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In Chapter 2, although the works are located in different sites and are produced over varying lengths of time, the overall spatial pattern produced emerges at once, and could therefore by thought of as a constellation.

Contemporary practice seems to raise new questions about terminology and method. Is the expanded field best understood in terms of site, place or space? Can the processes of art, architecture and landscape design be better described in an interdisciplinary way as spatial practices? Through the dialectical processes of historical materialism, change happened over time not through space.

Throughout the s, feminist geographers like Liz Bondi, Massey, Linda McDowell and Gillian Rose played a key role in extending and developing much of this work, arguing for attention to gender as well as class in the production of space. See footnote 4. Academics from all kinds of disciplines, from art history to cultural studies, turned to geography for a rigorous and theoretically informed analysis of the relationship between spatial and social relations, and of place and identity.

However, although several authors in the January, vol. In arguing for space as dynamic and constituted through practice, place somehow becomes 49 Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift eds Thinking Space London: Routledge, Tomasik Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, A place lieu is the order of whatever kind in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence.

It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location place. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.

Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programmes or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization … situated as the act of a present or of a time.

I examine the work of commissioning agencies like Artangel who work with selected artists to make artworks in unexpected places in the city. As in Chapter 2, the spatial pattern produced can be considered a constellation, but in Chapter 3 this is a 53 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p. A little like a view of the night sky in which each one of the many stars we can see has a different life span; when viewed as a constellation over time, the different sites for artworks past or present, are positioned in relation to one another, each bringing their own histories.

For Massey, although a place may comprise one articulation of the spatial or one particular moment in a network of social relations, each point of view is contingent on and subject to change. His examination of places of transition, such as airports, has provided an account of places that are unfixed in terms of the activities associated with them and the locational significance ascribed to them.

In the following three chapters I attempt to use all three terms as different processes involved in critical spatial practice: space in connection to social relations, place with reference to the creation of cultural meanings and site with a focus on aesthetic production. I reserve use of the term location to define the physical location of an art or architectural work.

See also Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. It was suggested that this very remoteness has allowed the work to resonate in more speculative ways, that indeed the imagination of the audience might today be the most potent place land art occupies. Being feet long and 15 feet wide where it joins the shore, the jetty is made of tons of black basalt rocks and earth taken from the site.

Stimulated largely by the film Holt and Smithson made of its construction, more recent criticism has focused on the performative aspects of the work. The project alerted him to ways of working outside the gallery, to consider how works might be viewed from the air and to think about how to communicate aspects of exterior works to passengers in the terminal building. Robert Smithson, pp. Each subdivision of the Nonsite contains sand from the site shown on the map.

Tours between the Nonsite and site are possible. This discussion was first published in Avalanche Magazine Fall p. Abrams Inc, p. Here he lists the qualities of sites and non-sites. Inseparable from its context, much land art was intended as a critique of the gallery system and the role of art as commodity. However, resisting the site of the gallery by physically locating work outside does not necessarily involve operating outside the institution of the gallery, economically and culturally.

Indeed, many works of land art would not exist without the funding of private patrons. Many works of land art are positioned in remote sites, resulting in audiences of dedicated specialists. The only public access to such works is photographic. From its early days Dia has supported projects that because of their nature and scale require unusual locations.

Friedrich made an initial connection with de Maria in , later Smithson and then in , Turrell. The Lone Star Foundation, set up in , had a different objective — to make a collection. In the building that today houses the Dia Center for the Arts on 22nd Street was purchased in order to commission works from artists who came to maturity in the s, as well as mid- career artists and a younger generation of artists.

The premise was: 1 floor, 1 artist, 1 year. Some of these works have ended up becoming permanent, such as the rooftop project by Dan Graham. See also www. To experience the work, you must book in advance to stay in a residence at the site that takes a maximum of six visitors and visit at a time of year when lightning is expected.

The artist describes how the work is to be viewed: The land is not the setting for the work but part of the work. A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours. It is intended the work be viewed alone, or in the company of a very small group of people, over at least a hour period. At West Broadway , on a polished wooden floor between the grids of iron columns, de Maria placed brass rods in five parallel rows of rods each.

Each rod is placed so that the spaces between the rods increase by five millimetres with each consecutive space from front to back. The earth has been treated with chemicals to keep it inert, more like the implacable brass, but the contexts into which these materials have 77 Walter de Maria, quoted in Archer et al. In Dia installed five basalt stone columns, each paired with a tree, at West 22nd Street and in another eight tree and basalt pairs were planted down 22nd Street from 10th to 11th Avenues.

Beuys intended the work to be a social sculpture, a work of art made by many and transformed each time a tree was planted and a marker sited. The pavilion consists of a glass rectangle surrounding a cylindrical form also constructed of glass. The cylinder is almost the same size and shape as the water towers perched on the roofs around.

At other times you are confronted by your own reflection, looking back — glass or mirror? It all depends on where you stand and whether clouds are obscuring the sun at that moment. Like many other works by Dan Graham, this one combines the cube and cylinder. Graham argues that the cube references the grid of the city and modernist architecture, while the cylinder relates the surface of the body to the horizon line.

The artist always intended the park to be a place for performance, with timber flooring like that of the boardwalk extending New York City from Battery Park, and rubberized parapet walls so that children could play safely. On the roof you are on the outside of the building but still occupying gallery territory. Are you in a site or a non-site? Or are you off-site? How close to the physical fabric of the gallery does a work need to be to be off- site?

On my visit to the gallery the room was empty except for a platform made 80 The park includes a pavilion designed by the artist Dan Graham in collaboration with architects Moji Baratloo and Clifton Balch and a video salon with a coffee bar showing work selected by the artist. Stepping up onto this platform, I walked through the window, from inside to outside, onto a scaffolding gangway two floors above the street.

A slice of Las Vegas on the Finchley Road, it is the kind of place that could easily be described as hyper-real, a simulacrum or an empty signifier. But in pointing only to each other, their relationship is entirely self-referential; they make no attempt to relate to their immediate context.

Neither sign can be described as marking a site or non-site; the two are entirely equivalent, each one bound up in the other. If art is placed outside a gallery, why should it be more accessible, how and to whom? If art is placed outside a gallery, should it be closely related to a particular site, which site and in what way? When the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham moved site, artist Tania Kovats, supported by a Royal Society of Arts grant, worked with Levitt Bernstein architects to generate ideas for the new building.

Already in , there were nostalgic feelings about the once hated concrete architecture of the s, soon to be removed, as well as growing cynicism towards the supposedly affluent global future emerging in its wake. In a conversation I had with an off-site curator Deborah Kermode, who had facilitated the work, she placed emphasis not on the aesthetics of the outcome but on how the process of working with the various participants had produced a social space at the heart of the project.

Looking past the invigilator sitting behind a table with brochures and a sign-in book, I saw that the space beyond was occupied by a structure of ten boxes stacked up, two high, made of metal 85 See As It Is, off-site exhibition by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham ; also Claire Doherty ed.

The whole structure was no more than two metres high. It was possible to crawl in through the entrance onto a pink-carpeted floor. In one place I could stand full height and look into all the rooms; one had a television, another had a computer and two more had sleeping sections with clean white duvets. The lack of weatherproof finishes, the omission of any plumbing and the difficulty the construction creates for its occupants in terms of size and scale, make it clear that this is not a machine in which it is easy to live.

This work might look like architecture but we are not allowed to take a nap here, let alone take up residence; rather, we are asked to think about what that might mean illus. In the UK, works commissioned as part of off- site programmes are identified as existing within the gallery system, but usually under a different team of curators from those who oversee the internal spaces of the gallery. There is an expectation, not always made explicit, that these off-site works should be accessible to the general public and aligned with the needs of an educational programme.

Thus, the works, artists and curators connected with off-site programmes are allocated a special role within the gallery system, one that on many occasions, while not openly or formally acknowledged as such, is not assigned the same status as those located inside the physical site of the gallery.

How do the dialectical pairings of site and non-site, site and off-site, get played out in architecture? Although in art discourse the term site-specific usually infers a critically informed response to a site, in architecture the term site tends to define a location that can be measured in terms of physical rather than cultural qualities, such as geometry, geology and aspect. Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak offer us five ways of thinking about the relationship between architecture and site: reciprocity, materiality, threshold, insertion and infrastructure.

In a former quarry in the industrial estates on the outskirts of Barcelona, architects Enric Miralles and Carmen Pinos created the Iqualada cemetery. Wooden sleepers the length of bodies lie across the main route through the site between tombs stacked up into both hillsides. Each tomb has a concrete surround, a photograph and more often than not a small sprig of flowers. In between the tombs, concrete stairs lead up, while through a hole cut through the ground of the roof, a circular hole casts light down.

On the top, one can circle this skylight, which forms a sculpture in the soft grass, and look down into the canyon of graves. This condition, however, is not usual for architectural production. More commonly, the sites of material extraction are not physically linked to the location where architecture is built, but might be dispersed around the globe.

Current debates on environmental issues have been slow to influence the construction industry, yet there are examples of architectural projects that are exemplary in focusing on questions of sustainability. The ethical conditions operating at the sites of material extraction, as well as the distances materials must travel from their place of origin to their point of use, have been questions at the heart of much environmental activism and are most obviously visible in debates on agriculture and food consumption, but are yet to influence the production of urban and architectural space.

Although the reuse of materials found on the site may appear to adopt processes similar to land art, the process of architectural design is so enmeshed in institutional codes that it tends towards producing the qualities Smithson 92 Morris, Earthworks. Where are the sites architects must investigate and invent for critiquing the systems within which they operate?

Visitors to the gallery could cross over to the bookshop and pick up leaflets on anarchism. Working in a similar manner, Mexican artist Juan Cruz engaged with the cultural processes that regulate planning. Each was a proposal to build part of a fictitious Castilian village.

For Cruz, this village operated as a metaphor for social interaction. For each application he wrote a fictional description of a site in the village. He suggested, for example, that the Melbourne Museum, a site of local gossip and often mistaken by tourists as a hotel, should be a brothel. The project existed as 12 sheets of A1 paper displayed on the relevant sites. When a construction company tendered for one of the proposals, the project threatened to become a reality.

The relationship constructed between imagined and real becomes quite complicated here. In professional practice, architectural drawings describe an intended physical construction, whereas critical practitioners often use the same codes to question the assumptions implicit in architectural discourse.

Here the sites of architectural education, exhibitions and publishing are essential to architectural design in providing places to explore the critical and conceptual potential of architecture. It is important, however, not to use the square as a map that defines a finite set of categories but rather to regard it a mapping that remains open to the emergence of new possibilities.

Today, definitions and categorizations of art are occurring across multiple disciplines rather than within one, requiring new terms and modes of thinking that allow us to identify the particularities and differences of the various related practices in ways that go beyond opposition. To do this I propose that we need to understand artworks as products of specific processes, of production and reception, that operate within a further expanded and interdisciplinary field, where terms are not only defined through one discipline but by many simultaneously.

Perron and Frank H. Collins Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. I shall explore this situation through a project that took place in the UK in the late s. Bourneville was built in the late-nineteenth century as a village and factory complex, a paternalist development. It was conceived of by an enlightened capitalist, George Cadbury, a chocolate manufacturer who wanted to create a pleasant environment for his workers illus.

For In the Midst of Things curators Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade invited 27 artists to make artworks at Bourneville, both outside and in the buildings themselves. The artists refilled the pond with water dyed purple, installed two splashing fountains and had new paving stones laid around the edges. The dye prevented photosynthesis from taking place, so slowly the plant life in the pond died away. Since the artists spent their budget on repairing and restoring part of the property, in a sense their art is an offering, a gift to Bourneville, but like all gifts, something is expected See Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade eds In the Midst of Things London: August Media, See also Gavin Wade ed.

In referencing the sickly and suffocating effect of paternalism, the work questions the idealism of utopian schemes, suggesting perhaps that the apparently benign aspirations at Bourneville have a patronizing and controlling edge. This work being given as a gift challenges the ideology and values of Bourneville and demands critical thinking as its counter gift.

It is only the disturbing realization that the dark purple pond water is inert that starts to hint at something other than simple restoration. How is this work different from what a textile designer might produce? Why is one thing designated art and another design? These are questions increasingly emerging as a growing number of artists engage in territories usually associated with urban design and architecture.

It might be argued that it is the reflexive nature of this mode of practice that makes the work art and not design. Utopian design visions have often addressed social problems by attempting to solve them. Modernism had it that new designs and spaces could determine new forms of social relation. Architecture, as Le Corbusier was keen to point out, was the alternative to social revolution. The projects that tend towards the utopian in their vision have questions rather than answers in their intentions.

It is in this sense that art can offer architecture and design a chance to think critically about their recent history and present aspirations. Gary Perkins makes models of interiors, sometimes of domestic settings at other times of the insides of lorries and vans. His work suggests the subversive and fetishist aspects of looking, particularly when we gaze into spaces that have been miniaturized and that locate us as omnipotent subjects. Architecture and Revolution London: Routledge, p.

Placed within architectural discourse, these objects would be understood as scale models of existing spaces or proposals for new designs, but positioned as artworks we are able to consider them more critically. Architectural design conventions locate models either as representations of real spaces or as fictions, not as both. Taken out of such a context and presented with no site plan or map, the architectural model can operate both as determination and speculation.

Coley created a series of architectural models that could be worn as hats, including a model of the rest house in Bourneville and a Frank Gehry and Mies van der Rohe building. Coley then asked a photographer to take an image of five people with these cardboard models on their heads. A text placed below suggested that the models were responses to an invitation to redesign the rest house illus.

This involved developing a site not previously open to the public. Part 1 was first published in Artforum February pp. Reprinted from Artforum October pp. Part 2 was first published in Artforum October pp. Today, an interest in the relationship between art and space continues to underline much contemporary practice, but what distinguishes much of the artwork of the past few years from the work of the s and s is the process-based nature of the spatial interest and the kind of occupation the works require in order to function.

In this sense, her expanded field extends, if critically, the terrain of the gallery. The other structures that populate sites outside the gallery, the diverse practices, meanings and uses that inhabit such locations, are not brought into play, either by the artists or the critic.

So, is it possible to expand the field, to think of art not as place but as spatial practice and to include spatial practices that occur beyond the gallery, activities that are not associated with art? At Bourneville, many of the invited artists made pieces of architecture that required occupation to allow them to function.

Chocolate was included in the soil and the cabbages were grown in purple dye so that they looked faintly purplish in colour. In England, where a vegetable patch is usually associated with the back garden rather than the flowerbeds of the front garden or park, they felt strangely out of place. The scale of Bourneville made it possible to walk through the entire site and to see works Prince and Wade, In the Midst of Things, pp. A work might occupy the foreground and then recede to become a backdrop, offering the viewer multiple, changing and sometimes conflicting ways of experiencing art.

In Artscapes: Art as an Approach to Contemporary Landscape, Luca Galofaro points to landscape as the place where artists and architects establish a relationship of exchange. In moving outside the gallery in the s artists sought to critique the operations of their own discipline. The white light emitted by fluorescent tubes through the plexiglas of the floor decreased melatonin secretion, reducing fatigue and increasing sexual desire.

These plants were chosen because of their ability to produce certain vitamins and minerals beneficial in exercise, such as asparagus a vegetable that provides vitamin B1 and helps increase muscle tone and prevent cramps. There are longstanding arguments about architectural and environmental determinism; on the one hand architects are located as the culprit of all crimes and misdemeanours committed in the buildings they design; on the other hand questions are raised about whether architecture has the power to control how we behave.

As architects, when we design it is hard not to believe that the places we make will effect the occupier in the ways we intend, yet this optimistic hope can easily be perverted to create an architecture of control. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, code and effect of architecture itself. What contribution does this inorganic matter make architecturally? All kinds of household items, from books to a pair of slippers, each in a plastic bag and labelled with an inventory number, circulated on the belt.

The people in overalls, including the artist, engaged in different operations — one to remove the plug from a fridge, another to pass pieces of wood into a shredder. Landy chooses not to distinguish between different kinds of object — gifts, souvenirs, commodity consumables, originals, replicas — all were broken down.

This is an essential de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p. See Gerrie van Noord ed. But perhaps this is doing Landy a disservice, the bluntness of the breakdown may well be intended to bring us to our senses and make us think about the sheer number of objects in the world as an effect of the increasingly particular knowledge we demonstrate as consumers.

What kind of relationship is Landy trying to establish between these sites? And how does he use performance to make his points? There was a lack of precision in the way Landy broke his objects down. Some were taken apart physically, but not all and not all to the same extent; some materials were destroyed, but apparently only those that would go through the wood shredder on site. There are certainly problems with the work. For example, the decisions Landy made about the actual performance seemed to be based on pragmatic rather than aesthetic concerns, and what he 71 had to say about the lives of different kinds of objects and the ethical issues surrounding consumption is less than clear.

Yet, that said, I think it is still possible to suggest that Landy transformed a place into a space. On a cold grey day in June, on a field somewhere outside Sheffield, a fight took place between the police and a huge gang of men in jeans and T- shirts. Surrounding them, yet held back by a rope, a crowd strained for a view. I stood in that crowd, trying to take a photograph, one that would crop out the man with a microphone, the heads of the crowd around me, the array of hotdog stands and ice cream vans and the film crew taking footage of the event for broadcast on Channel 4.

Illuminations London: Fontan, p. Walter Benjamin, who quotes the positivist historian Leopold von Ranke, argues that such an endeavour is impossible for a critical historian to achieve. I felt vaguely uncomfortable with such a powerful emotional response. As a historian, I am slightly sceptical of empathy and of the ease with which authenticity is ascribed to experiential accounts of the past.

There were plenty such testimonials to be told at Orgreave that day. Miners and their families were keen to discuss the battle and its ensuing ramifications. Although Deller involved a battle enactment society to restage the battle, some of the miners chose to play themselves and some sons played their fathers, though only one policeman played himself.

It is interesting to compare this approach with that of the Public Art Development Trust, PADT, a public art consultancy set up by Sandra Percival, for whom the starting point in a project has been the decision to work in a certain location, allowing the chance for one piece of work to build on another. It is also worth looking at other agencies that commission art in the UK. For Bulkhead, a commissioning agency based in Glasgow from to , see www.

Here, Bulloch exhibited her archival material along with her idea to replant the jetty with imported tree species and organized a party to light up the jetty over several hours so that it gradually became redder, with its new name projected onto it in white light.

In her research, Horn became interested in the relationship of rivers to death, drowning, misadventure and suicide. The concept was to look at the idea of an invisible wall lying both between the stage and the audience, and between the city and the stage. See www. Watershed Journal no. Some of these works have ended up becoming permanent, such as the rooftop project by Dan Graham. See also www. To experience the work, you must book in advance to stay in a residence at the site that takes a maximum of six visitors and visit at a time of year when lightning is expected.

The artist describes how the work is to be viewed: The land is not the setting for the work but part of the work. A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours. It is intended the work be viewed alone, or in the company of a very small group of people, over at least a hour period. At West Broadway , on a polished wooden floor between the grids of iron columns, de Maria placed brass rods in five parallel rows of rods each. Each rod is placed so that the spaces between the rods increase by five millimetres with each consecutive space from front to back.

The earth has been treated with chemicals to keep it inert, more like the implacable brass, but the contexts into which these materials have 77 Walter de Maria, quoted in Archer et al. In Dia installed five basalt stone columns, each paired with a tree, at West 22nd Street and in another eight tree and basalt pairs were planted down 22nd Street from 10th to 11th Avenues.

Beuys intended the work to be a social sculpture, a work of art made by many and transformed each time a tree was planted and a marker sited. The pavilion consists of a glass rectangle surrounding a cylindrical form also constructed of glass. The cylinder is almost the same size and shape as the water towers perched on the roofs around. At other times you are confronted by your own reflection, looking back — glass or mirror?

It all depends on where you stand and whether clouds are obscuring the sun at that moment. Like many other works by Dan Graham, this one combines the cube and cylinder. Graham argues that the cube references the grid of the city and modernist architecture, while the cylinder relates the surface of the body to the horizon line.

The artist always intended the park to be a place for performance, with timber flooring like that of the boardwalk extending New York City from Battery Park, and rubberized parapet walls so that children could play safely. On the roof you are on the outside of the building but still occupying gallery territory. Are you in a site or a non-site? Or are you off-site? How close to the physical fabric of the gallery does a work need to be to be off- site?

On my visit to the gallery the room was empty except for a platform made 80 The park includes a pavilion designed by the artist Dan Graham in collaboration with architects Moji Baratloo and Clifton Balch and a video salon with a coffee bar showing work selected by the artist.

Stepping up onto this platform, I walked through the window, from inside to outside, onto a scaffolding gangway two floors above the street. A slice of Las Vegas on the Finchley Road, it is the kind of place that could easily be described as hyper-real, a simulacrum or an empty signifier. But in pointing only to each other, their relationship is entirely self-referential; they make no attempt to relate to their immediate context.

Neither sign can be described as marking a site or non-site; the two are entirely equivalent, each one bound up in the other. If art is placed outside a gallery, why should it be more accessible, how and to whom? If art is placed outside a gallery, should it be closely related to a particular site, which site and in what way?

When the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham moved site, artist Tania Kovats, supported by a Royal Society of Arts grant, worked with Levitt Bernstein architects to generate ideas for the new building. Already in , there were nostalgic feelings about the once hated concrete architecture of the s, soon to be removed, as well as growing cynicism towards the supposedly affluent global future emerging in its wake.

In a conversation I had with an off-site curator Deborah Kermode, who had facilitated the work, she placed emphasis not on the aesthetics of the outcome but on how the process of working with the various participants had produced a social space at the heart of the project. Looking past the invigilator sitting behind a table with brochures and a sign-in book, I saw that the space beyond was occupied by a structure of ten boxes stacked up, two high, made of metal 85 See As It Is, off-site exhibition by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham ; also Claire Doherty ed.

The whole structure was no more than two metres high. It was possible to crawl in through the entrance onto a pink-carpeted floor. In one place I could stand full height and look into all the rooms; one had a television, another had a computer and two more had sleeping sections with clean white duvets. The lack of weatherproof finishes, the omission of any plumbing and the difficulty the construction creates for its occupants in terms of size and scale, make it clear that this is not a machine in which it is easy to live.

This work might look like architecture but we are not allowed to take a nap here, let alone take up residence; rather, we are asked to think about what that might mean illus. In the UK, works commissioned as part of off- site programmes are identified as existing within the gallery system, but usually under a different team of curators from those who oversee the internal spaces of the gallery. There is an expectation, not always made explicit, that these off-site works should be accessible to the general public and aligned with the needs of an educational programme.

Thus, the works, artists and curators connected with off-site programmes are allocated a special role within the gallery system, one that on many occasions, while not openly or formally acknowledged as such, is not assigned the same status as those located inside the physical site of the gallery.

How do the dialectical pairings of site and non-site, site and off-site, get played out in architecture? Although in art discourse the term site-specific usually infers a critically informed response to a site, in architecture the term site tends to define a location that can be measured in terms of physical rather than cultural qualities, such as geometry, geology and aspect. Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak offer us five ways of thinking about the relationship between architecture and site: reciprocity, materiality, threshold, insertion and infrastructure.

In a former quarry in the industrial estates on the outskirts of Barcelona, architects Enric Miralles and Carmen Pinos created the Iqualada cemetery. Wooden sleepers the length of bodies lie across the main route through the site between tombs stacked up into both hillsides. Each tomb has a concrete surround, a photograph and more often than not a small sprig of flowers.

In between the tombs, concrete stairs lead up, while through a hole cut through the ground of the roof, a circular hole casts light down. On the top, one can circle this skylight, which forms a sculpture in the soft grass, and look down into the canyon of graves. This condition, however, is not usual for architectural production. More commonly, the sites of material extraction are not physically linked to the location where architecture is built, but might be dispersed around the globe.

Current debates on environmental issues have been slow to influence the construction industry, yet there are examples of architectural projects that are exemplary in focusing on questions of sustainability. The ethical conditions operating at the sites of material extraction, as well as the distances materials must travel from their place of origin to their point of use, have been questions at the heart of much environmental activism and are most obviously visible in debates on agriculture and food consumption, but are yet to influence the production of urban and architectural space.

Although the reuse of materials found on the site may appear to adopt processes similar to land art, the process of architectural design is so enmeshed in institutional codes that it tends towards producing the qualities Smithson 92 Morris, Earthworks. Where are the sites architects must investigate and invent for critiquing the systems within which they operate?

Visitors to the gallery could cross over to the bookshop and pick up leaflets on anarchism. Working in a similar manner, Mexican artist Juan Cruz engaged with the cultural processes that regulate planning. Each was a proposal to build part of a fictitious Castilian village. For Cruz, this village operated as a metaphor for social interaction.

For each application he wrote a fictional description of a site in the village. He suggested, for example, that the Melbourne Museum, a site of local gossip and often mistaken by tourists as a hotel, should be a brothel. The project existed as 12 sheets of A1 paper displayed on the relevant sites. When a construction company tendered for one of the proposals, the project threatened to become a reality. The relationship constructed between imagined and real becomes quite complicated here.

In professional practice, architectural drawings describe an intended physical construction, whereas critical practitioners often use the same codes to question the assumptions implicit in architectural discourse. Here the sites of architectural education, exhibitions and publishing are essential to architectural design in providing places to explore the critical and conceptual potential of architecture. It is important, however, not to use the square as a map that defines a finite set of categories but rather to regard it a mapping that remains open to the emergence of new possibilities.

Today, definitions and categorizations of art are occurring across multiple disciplines rather than within one, requiring new terms and modes of thinking that allow us to identify the particularities and differences of the various related practices in ways that go beyond opposition. To do this I propose that we need to understand artworks as products of specific processes, of production and reception, that operate within a further expanded and interdisciplinary field, where terms are not only defined through one discipline but by many simultaneously.

Perron and Frank H. Collins Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. I shall explore this situation through a project that took place in the UK in the late s. Bourneville was built in the late-nineteenth century as a village and factory complex, a paternalist development. It was conceived of by an enlightened capitalist, George Cadbury, a chocolate manufacturer who wanted to create a pleasant environment for his workers illus.

For In the Midst of Things curators Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade invited 27 artists to make artworks at Bourneville, both outside and in the buildings themselves. The artists refilled the pond with water dyed purple, installed two splashing fountains and had new paving stones laid around the edges. The dye prevented photosynthesis from taking place, so slowly the plant life in the pond died away. Since the artists spent their budget on repairing and restoring part of the property, in a sense their art is an offering, a gift to Bourneville, but like all gifts, something is expected See Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade eds In the Midst of Things London: August Media, See also Gavin Wade ed.

In referencing the sickly and suffocating effect of paternalism, the work questions the idealism of utopian schemes, suggesting perhaps that the apparently benign aspirations at Bourneville have a patronizing and controlling edge.

This work being given as a gift challenges the ideology and values of Bourneville and demands critical thinking as its counter gift. It is only the disturbing realization that the dark purple pond water is inert that starts to hint at something other than simple restoration. How is this work different from what a textile designer might produce? Why is one thing designated art and another design? These are questions increasingly emerging as a growing number of artists engage in territories usually associated with urban design and architecture.

It might be argued that it is the reflexive nature of this mode of practice that makes the work art and not design. Utopian design visions have often addressed social problems by attempting to solve them. Modernism had it that new designs and spaces could determine new forms of social relation.

Architecture, as Le Corbusier was keen to point out, was the alternative to social revolution. The projects that tend towards the utopian in their vision have questions rather than answers in their intentions. It is in this sense that art can offer architecture and design a chance to think critically about their recent history and present aspirations.

Gary Perkins makes models of interiors, sometimes of domestic settings at other times of the insides of lorries and vans. His work suggests the subversive and fetishist aspects of looking, particularly when we gaze into spaces that have been miniaturized and that locate us as omnipotent subjects. Architecture and Revolution London: Routledge, p.

Placed within architectural discourse, these objects would be understood as scale models of existing spaces or proposals for new designs, but positioned as artworks we are able to consider them more critically. Architectural design conventions locate models either as representations of real spaces or as fictions, not as both. Taken out of such a context and presented with no site plan or map, the architectural model can operate both as determination and speculation. Coley created a series of architectural models that could be worn as hats, including a model of the rest house in Bourneville and a Frank Gehry and Mies van der Rohe building.

Coley then asked a photographer to take an image of five people with these cardboard models on their heads. A text placed below suggested that the models were responses to an invitation to redesign the rest house illus. This involved developing a site not previously open to the public. Part 1 was first published in Artforum February pp. Reprinted from Artforum October pp. Part 2 was first published in Artforum October pp.

Today, an interest in the relationship between art and space continues to underline much contemporary practice, but what distinguishes much of the artwork of the past few years from the work of the s and s is the process-based nature of the spatial interest and the kind of occupation the works require in order to function. In this sense, her expanded field extends, if critically, the terrain of the gallery. The other structures that populate sites outside the gallery, the diverse practices, meanings and uses that inhabit such locations, are not brought into play, either by the artists or the critic.

So, is it possible to expand the field, to think of art not as place but as spatial practice and to include spatial practices that occur beyond the gallery, activities that are not associated with art? At Bourneville, many of the invited artists made pieces of architecture that required occupation to allow them to function. Chocolate was included in the soil and the cabbages were grown in purple dye so that they looked faintly purplish in colour.

In England, where a vegetable patch is usually associated with the back garden rather than the flowerbeds of the front garden or park, they felt strangely out of place. The scale of Bourneville made it possible to walk through the entire site and to see works Prince and Wade, In the Midst of Things, pp. A work might occupy the foreground and then recede to become a backdrop, offering the viewer multiple, changing and sometimes conflicting ways of experiencing art.

In Artscapes: Art as an Approach to Contemporary Landscape, Luca Galofaro points to landscape as the place where artists and architects establish a relationship of exchange. In moving outside the gallery in the s artists sought to critique the operations of their own discipline. The white light emitted by fluorescent tubes through the plexiglas of the floor decreased melatonin secretion, reducing fatigue and increasing sexual desire.

These plants were chosen because of their ability to produce certain vitamins and minerals beneficial in exercise, such as asparagus a vegetable that provides vitamin B1 and helps increase muscle tone and prevent cramps. There are longstanding arguments about architectural and environmental determinism; on the one hand architects are located as the culprit of all crimes and misdemeanours committed in the buildings they design; on the other hand questions are raised about whether architecture has the power to control how we behave.

As architects, when we design it is hard not to believe that the places we make will effect the occupier in the ways we intend, yet this optimistic hope can easily be perverted to create an architecture of control. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, code and effect of architecture itself.

What contribution does this inorganic matter make architecturally? All kinds of household items, from books to a pair of slippers, each in a plastic bag and labelled with an inventory number, circulated on the belt. The people in overalls, including the artist, engaged in different operations — one to remove the plug from a fridge, another to pass pieces of wood into a shredder.

Landy chooses not to distinguish between different kinds of object — gifts, souvenirs, commodity consumables, originals, replicas — all were broken down. This is an essential de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, p.

See Gerrie van Noord ed. But perhaps this is doing Landy a disservice, the bluntness of the breakdown may well be intended to bring us to our senses and make us think about the sheer number of objects in the world as an effect of the increasingly particular knowledge we demonstrate as consumers. What kind of relationship is Landy trying to establish between these sites? And how does he use performance to make his points?

There was a lack of precision in the way Landy broke his objects down. Some were taken apart physically, but not all and not all to the same extent; some materials were destroyed, but apparently only those that would go through the wood shredder on site. There are certainly problems with the work. For example, the decisions Landy made about the actual performance seemed to be based on pragmatic rather than aesthetic concerns, and what he 71 had to say about the lives of different kinds of objects and the ethical issues surrounding consumption is less than clear.

Yet, that said, I think it is still possible to suggest that Landy transformed a place into a space. On a cold grey day in June, on a field somewhere outside Sheffield, a fight took place between the police and a huge gang of men in jeans and T- shirts. Surrounding them, yet held back by a rope, a crowd strained for a view.

I stood in that crowd, trying to take a photograph, one that would crop out the man with a microphone, the heads of the crowd around me, the array of hotdog stands and ice cream vans and the film crew taking footage of the event for broadcast on Channel 4. Illuminations London: Fontan, p. Walter Benjamin, who quotes the positivist historian Leopold von Ranke, argues that such an endeavour is impossible for a critical historian to achieve.

I felt vaguely uncomfortable with such a powerful emotional response. As a historian, I am slightly sceptical of empathy and of the ease with which authenticity is ascribed to experiential accounts of the past. There were plenty such testimonials to be told at Orgreave that day. Miners and their families were keen to discuss the battle and its ensuing ramifications. Although Deller involved a battle enactment society to restage the battle, some of the miners chose to play themselves and some sons played their fathers, though only one policeman played himself.

It is interesting to compare this approach with that of the Public Art Development Trust, PADT, a public art consultancy set up by Sandra Percival, for whom the starting point in a project has been the decision to work in a certain location, allowing the chance for one piece of work to build on another. It is also worth looking at other agencies that commission art in the UK. For Bulkhead, a commissioning agency based in Glasgow from to , see www. Here, Bulloch exhibited her archival material along with her idea to replant the jetty with imported tree species and organized a party to light up the jetty over several hours so that it gradually became redder, with its new name projected onto it in white light.

In her research, Horn became interested in the relationship of rivers to death, drowning, misadventure and suicide. The concept was to look at the idea of an invisible wall lying both between the stage and the audience, and between the city and the stage. See www. Watershed Journal no. In her book, Horn has subverted the usual sets of relationships that exist between image and writing in much textual material, where images illustrate or support the writing and where footnotes provide the foundation or detail to the research.

The footnotes, rather than substantiate and expand the findings of the research, provide a series of subjective asides. They comprise different descriptions and comments about water and rivers written in the first person by Horn: more complex still they cross-reference one another.

In many other cities around the world there are similar organizations, each with its own particular approach to commissioning artworks in the sites in which it operates. In the last couple of years a number of projects have operated across multiple sites, developing an understanding of one place by referring to another.

At the end of the footage the monitors reverted to displaying passenger information for commuters travelling to and from New Jersey by PATH trains. Locating the work here meant that the viewer had to make connections between the everyday existence of a chick growing up and the day-to-day life of a commuter travelling to and from work five days a week.

PAF is a non-profit arts organization; financial support comes from a combination of donations from individuals, foundations and corporations, and as public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. New York, 4. By positioning the activities of one site in another, relating the temporal nature of the practices that occur in them, Pfeiffer juxtaposed the monotony of the repetitive daily journey of the commuter to the progressive but soon-to-be-ended day-to-day cycle of chicks growing up.

Connecting the two sites transformed both from places of unquestioning conformity to spaces of critical debate, potentially raising issues about both the monotonous activity of work and poultry farming. How does architecture engage with spatial practice? As I have discussed above, spatial practices such as performing one activity in the site of another or restaging an historical event, have the potential to be transformative, to turn spatial practices into critical spatial practices.

If, by performing practices, art can focus attention on the critical possibilities of a site or place, encapsulated in a particular moment in time or set of activities, do similar processes operate in architecture? Work by Rem Koolhaas and the OMA Office for Metropolitan Architecture has emphasized the importance of researching the activities that already exist on urban sites, bringing these to the centre stage of architecture, as well as documenting the design process and publishing this as visual material along with images of final buildings.

Published in , S, M, L, XL brought together different modes of writing — description, proposition, manifesto, diary, fairy tale, travelogue and mediation on the contemporary city — along with 79 documentation of the design work produced by OMA over the past 20 years, all arranged according to scale.

At the same time, with students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Koolhaas started to focus on a number of large-scale research projects, including one on shopping. The book, Meta City Data Town, based on a video installation of the same name produced by the architectural practice MVRDV, is a publication that primarily deals with numbers.

Through visual number-crunching MVRDV points out that statistics are not empirical facts but instances of speculation that can provide interesting raw material for spatial invention. Datascapes can be understood as sites where critical investigations into the status of so-called facts and objectivity take place, and where what is usually considered as the documentation of design research processes becomes understood as formal proposition. They believe that architecture has suffered from looking to sociology, cultural analysis and politics for legitimation.

When FOA borrows from other disciplines, it favours instead science and geometry where it believes it can find processes that are architecture-specific in order to make links that are literal and based on material processes. FOA finds the scientific model interesting because it is rigorous, and according to Moussavi and Zaera Polo, architecture, as a professional activity, needs rigour.

Mobile or collapsible physical barriers and surveillance points will enable the reconfiguration of the borders between territories, allowing the terminal to be occupied by locals or invaded by foreigners. Since most buildings are responses to demands for programmes that support capitalism and the commodity consumption that goes with it, it seems that contemporary practitioners and their critics understand the potentials and dangers of this situation in different ways.

Could FOA and OMA, along with MVRDV, and numerous other contemporary practices, be producing an approach to architectural design that is ironical and therefore critical, or does their work simply slip without trace into the normalized activities of commodity capitalism?

This introduction discusses aspects of the work of cultural critic Walter Benjamin, whose writings have addressed how history is written and is understood in the present, and whose concept of the dialectical image has great relevance for those interested in art and architecture, for it provides a way of thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels conceived of in and written in , Benjamin discusses Trauerspiel a particular form of baroque theatre based on royal martyr dramas as a play of sorrow, a ceremonial and ritualized expression of grief, where the hero is both a tyrant and a martyr, both sovereign and Christ, part man and part god, grounded in history rather than myth, and emphasizing the corporeal as well as the transcendental.

They are residues of a dream- world. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. The arcade, an architecture that in the early twentieth century no longer represented the desires of the population, could be seen to stand for the transitory and destructive nature of capitalism.

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock. Buck-Morss discusses how, in the work of John Heartfield, montage techniques operate to switch two sets of signifier-signified relationships in order to question dominant ideologies.

These are located on a dying branch, Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. The image, in the tradition of the emblem, has a title and a caption. The caption both explains the image and provides a way of reading it critically, putting forward the suggestion that to understand political history as natural evolution is a myth. Illuminations London: Fontana, p. See Theory of the Avant- Garde, p. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components.

Benjamin met Lacis in and they 92 subtitles, which often consist of words and phrases taken from objects, signs and shop windows, are not related to the texts placed beneath them in obvious ways, but rather the relation of apparently unconnected thoughts and sentences borrowed from the city itself suggests alternative ways of reading and interpretations that might otherwise be overlooked.

Jennings eds Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings vol. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, and his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.

This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.