Trading Between Architecture and Art

Since the 1960s, art and architecture have experienced a series of radical and reciprocal trades. While artists have simulated ‘architectural’ means like plans and models, built structures and pavilions outside art institutions, or intervened in urban and public spaces, architects have employed ‘artistic’ strategies inside art institutions, in exhibitions, biennales and art events. At the same time, art galleries and museums have combined both activities in an interdisciplinary, hybrid field, playing with the conditional differences between inside and outside the institution.

Trading between Architecture and Art zooms in on specific examples or ‘cases’ of these two-way transactions: artists adopting architectural means on the one hand, and architects adopting artistic strategies on the other. In particular, it presents in-depth studies of both historical and contemporary examples of the transposition of means and strategies from architecture to art, and vice versa, up to the point that established understandings of institutional categories, disciplinary concepts, and concrete practices become interestingly opaque, and meanings provocatively uncertain.