see’ things differently; to be inspired to bring new ideas into the field of architecture. The connection is seen to be holistic, working on unknown levels, indirectly but potently: for example, Hannah Tribe spoke about how art had influenced her work: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/12/hannah-tribe-portrait-builder.html.
The relationship reminds one how architecture is constantly reaching out into other aspects of knowledge to better understand and explain itself. Giedion’s physics is one example; and parallels with ideas in linguistics, semiology, and music are a few others. The arts closest to architecture seem to be connected more intimately, rather than intellectually, theoretically, playing a surreptitious role in outcomes with their encounters.
While the relationship is easy to appreciate when the works are the output of one individual, the group or ‘school’ connection is no less powerful or relevant. One only has to look at not only the Constructivists, but also the Bauhaus to see this, with architects like Gropius and Breuer; painters like Klee and Kandinsky; and sculptors like Schlemmer all working together. The Bauhaus saw connections in a broad range of aspects of art, highlighting their relevance to architecture. But what is this relationship? How is it manifested?
It is easy to draw direct relationships with matching forms and colours, but the intent in this mix was something more emotional, lying at the roots of art, its beginnings. The silent theory of connection seemed to suggest some relevant, underlying, common richness in the arts, their sources; some shared ground of being, from which meaning could develop, with all aspects of art being equally engaged with this muse. Architecture seemed to be the art that embodied all the other arts in its holistic reality, rooting them in the context of the ‘real’ world. There was no explicit explanation that clarified the connection; merely whimsical suggestive analyses.
There was a sense of mysticism here, an involvement in a spiritual world. Both Kandinsky and Mondrian were openly involved in matters of the spirit. Kandinsky wrote a text called Concerning the Spiritual in Art Wittenborn, Schultz New York 1947. While this sense of there being ‘something in the air’ made its impact on the arts in general, the most obvious connections were the similarities in pattern, form, and colour. Here, for example, the works of Mondrian made themselves easier to replicate in buildings and general design than those of Kandinsky. Even clothing and coffee mugs became inspired by Mondrian’s images, turning the outcomes into something like kitsch.
With the sole practitioner of the arts, as in Corbusier, one might see colours and forms appear in architecture and assume that this might prove a close relationship in origin; otherwise this relationship became a matter of feeling, perhaps intuition. Whether this understanding of connections came about just because there was one, at least in just one source, is not known; but the highly suggestive situation can easily be seen to exist, and to cast its obvious spell. Why might there not be a difference?
More recently we see this painting / architecture connection in the work of the late Zaha Hadid. One is careful to identify Hadid herself here, as the current office still likes to promote the Hadid name, leaving matters of provenance ambiguous. When a student at the AA, Hadid made a name for herself with her designs that were submitted as paintings. She continued this form of expression in practice.
The other recent example of drawing and architecture is Gehry. Rather than paintings being used to initiate his architecture, Gehry uses his inspirational scribbles to inform his ‘visionary’ work – pencil paintings. To the outsider, this relationship might be difficult to comprehend; one has to accept the Gehry position as an act of faith. Here one eyes off the inspired scrawl and ‘sees’ the relationship as a matter of course, as one is told to. The cynic might remain puzzled, but the suggestion from Gehry is that there is something mystical here, something like the Bauhaus / Constructivist circumstance – emotive origins. Just what the process is from scribble to built form is not known, although models are involved, and crumpled paper.
Hadid’s works suggest something different. Here the paintings are representations of the buildings; they are the buildings, with projects becoming directly informed by the inspired painting such that the building is the painting constructed. One might consider the outcomes as pictorial forms. This is a complete change in the relationship between painting and architecture that was previously far more mystical in its modern intent, and, on occasions, very straightforward – the latter situation being where Corbusier might, for example, introduce a painted mural or door into his buildings.
We are now in a situation that sees scribbles and paintings becoming buildings. Scribbles seem easier to accept than paintings, as they relate more as drawing, the traditional technique used in architecture. One problem is that one never knows when the sketch might have been done. It is not unusual for the ‘inspired’ scribble – the one to be framed and given to the client - to be done after the building has been started to be constructed, in order to complete the PR package. Might Gehry do this? Murcutt appears to have prepared such sketches of his mosque after things had been worked out, as the drawings, that seem to want to look like thoughtful, exploratory images, appear very precise and resolved illustrations: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/01/murcutts-mosque-meanings-sources.html; but we know that most of Hadid’s paintings were prepared prior to work starting on the building. It had become her way of communicating intent; her ideas – her buildings.
The question that lies buried in this relationship is: what are the implications of a painting becoming a building? Is the concern with Hadid’s buildings that they are assemblages based on paintings, that have their own compositionally expressive ambitions, rather than buildings rooted in any necessity? As for Gehry? One might suggest his buildings are similarly buildings of scribbles, functioning interpretations, and less a part of the suggestively mystic world drawing from the other arts. Gehry seems to want us to believe that he intuitively grasps visions, suggesting that the hand might be being moved by the spirit.
This leaves us with a new dilemma: what can reasonably be the origins of form in art that can sustain rather than entertain and amaze as Ouija boards might? Herbert Read asked this question in his book of the same name: The Origins of Forms in Art Thames and Hudson, London, 1965. Tradition warns us of the danger of self-expression. What problems lie in buildings that are built paintings or scribbles? Rather than this situation being seen as the inspired outcome of a special genius, tradition saw it as a problem of individual speculation; blind guesses, invented forms aimlessly cast into the world for special admiration of bespoke skill; unique difference rather than any communal relevance.
It is a critique that the modern world finds difficult to understand, since, as Guénon notes, ‘individuality’ is a modern phenomenon.# We are going to need to try to understand that the situation is problematical if we are going to even contemplate any change; but it will need an honest, committed effort. We have come to expect mystery to be revealed as quirky difference, in behaviour and output, as if it might never be something other than idiosyncratic self-interest being promoted as much more. Guénon has commented on this too; how the modern world expects things ‘greater’ to come from ‘less.’# We need to find out what ‘more’ might be rather than delight in the differences of a bespoke ‘less,’ no matter how ‘exciting,’ ‘clever,’ or ‘interesting’ it might appear.
Suggesting that a building of a painting could be anything other than a clever PR stunt that might be personally intriguing, remains something yet to be revealed to us as an issue that we should question seriously, because we know so little of anything truly meaningful beyond smart, individualism: modern heroics. While we might struggle to say just what this 'more' might be, we have little trouble in recognising it historically, in what we consider to be 'priceless' works by unknown individuals.
#
René Guénon, in The Reign of Quantity & the Sign of the Times, Penguin, Baltimore, 1972, answers this question:
p.17 - “individualism” . . . is one of the characteristics of the modern spirit.
In the context of Meis’s “Less is more,” one should note Guénon's comment:
p.30 - to claim to derive the “greater” from the “less” is indeed one of the most typical of modern aberrations.
15 MARCH 2022
John Berger And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos Writers and Readers, London, 1984.
(Part One is about Time; Part Two is about Space.)
p.9/10
The explanation offered by contemporary European culture – which, during the last two centuries, has increasingly marginalized other explanations – is that which constructs events, and according to which all “times” can be compared and regulated. This law maintains that the Great Plough and the famine belong to the same calculus, a calculus which is different to both. It also maintains that human consciousness is an event, set in time, like any other. Thus, an explanation whose task is to “explain” the time of consciousness, treats that consciousness as if it were as passive as a geological stratum. If modern man has often become a victim of his own positivism, the process starts here with the denial or abolition of the time created by the event of the consciousness.
In reality we are always between two times: that of the body and that of consciousness. Hence the distinction made in all other cultures between body and soul. The soul is first and above all, the focus of another time.
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