Imagination pouvoir

—Graffito, Paris 1968 [1]

Recent advances in digital technology and communicationhave necessitated a critical appraisal of new methods of imageconstruction as they relate to architectural production. Con-currently, the popularization of the Internet and wireless tech-nologies has pressed architects to recognize less material formsof public interaction, which is historically considered theprovince of architecture. As a result, the discipline is facing anontological crisis, which compels a review and critique of itsorigins.

A period of questioning and criticism occurred in Western

art during the late 1960s; by exam-ining this past, it is possible to gainan understanding of the challengesthat architectural imaging currentlyfaces vis-à-vis digital media. Theforces that contributed to the de-materialization of the art “object”are in many ways similar to those atwork in the dematerialization of thearchitectural “object,” giving rise toincreasing attention to process and

©2007 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 51–57, 2007 51

G E N E R A L A R T I C L E

Formulating Abstraction: Conceptual Art and the Architectural Object

Therese Tierney

Therese Tierney (scholar) University of California Berkeley, CA U.S.A. E-mail: <Tierney@media.mit.edu>.

A B S T R A C T

Digital techniques, primarilysoftware appropriated from theentertainment and industrialdesign sectors, have destabi-lized the essential status of thearchitectural image-objectformulated in classical philo-sophical thought. WesternEuropean art experienced asimilar crisis when conceptualart movements of the 1960schallenged Clement Greenberg’snotion of medium specificity.The author examines work by conceptual artists whosetheories posit alternative viewsof spatial and social relationsbased on open-ended systemsand indeterminacy. An examina-tion of the relationship betweenmateriality and abstraction asexemplified in new media’sreformulation of architecturaldesign processes indicates howa more inclusive and mutableprofession has been realized.

Fig. 1. Zaha Hadid Architects, The Contemporary Art and ArchitectureCentre for Rome, 1999–present. (© Zaha Hadid Architects) A digitalrendering of the museum complex describes urban flows, as well as the design concept of “irrigating” a large urban field with lineardisplay surfaces.

context. This philosophical shift could besaid to have originated when art criticClement Greenberg’s argument formedium specificity ultimately exhausteditself.

Any reconsideration of the architec-tural image-object has serious conse-quences, because the image instantiatesnot only a process of information ex-change but also a mode of thinking. Theterm image will be used here to describearchitectural drawings, whether analogueor digital; photographs; renderings; ani-mations; or new media. While in the pastvisionary architects, most notably Gio-vanni Battista Piranesi (in 1745), Etienne-Louis Boulee (1784) and AntonioSant’Elia (1914), experimented for vari-ous reasons with redefining architecturaldrawings as products or media, it isworthwhile to reinvestigate art’s responseto technology’s challenge of immaterial-ity, which invites comparison to currentarchitectural discourse.

During the early 20th century the nor-mative vision of the fine arts was calledinto question as a result of numerous fac-tors, most especially technological ad-vances in methods of representation, firstin photography and later in Dadaist film.Both film (through movement) and con-ceptual art (through “non-art,” where theidea is the most important aspect of thework, and “anti-form,” a plastic qualitythat emerges through process, for exam-

rizing was not unique to art but manifestthroughout science, music, performanceand linguistics. By transposing the1960–1970s art debate onto architecture,Swiss architects Jacques Herzog andPierre de Meuron, among others, al-lowed new possibilities to emerge in theirdesigns: Architectural expression couldbe said to operate on multiple registers,only one of which is material; it is definedby a process and is part of a larger cul-tural and biological system [4].

ESSENTIALISM ORANTI-ESSENTIALISMEarly 20th-century codes of normalcy orappropriateness in art have been said tooriginate with the art critic and historianJoshua Reynolds. In his Discourses on Art(1771), he attempted to formalize art’suniversal principles of pan-historicalgreatness [5]. Reynolds also originatedthe concept that paintings are experi-enced “all at once” because they occupya defined space and are perceived in onemoment of time. The other notions re-ceived from Reynolds were firstly, thatcertain mediums do certain things in cer-tain ways (medium specificity); secondly,art genres should not exceed theirboundaries—for example, in the trans-ference from one medium into another;and lastly, the importation of onemedium into another violates conven-

ple, a set of instructions) necessitated ashift in conceptions of what precisely con-stituted a work of art [2]. Questions wereposed by critics and artists alike, all ofwhich threatened to destabilize the artworld: Is a work an eternal immutable ob-ject? A commodity? A process?

Three closely related conceptual artmovements have much relevance to to-day’s crisis in the status of the architec-tural image: Arte Povera, process art andart-and-technology. Conceptual artistswho participated in the discourse of thelate 1960s concluded that what was mostintrinsic to art was not its object-status,but, first, the inherent cognitive conceptand second, the open-ended exploratoryprocess of expressing the concept [3].These notions later filtered into archi-tecture via architects and designers whosesocial networks extended into concep-tual and process-art circles. Some of thesearchitects, such as Rem Koolhaas andZaha Hadid at the Architectural Associa-tion and Daniel Libeskind, director ofCranbrook Academy, introduced into stu-dio pedagogy new design methods thatwere later reflected in their built works(Fig. 1).

In addition, conceptual artists also sawart as expressive of a larger social and bi-ological system. Conceptual artists de-termined that there were no clearboundaries between the artist, the art ex-pression and the audience. Such theo-

52 Tierney, Formulating Abstraction

Fig. 2. Herzog & de Meuron Architects, Ricola-Europe SA Production & Storage Building, Mulhouse-Brunstatt, France (1993). (Photo © Margherita Spiluttini) The structure is designed to drain rainwater onto a vertical wall surface. When sunlight interacts with environmental conditions, it creates a constantly changing surface reflection, which challenges the building’s materiality.

tions [6]. One can understand theseprinciples as expressions representingthe permanence or stability of an exist-ing aristocratic hegemony. Additionally,they supported the view that architec-tural expressions, whether images orbuildings, exist in fixed, static, timelessmodes.

Reynolds’s treatise was a refinement onthe dramatist and art critic GottholdEphraim Lessing’s earlier work, Laocoon(1766). Lessing contrasted painting’s sin-gular moment of perception with thetemporality of poetry. He concluded thatpoetry was best represented consecu-tively, that is to say, sequentially, becauseit was experienced over time [7]. BothReynolds and Lessing promoted rigid,inviolable media boundaries and wereunable to entertain the possibility thatmedia might be combined.

Although Reynolds and Lessing werecertainly influential, the leading figureof 20th-century art criticism, ClementGreenberg, was ultimately responsiblefor many accepted conventions aboutaesthetics. “Purity in art consists in theacceptance of the limitations of the me-dium of the specific art . . . an art which isnothing else except sensuous” [8]. HisTowards a Newer Laocoon, written in 1940,developed arguments by Reynolds andKant to justify criticism of art. His twomain ideas were that art (as he definedit) is a nonconceptual, subjective, uni-versal and irreducible pleasure, and thataesthetic judgment is disinterested anddetached.

Speaking as an unrestrained positivist,Greenberg perpetuated the limiting con-cept of medium specificity. His writingsappealed for an explicit and rationalstructuralism of the arts. In Greenberg’sview, the medium of art, its material-ity, was paramount, because it was the ul-timate grounding for the work of art.Even more importantly, only abstract artwas considered a pure expression of itsmedium, because Greenberg reductivelyconcluded that flatness and opticalitywere the only two irreducible aestheticexperiences in painting. In addition, ab-stract art, to maintain its purity, also re-quired absolute integrity, which is to say,no intermixing of other media [9].

While Greenberg directed his criticismto paintings and sculpture, his theorieswere not unfamiliar to architecture. Areexamination of architecture’s geneal-ogy shows that the discipline inheritedClassicist notions of integrity and me-dium specificity. Classicism (including,broadly speaking, Greek, Hellenistic andRoman styles, as well as those of the 17th,18th and 19th centuries, where these con-

architectural systems similar to classi-cism—for example, typologies and mostbuilding regulations—are likewise pre-scriptive systems.) Ancient Greek aes-thetics attempted to purify the form, andits constraints were maintained in subse-

tain some allusion to the antique orders[10]) established a prescriptive systemcomposed of rules determining theacceptability of a design’s formal or func-tional aspects on the basis of nonvio-lation of certain constraints. (Formal

Tierney, Formulating Abstraction 53

Fig. 3. Bruce Nauman, Live/Taped Video Corridor, wallboard, video camera, videotape player and two video monitors, dimensions vary with installation, 1969–1970. (© 2007 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York) The interactive relationship between physical installation, the viewer/participant and the video camera dissolves theformal divisions between art object and art experience. Gordon Matta-Clarke’s Splitting: Four Corners appears at left.

quent architectural treatises from AndreaPalladio to Marc-Antoine Laugier, andeven in Robert Venturi’s postmodernism;all consistently referred back to classicismas their true origins. Thus occurred re-peated resurgences of classical codingafter the Middle Ages, from the Renais-sance through the 18th century and con-tinuing with the various revival styles ofthe 19th century. Architectural peda-gogy, as well as practice, consisted of a his-torical referencing, a recombination ofpreexisting elements and an uncriticalacceptance of tradition.

When World War I resulted in a socialand cultural break with aristocratic aes-thetic privilege, the efforts of the avant-garde, primarily the de Stijl movementand other early modernists, provided themeans for early-20th-century architectsto break with history. In an attempt atself-criticism best represented by Le Cor-busier and the International Style, mod-ern architects established their ownversion of formal purification. However,while it is commonly acknowledged thatLe Corbusier’s modernist version of func-tionality, purity and the machine aes-thetic effectively replaced the Vitruviancoding of utilitas, firmitas, venusta (usefuleconomy, structural integrity and aes-thetic pleasure) [11], even Le Corbusierdid not actually make a clear historicalbreak but studied classical proportions tojustify the forms of racecars and his ownsystem of regulating lines [12].

Moreover, by mid-century, with few ex-ceptions, architectural discourse laggedbehind the internal art debate becauseof the demands of a post–World War IIbuilding expansion. The architecturaldiscipline had to contend with a severehousing shortage and new constructionmethods. While isolated moments ofcritique and experimentation existed,such as among the Situationists or ininnovative proposals for a new Austral-ian national government center at Can-

[15]. In a sense this was a liberation of art from the constraints of representa-tion, freeing it to do what only art can ex-pressly do.

With this in mind, the end of the clas-sical age, which Nietzsche pronouncedan end without return, was in actualitythe exhaustion of the early rationalistmodernist project. By the 1960s, more-over, art was responding to an even morecomplex set of factors. In addition to thecritique of rationalism, it was also open-ing up to interdisciplinary ventures. Inthe wider social milieu, student riots, newdivorce laws, a mixing of high and lowculture and the influence of advertisingand mass media marked the disappear-ance of any kind of absolute referent thatmight frame a system of essentializedknowledge [16].

While many avant-garde movements in the late 1960s and 1970s attempted toarticulate this disappearance of ground,conceptual art had particular bearingupon the architectural image [17]. Thebroader rubric of conceptual art ap-plies to “work in which the idea is par-amount and/or the material form issecondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap,unpretentious and/or dematerialized”[18]. These art movements were directlyrelated to the transformation of the ar-chitectural image by two major contem-poraneous trends: first, new theories ofrepresentation and second, new techno-logically derived mediums. Both resultedin an unprecedented dematerializationof the art object.

This ontological crisis of representa-tion is crucial to understanding one ofthe forms of resistance in architecturetoward new forms of media expression.Traditionally, architects represented anidea in a drawing, and the drawing wasthen represented in a building. Althoughthe drawing had documentary status, it needed to be further translated intoanother medium: material form. If inactuality architects only construct ideasand the design evolves dynamically as aprocess, then all expressions, in whatevermedia, are a record of the process. Ar-chitectural expressions then participatein a larger design continuum with con-ceptual or cognitive activity at one endand materiality at the other, with manyvariants or media in between. Rigid dis-tinctions between media are not only un-necessary but patently misleading.

In one of their few areas of agreementwith Greenberg, conceptual artists alsoapprehended the increasing colonizationof art by consumer capitalism. In Towardsa Newer Laocoon, Greenberg’s critique ofcapitalism was grounded in a fear of mass

berra, the majority of architects werepreoccupied with the demands of a rap-idly expanding economy. As a result, mostarchitects were engaged with topics re-lated to functionality and standardization[13], leaving little time to reflect on thefilmic implications of projects such asFriedrich Keisler’s visionary “EndlessHouse” [14].

CONCEPTUAL ARTAND ARCHITECTUREIn 1969 philosopher and social criticMichel Foucault, in The Archaeology ofKnowledge, ventured that the crisis of clas-sical thought was produced by a loss ofground. Within the field of art, this losswas accompanied by the loss of an art-product produced on the basis of a de-sire to represent. It has been suggestedthat this loss was actually initiated muchearlier in the century by artists’ adoptionof a new technology, photography, whichdestabilized traditional art practices suchas portrait or landscape painting. TheSurrealist André Breton believed that it was photography’s indexical charac-ter that compelled a reexamination ofart’s ontological origins and purpose aswell as of the grounding of the disciplineitself.

Breton argued that artists in the clas-sical tradition represented a preexistingcondition, whether or not through theaid of Cartesian perspective, the cameraobscura or other optical devices. Avant-garde artists of the early 1900s, on theother hand, were making attempts to pre-sent an original concept or idea previ-ously unknown. Influenced by Freud’spsychological research, Cubism, Surreal-ism and Dadaism expressed previouslyunseen subjective worlds. They “soughtto explore the unconscious as a site ofmeaning and to challenge rationalist dis-tinctions between self and other, insideand outside, conscious and unconscious”

54 Tierney, Formulating Abstraction

Fig. 4. Hans Haacke, Conden-sation Cube, clear acrylic, water,light, air currents, temperature,climate in exhibition situation, 30 × 30 × 30 cm, 1963. (© 2007Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)Haacke was concerned with pro-duction of systems and the opera-tional structure of organizations,in which transfer of information,energy and/or material occurs.Here he demonstrates the depen-dency of a relatively closed systemon its environmental context:Changes in temperature andhumidity lead to condensation and evaporation within the cube.

culture and of a loss of an essentialistaesthetic [19]. Furthermore Greenbergwas convinced that only abstract art, be-cause of its pure medium specificity,could successfully carry the burden of de-feating capitalism. Ironically, however, he was unable to recognize how artiststhemselves had been converted into aform of cultural capital by the economicprocesses of art production and con-sumption [20].

While abstract expressionists and min-imalists were still producing discreteform-objects distributed through a tra-ditional gallery system, conceptual artistssaw a decreasing range of expression inadherence to the preordained medium-specificity protocol. Thus, their effortswere directed toward a deterritorializa-tion of art from its commercial contextin such a way that new possibilities couldemerge. In this substantial respect, con-ceptual art differed from the avant-gardeproject. As Edward Shanken explains,

Resisting the arch formalism that had be-come institutionalized by the 1960s, con-ceptual art . . . sought to analyze the ideasunderlying the creation and reception of art, rather than to elaborate anotherstylistic convention in the historical suc-cession of modernist avant-garde move-ments [21].

The dissemination of anti-rationalistwritings by John Dewey, an early advocateof knowledge acquisition through ex-perimentation, as well those of RolandBarthes and Umberto Eco, validated newapproaches to the art process. These writ-ers endorsed exploration, complexityand diversity. This open-ended approach,while not denying history, allowed it tobe renegotiated [22].

The redefinition of creative processeswas also extended to unorthodox mate-rials. In Turin, Italy, Arte Povera chal-lenged the assumption that only marbleor bronze were suitable materials forsculpture. Trash or refuse, industrial ma-terials, even people, as well as immaterialprocesses such as moisture, sound or en-ergy, could all be art. Concurrently, art-and-technology also questioned the ideathat only tangible media are inherent toartistic expression. Instead, conceptualartists believed that art expressions couldbe written, gestured, spoken, acted,filmed, industrially produced or concep-tualized. The work of art might exist as amomentary, time-based action, such asperformance, as in Arte Povera artistMichelangelo Pistoletto’s Ball of Newspa-pers (Minus Objects) (1966–1968). In thework as event and performance, an im-mense papier-mâché ball was rolled

ceasingly recorded the sound of its ownmechanisms until it broke down. In AstaCurbata (Bent Pole) (1967), the viewer’sperception was guided away from thework of art to an awareness of the basicdimensions of space and thus of experi-ence itself [24].

These installations did not remain as singular or isolated moments withinthe art world but formed a trajectory into contemporary architecture. JacquesHerzog and Pierre de Meuron, PeterZumthor, Elizabeth Diller and RichardScofidio have all made claims to thephilosophies of conceptual art. PritzkerAward winners Herzog and de Meuronfrequently collaborate with artists as partof their design method. The architectshave explained that each project beginswith a particular form of non-directed

through the streets of Turin and filmed.Later, the ball, as sculpture, was enclosedin a metal cage and retitled Mappamondo(Globe). This version later appeared inan exhibition in Amalfi. Pistoletto was ul-timately questioning the nature of theevent: Is it documentary (newspapers) oractuality (performance)? [23] The in-vestigative and participatory process wasforemost, however. In another example,Emilio Prini, who produced some of themost dematerialized work associated withArte Povera, was concerned with notionsof time and space and sought to recon-nect aesthetic experience with a dura-tional experience of actual lived time.This echoed explorations of the conceptof duration by the philosopher HenriBergson. In Prini’s work L’USA usa (TheUSA Uses) (1969), a tape recorder un-

Tierney, Formulating Abstraction 55

Fig. 5. Tissue Culture &Art (Oron Catts & IonatZurr) in collaborationwith Stelarc, (top) ExtraEar—1/4 Scale, 2003:small ear in hand (bottom) Extra Ear—1/4 Scale, close up, semi-living sculptures ofbiodegradable polymerand human chondrocytecells, 3cm × 1.5cm ×1.5cm, 2008. (© OronCatts and Ionat Zurr)Art is continually opento redefinition; TC&Ahave extended theirinvestigations into living systems.

questioning; the inclusion of an artist re-flects their refusal to presume in advancewhat a future building ought to look like(Fig. 2). Swiss artist Remy Zaugg states,“If we know what art or architecture are,we, you and I, merely produce illustra-tions of what we already know aboutarchitecture or art” [25]. In another col-laborative project with a biologist, Her-zog designed a garden structure, theEDEN Pavilion, which reacted to theweathering process of lichen by trans-forming the concrete roof structure intoa living, evolving generative canopy. In-stead of memorializing a static momentin time, the architectural expression en-compassed temporality, interacting withthe environment whether in sun, fog or rain.

In closely analyzing conceptual art, itshould be noted that many rigid disci-plinary boundaries and categorizationswere initiated by critics and academies,not the artists themselves, most of whomresisted all attempts at classification. Itmight otherwise be confusing that con-currently with Arte Povera, Americanartists Bruce Nauman, Walter de Mariaand Michael Heizer were linked withwhat was termed process art. It differedfrom other conceptual art in that an artistwould set a process in motion and awaitunpredictable results (Fig. 3). This ex-emplified a radical shift from artist as pri-mogenitor to artist as one who sets up anautonomous and random process.

In Hans Haacke’s Plexiglas cubes, or“weather boxes,” water condensed andevaporated in response to the changinglevels of light and temperature in thegallery (Fig. 4). “A sculpture that phys-ically reacts to its environment and/oraffects its surroundings is no longer to be regarded as an object,” explainedHaacke.

The range of outside factors influencingit, as well as its own radius of action,reach beyond the space it materially oc-cupies. It thus merges with the environ-ment in a relationship that is betterunderstood as a system of interdepen-dent processes. These processes—trans-fers of energy, matter or information—evolve without the viewer’s empa-thy. . . . A system is not imagined; it is real [26].

Systems thinking, as well as cybernet-ics, were at the same time making theirway into other disciplines, including art,via art-and-technology, and architecturaldesign theory. Within the architecturaldiscipline, self-criticism occurred primar-ily through Horst Rittel and other second-generation theorists of the 1970s whocritiqued scientific rationalism’s prescrip-

(1986). At that time there was little newwork and even less construction, so newlygraduated, ambitious, yet unemployedarchitects began to trespass art’s histori-cal territory in search of new forms of ar-chitectural expression.

PERSPECTIVESThe furthest trajectory of this line ofquestioning led to the notion that the in-trinsic experience of cultural productionmight be nonmaterial. It was further elab-orated in two influential writings: RobertSmithson’s Tour of the Monuments of Pas-saic New Jersey and Samuel Wagstaff Jr.’sinterview, Talking with Tony Smith, whichincluded Smith’s night ride on the un-finished New Jersey Turnpike [30]. Bothessays radically altered preconceived at-titudes about the art experience.

At first I didn’t know what it was, but itseffect was to liberate me from the manyviews I had about art. It seemed there wasa reality there that had not any expres-sion in art. The experience on the roadwas something mapped out but not so-cially recognized. I thought to myself, itought to be clear that’s the end of art.Most painting looks pretty pictorial afterthat. There is no way to frame it; you justhave to experience it [31].

This view radically differed from pre-vious social codifications of the art object,in that Smith was attempting to definethe art expression as nonmaterial, that isto say, as an experience. A similar rupturewas effected by conceptual artists whoexplored “networks of signification” bydeploying language through the infor-mation arts. Their efforts led to a largercritique of traditional art norms throughthe analysis of the operative relationswithin semiotic systems [32]. Contin-gencies of meaning and material con-verged in the first digital art installations,as diverse as Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV, Sonya Rapoport’s Goethe’s Urplfanze(which later evolved into Shared Dynam-ics) and some of the early interactive, dig-itally based art-and-technology works.

These approaches could then be simi-larly applied to architectural expression,making it possible to frame architecturalproduction in a more conceptual way.Given that materiality was replaced ex-clusively by ephemeral experience, con-textuality became foregrounded andinstrumental in the perception of thework of architecture. Historically, classi-cal/modern architecture viewed the sin-gular built object as inseparable from thearchitectural experience. However, uponreexamination, this is always revealed tobe an assumption. The definition of anarchitectural experience is in fact em-

tive methods and forged interdisciplinarydesign research [27]. Advances in tech-nology, psychology, computer sciencesand especially “autonomous design” im-pinged on academic disciplines, creatinga need for them to come to terms withthe very same issues regarding media andmethodology that we face today. The artcritic Jack Burnham

pushed the exploration of the relation-ship between art and technology to anunprecedented point. In 1970, he cu-rated the exhibition Software, InformationTechnologies: Its New Meaning for Art . . .the show drew parallels between theephemeral programs and protocols ofcomputer software and the increasingly“dematerialized” forms of experimentalart, which the critic interpreted, meta-phorically, as functioning like informa-tion processing systems [28].

Most conceptual artists also incorpo-rated an interest in perceptual psychol-ogy and the role of the viewer, in additionto the processes of making. Primacy wasgiven to immediacy of the experience,traditionally associated with architecturalaffects. This emphasis was reflected in theincreased scale of their projects, often ex-ceeding traditional gallery or museumspace and venturing into architecturalmodes of expression. In one example,the negative space of the exhibition hallis defined by the stacks of felt and thewalls. In another, Joseph Beuys removedthe exterior wall of a gallery that directlyfaced an alley and thereby engagedpedestrians as part of the installation. In conceptual moves borrowed largelyfrom the Situationists, actions of pass-ersby and coincidental meetings in timecontributed to the work of art. These ef-forts suggest an element of interactivityand a merging of art, technology and ar-chitecture. Conceptual art was dedicatedto the possibility of making art outsideconventional media, outside normalcy.

By dismantling the inherited framearound defined art, that is to say, theframe of medium specificity, artistsopened up the territory of art to includethe immaterial conceptual realm as a wayto renegotiate the art experience. Theultimate infiltration of Arte Povera, pro-cess art and art–and-technology intoarchitectural modes of thinking and pro-duction was perversely caused by an ex-tended economic recession during thelate 1970s and 1980s [29]. We find thestance taken up by architects who werefamiliar with both process art and per-formance: In the United States, DillerScofidio + Renfro utilized this approachwith their Times Square installation SoftSell (Color Plate A No. 2) and their per-formance of Duchamp’s Delay in Glass

56 Tierney, Formulating Abstraction

bedded within a larger social and culturalsystem. One objective of critical theoryhas been to remove surface layers of ma-teriality and expose the invisible forcesoperating on form, which describe an in-tricate network of social and economicrelationships. This leads one to suggestthat the intrinsic architectural experi-ence might not be materially grounded—that it might actually be a set of relationsor even a special kind of attention exist-ing outside normative boundaries. Thisnotion is not unique but was advanced by conceptualists who indicated that the most exciting “art” might be still bediscovered in social energies not yet des-ignated as art [33], or by John Cage in re-gard to musical composition and EleanorRosch in her psychology research [34].Architecture, like art, is continually opento redefinition (Fig. 5). However, its ac-ceptance can only be predicated on a re-examination of existing architecturaldesign theories and the proposition of anew ground rather than a deconstructionper se.

It also seems evident that instead ofconstituting yet another reactionary avant-garde movement, the various threads ofconceptual art were actually an attemptto deterritorialize art, to abstract it froma historically bound context in such a waythat new interpretive connections couldbe formed. This process of deterritorial-ization further recoded the interpretivematrix of the original historical contextas part of a socially reflexive process. First,while Arte Povera may not have specifiedexactly what art is, it certainly re-inscribedthe boundaries of art production to en-compass the conceptual or non-material.Second, process art revealed the narra-tive process of its own making, so thatwhatever form the art object may take, italso occupied a transition in time. Third,art-and-technology, using less materialmodes of expression, found a way to de-fine art as a set of social relations, even iftechnologically supported.

A broader perceptual shift thusemerged from the 1960s art world, onethat eventually found its way into archi-tectural pedagogy and practice. By themid-1990s, new theories of representa-tion and technologically derived me-dia supported a more diverse range ofexpression for architects, including in-stallations and web sites, once again gen-

14. The questions that the Surrealists asked during1920–1930s were revisited again during the 1960–1970s. Although architectural discourse was not es-pecially engaged with topics related to doubling, me-dia presentations or the origins of transmedia art,other artists were.

15. Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women,Surrealism and Representation (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1998) p. 5.

16. Flood and Morris [2] p. 24.

17. Peter Eisenman does not make distinctions be-tween the art process and the architectural process(although he does distinguish their products). PeterEisenman, “Conceptual Architecture: Towards a De-finition,” A+U, No. 2 (February 2001) p. 365.

18. Lippard [3] p. vii.

19. Greenberg [8] p. 301.

20. Through his writings, Greenberg promoted ab-stract expressionism via the gallery system, inadver-tently or perhaps intentionally inflating the value ofhis own art collection.

21. Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age:Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo 35, No.2, 433–438 (2002) p. 433.

22. Flood and Morris [2] p. 16.

23. Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, exhibi-tion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 10March–11 August 2002.

24. Flood and Morris [2] p. 17.

25. Wilfried Wang, Herzog & de Meuron (Basel,Switzerland: Birkhauser Verlag, 1992) p. 191.

26. Germano Celant, Arte Povera (New York: Praeger,1969) p. 179.

27. Jean-Pierre Protzen, Architecture Lecture: De-sign Theories and Methods, Arch 230, University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Spring 2003.

28. Shanken [21] p. 433.

29. See Ref. [4].

30. Tony Smith was educated and practiced as an ar-chitect.

31. Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith,”ArtForum, Vol. 4 (December 1966) p. 19.

32. Shanken [21] p. 433.

33. Lippard [3] p. xxii.

34. Eleanor Rosch, “If You Depict a Bird, Give ItSpace to Fly: Eastern Psychologies, the Arts, and Self-Knowledge,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Liter-ary Criticism 30, Nos. 1–2, 236–253 (2001).

Manuscript received 27 April 2005.

Therese Tierney is currently a doctoral scholarat University of California, Berkeley. During2005, she studied at Massachusetts Instituteof Technology Media Laboratory, where shewas engaged in design research on emergentsystems. An award-winning architect and de-sign instructor, Tierney is the author of Ab-stract Space: Beneath the Media Surface(forthcoming 2007) and co-editor of NetworkPractice: New Strategies for Architectureand Design.

erated during a building recession. Thegradual infiltration of these three artmovements, Arte Povera, process art andart-and-technology, as part of the largerconceptual art movement, into architec-tural modes of thinking and productionindirectly contributed to a transversal ofmedia boundaries to include digitalforms of expression and ultimately to anunprecedented dematerialization of thearchitectural image-object.

References and Notes

1. National Public Radio, interview with film direc-tor Bernardo Bertolucci, “Morning Edition,” 6 Feb-ruary 2004.

2. Richard Flood and Francis Morris, Zero to Infinity:Arte Povera 1962–1972, exh. cat. (London: Tate Mu-seum Modern Art, 2001) p. 21.

3. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” inLucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerializationof the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Los Angeles: Uni-versity of California Press, 1973) p. 28.

4. Interview with Pierre de Meuron, Basel, Switzer-land, 14 July 2001.

5. The principles of art’s universal subjectivity werelater codified in Immanuel Kant’s “On the Ideal ofBeauty,” from Critique of Judgement (first published1790), Werner S. Plucher, trans. (Indianapolis, IN:Hackett, 1987) and found their way into Greenberg’sthinking.

6. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, Robert R. Wark,ed. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959) pp.145, 175, 182.

7. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay uponthe Limits of Painting and Poetry, Ellen Frothingham,trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1957) pp. 91–92.

8. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,”Partisan Review 7, No. 4 ( July–August 1940) p. 305.

9. Shannon Jackson, Charles Altieri and WhitneyDavis, Theory across the Arts, Rhetoric 240G, Uni-versity of California at Berkeley, Fall 2003.

10. John Summerson, The Classical Language of Ar-chitecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966) pp. 7–8.

11. An exception was the Bauhaus under WalterGropius’s direction. His manifesto called for a unifi-cation of all the arts, including performance and the-ater, “in a cathedral of socialism.”

12. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Freder-ick Etchells, trans. (New York: Payson and Clark LTD,1927) pp. 65–83.

13. While many architects, such Alison and PeterSmithson, and councils, such as the Congrès Inter-nationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), wereconcerned with social and economic equality afterthe war, most of their efforts centered on the issueof mass or social housing as a result of a manufac-turing drive spurred on by production during andafter the war. For many architects, it was difficult toseparate mass culture from the goal of standardiza-tion, which was believed to be the only practical eco-nomic strategy to accomplish social justice. Eventhese efforts were primarily confined to Europe, asthe majority of American architects operated in themidst of a post–World War II building boom.

Tierney, Formulating Abstraction 57

Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art

Leonardo Special SectionGuest Editors: Tom Rockwell and Tami I. Spector

Over the last decade, “nano” has become the buzzword signifying everything from imagined atomic-scalerobotic utopias to small electronics. For scientists the shift toward nano has also become ubiquitous; whatused to be referred to as “molecular” has been reframed as “nano,” 27 journals devoted to nanotech/nanoscience are now published, and the National Science Foundation and other granting agencies havedevoted a significant amount of funding toward nanotech/nanoscience. Among engineers, scientists andscience-studies scholars, discussions of the potential of nanotech/nanoscience abound, including confer-ences that debate the pros and cons of a nano-hegemony and attempt to debunk some of the hype. Artists,however, have only begun to explore this emergent scientific field, leaving it wide open for creative inter-pretation. With this special section of Leonardo we hope to ignite artists’ interest in the exploration of nan-otech/nanoscience and encourage scientists, scholars and educators to contemplate the implications of an art-nanotech/nanoscience connection.

Leonardo, in collaboration with the Exploratorium under the auspices of the Nanotech Informal ScienceEducation Network, will publish a series of special sections periodically over the next 5 years exploring theintersections of nanotech/nanoscience and art. We are especially seeking submissions of artworks (visual,performance, sound, etc.) with artists’ statements explaining the relationship of the work to nanotech/nanoscience; essays from scientists, engineers and scholars exploring the connection between nanotech/nanoscience and art; and essays and visuals aiming at nanotech/nanoscience education that uses the artsas a pedagogical tool.

Interested artists and authors are invited to send proposals, queries and/or manuscripts to the Leonardo editorial office: Leonardo, 800 Chestnut St., San Francisco, CA 94133, U.S.A. E-mail:<isast@leonardo.info>. Editorial Guidelines for Authors can be found at <www.leonardo.info>.

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