Is architecture a form of art?

Is architecture an art form?

How to make a house become a work of art? Is it necessary to follow any fashion or trend? Moreover, can architecture be considered an art form? A discussion we will address in these brief lines.

Let’s review the state of the art.

The consensus of the last forty years

Over the past four decades, a consensus has been established in the architectural community that architecture is not art.

Buildings satisfy certain needs, perform completely comprehensible functions, are predetermined by construction systems, regulatory frameworks, and so on.

The architect does not have the freedom an artist needs.

Moreover, houses — even the most imaginative and innovative — are completely rational buildings. You can explain what, why and how, and there are not many options for interpretations, which does appear in a work of art.

But can architectural objects somehow become art?

Aldo Rossi, one of the most prominent and influential architectural theorists of the twentieth century, comes to answer this question.

They can, Rossi replies. Due to the development over time and accumulation of uninterrupted processes, functions and forms.

What does this mean?

The unconscious component

A work of art has an irrational, subconscious component, which gives it a certain character, persistence in time, and the possibility of multiple interpretations.

Buildings and other forms of the city — urban facts, as Rossi calls them — lack this unconscious component, since they are totally conscious and rational works.

Nevertheless, the work of architecture survives over time and accumulates conscious actions. Different modifications by different users.

Each modification is rational and has a logic. However, the accumulation of these processes is itself irrational, and gives the urban fact the character of a work of art.

Architecture as a collective fact

Thus architecture is a work of art insofar as it becomes a collective fact of multiple actions.

Two of the examples given by Rossi are the ancient amphitheatres of Nîmes and Arles. First they were amphitheatres, then they became fortresses, were occupied with buildings and became walled cities in their own right, and so on.

Each of the stages was completely rational, and the forms that were stratified were quite logical and explicable. Meanwhile, in general, the accumulation of these comprehensible processes and forms created an irrational object that became a work of art.

Our approach

In our firm we are very interested in this accumulation of functions and layers in projects, and we try to propose multi-level systems.

Sometimes this accumulation occurs through form, sometimes through function. Or by incorporating into the project the ability to change over time.

This is one of the parameters that, in our opinion, enriches the architecture and makes it more interesting.