Durability – a building should stand up robustly and remain in good…show more content…

Beauty – it should be aesthetically pleasing.

According to Vitruvius, the architect should strive to fulfill each of these three attributes as well
as possible. Leon Battista Alberti, who elaborates on the ideas of Vitruvius in his treatise, De Re
Aedificatoria, saw beauty primarily as a matter of proportion, although ornament also played a
part. For Alberti, the rules of proportion were those that governed the idealised human figure,
the Golden mean.

The most important aspect of beauty was, therefore, an inherent part of an object, rather than
something applied superficially, and was based on universal, recognisable truths. The notion of
style in the arts was not developed until the 16th century, with the writing of Vasari:[10] by the
18th century, his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects had been
translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and English.
By the end of 18th century, with the industrialization of steel and glass, architecture began to
take on a different role in the society. Architecture was no longer about building structures for
an individual, but was about concerning with beauty, style, and aesthetics within the
technology of space (Conway 8). The idea that building plus art equals architecture was no
longer valid, as the equation undermined the true meaning of architecture. In Understanding
Architecture, Hazel Conway states, “the allocation of living space is economically, socially, and
culturally determined” (6), when discussing the purpose of architecture. This means that the
surrounding environment of the building, also referred to as built space, is often intertwined
with social relationships. Built space can be defined as the philosophical way of referring to
architecture. To a certain extent, the architecture becomes about the philosophical
investigation into built space, rather than establishing a single building. Through the examples
of artists and architectures, such as Rachel Whiteread, Robert Smithson, Meis Van Der Rohe,
and Gordon Matta-Clark, this paper will demonstrate how art pushes architecture into critical
examination of built space. In doing so, it will be evident that artists and architecture define
sculpture, object, prototype, installation, network, building, assemblage, and/or habitat
differently.
An artist who dealt with technologies of built space is Rachel Whiteread. The core concepts of
Whiteread’s work includes, playing with negative space and scale, and focusing on line and
form. In the piece called Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial a.k.a. Nameless Library, Whiteread
uses sculpture to represent what is not there, the empty space. By...