Art and Architecture in Ireland: Overlapping Fields and the Synthesis of Architectural Knowledge

Abstract

In the Republic of Ireland, architecture’s objective qualities, particularly its objectified aesthetic ones, are valued within the discipline above all others. Promoting collaborative and socially engaged practice in the field where art and architecture overlap can alter these existing paradigms by emphasizing instead architecture’s social, cultural, and political attributes. The ethnographic methods and theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, Leon Festinger, and Ian McGilchrist are employed here to help assess and address current conditions of praxis critically, and to enable a holistic understanding of increasingly diverse modes of architectural practice (aesthetic, critical, technical, and social). This study proposes that adopting some of the mutually supportive systems from the field of art has the potential to subvert the way architectural knowledge is disseminated and produced, and to challenge disciplinary values in a fundamental way.

Keywords:

• art
• architecture
• praxis
• collaboration
• field of production
• inter-disciplinary practice
• cognitive dissonance

Acknowledgements

Professor Hugh Campbell, Ph.D. supervisor and Dean of the School of Architecture, University College Dublin.

Notes

¹ Nishat Awan, Tatiana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency – Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

² Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Art Forum (February 2006): 178–83.

³ Awan et al., Spatial Agency, 28.

⁴ Dominic Stevens, Rural (Leitrim: Mermaid Turbulence, 2007), 85–6.

⁵ Commonage, “Commonage, Summer School Programme, 2011” (Callan, 2011).

⁶ Commonage, “Commonage, Summer School Programme, 2012” (Kilkenny, 2012).

⁷ Anne Cleary, “No Place Else,” in Moving Dublin, ed. Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly (Kinsale: Gandon, 2009), 14–18.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 1–32.

¹⁰ Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 227.

¹¹ Garry Stevens, The Favored Circle – The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 168–204.

¹² Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–13.

¹³ Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research, 1, no. 2 (2007): 4–5.

¹⁴ Bláithín Quinn, “Transcolonia,” http://www.transcolonia.wordpress.com (accessed May 15, 2012).

¹⁵ Paul Jenkins and Leslie Forsyth, eds., Architecture Participation and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

¹⁶ AC Arts Council of Ireland, “Engaging with Architecture Scheme,” http://www.artscouncil.ie/Funds/engaging-with-architecture-scheme/.Site (accessed May 4, 2016).

¹⁷ Pierre Bourdieu, “The Intellectual Field and the Creative Project” [Le marche des biens symboliques]. L’Annee Sociologique, no. 22 (1971): 49–126.

¹⁸ Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture (London: Verso, 2002), 5–20.

¹⁹ The use of the terms “situated” and “situating” is informed by the Situationists’ experiential interaction with space and their understanding of psychogeography, but does not in this instance represent the political interventions associated with the group; Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Levres Nues, 6 (September 1955).

²⁰ Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-Centred Society (New York: New Press, 1997), 33.