Twentieth-Century Engineering

Until lately art has been one thing and everything else something else. These structures are art and so is everything made. The distinctions have to be made within this assumption. The forms of art and of non-art have always been connected; their occurrences shouldn’t be separated as they have been. More or less, the separation is due to collecting and connoisseurship, from which art history developed. It is better to consider art and non-art one thing and make the distinctions ones of degree. Engineering forms are more general and less particular than the forms of the best art. They aren’t highly general though, as some well-designed utensils are. Simple geometric forms with little detail are usually both aesthetic and general.

The few good buildings, “real architecture”, are more specific than most of the engineering project. But most building are far inferior to engineering projects, which with their definite use and the supposed objectivity of their solutions, have been allowed a freedom and advancement not accorded to buildings and architecture. Buildings only have to have space; they are east to construct. Commercialism dominates the engineers and architects, and the best knowledge isn’t used.

Much of the engineering is better architecture than most architecture, It’s well known that Buckminster Fuller’s domes cannot be architecture. His lenticular Union Tank Car Company rebuilding plant(1959) in Baton Rouge is an interesting building, and that’s architecture. Excessive though genuine elegance also marred this exhibition, which, like most Museum of Modern Art shows, was overly dramatic, somewhat pretentious.



For more reading see
http://www.amazon.com/Donald-Judd-Architecture-Brigitte-Huck/dp/3775711325/a>

Who are some architects who you think show the Judd influence strongly?
Judd’s influence is extensive and pervasive.
Obviously there's Norman Foster, Herzog & de Meuron and Brad Cloepfil.  All have completed a lot of renovations and Judd loved old buildings. He almost always worked with existing structures. What’s more, Cloepfil’s Maryhill Overlook is a rather overt adaptation of Judd’s concrete and progression pieces.  A few years ago in an interview Brad told me how he looked to Judd, Serra and Heizer’s spatial vocabulary when he was a young architect because he felt the artists were dealing directly with space in a way the architects at that time often were not.  He’s right: I completely agree with him. 

Read more here
http://chatterbox.typepad.com/portlandarchitecture/2010/04/sublime-stillness-donald-judd-conference-brings-leading-contemporary-art-scholars-japanese-architect.html/a>

X House, Glass house designed by Arquitectura X, in
La Tola, Valle de Tumbaco, Quito, Ecuador.

If only I were, I feel in this moment, someone who could see all this as if he had no relation to it except seeing it — contemplate all of it as if he were the only adult traveler who had today reached the surface of life! If only I hadn’t learned, from birth onward, to give accepted meanings to these things, if only I could see them in the expression they have separate from the expression that has been imposed upon them. If only I could understand the human reality in the woman selling fish independent of her being a fishmonger and know that she exists and sells. If only I could see the policeman the way God sees him. If only I could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, like the revelation of the Mystery, but directly, like the blooming of reality.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 1914–1934

http://homegallerydesign.com/x-house-design//a>