AR Reading List 010

Architecture is always hoping to achieve something of the status of art, writes Yvonne Farrell in her essay on Art + Craft. ‘Artists have the freedom to think and make on behalf of society’ but it is our job as architects ‘to fold the ordinary into something more worthwhile’. All of the arts influence each other, ‘lap at the other’s shore’. At the Bauhaus, architects, painters and sculptors mingled and discussed ideas about returning to craft with restless enthuasiasm. Some architect’s tread a gentle line that meanders into the realm of art, and artists often inhabit a realm that is decidedly spatial.

The artist residency represents a retreat, in its grandest form into a complex landscape like that of the southern Korean island Gapado or Ando’s wall of studios posied between land and sea in Casa Wabi. There is something particularly engaging in the brief for an artist’s studio or residence. Studios can take on a variety of appearances and locations, sometimes the architecture is incidental. Yet to design a space intended for creation is romantic, and also a practical challenge encapuslating considerations of light, space and patterns of living.

Register for free to read today and receive the AR Reading List straight to your inbox. Stay safe, and happy reading!

• Pleasure island: a remote Gapado remodelled, AR May 2020, Colin Marshall
  ‘Beyond attracting day-trippers, overnight guests, and artists-in-residence, the Gapado project’s long-term goals include bringing back some of its population lost to the vortex of Seoul, after the decline of local agricultural and fishery industries’

• Beyond the horizon: Casa Wabi near Oaxaca by Tadao Ando, AR April 2019, Juan Carlos Cano
  ‘The artists’ residences and studios are at the western end of the wall – rather than separate private from public space, instead the wall separates work from leisure; it is the meeting point of two landscapes that do not like to mingle’

• Teshima Art Museum by Ryue Nishizawa, Teshima Island, Japan, AR March 2011, Dana Buntrock
  ‘Even though the museum’s initial intent had been to create a flexible space that could accommodate a range of artworks, it ended up housing a single, sublimely subtle installation by the artist Rei Naito, inspired by Nishizawa’s architecture

• AR 120: Yvonne Farrell on Art + Craft, AR February 2017, Yvonne Farrell
  ‘Sculpture is focused form, and architecture is containment of life. The creative process, from imagining to making, is perhaps similar in the two disciplines, but architecture has other practical and social layers of responsibility to absorb and transcend’

• The nature of Andy Goldsworthy, AR February 1988, Peter Buchanan
  ‘Goldsworthy is exceptional not just in the ephemerality of his sculpture, but in the prolific and unselfconscious way he creates it to be enjoyed purely for what it is, devoid of cultural resonance and pretension’

• Typology: Artist Studio, AR February 2017, Tom Wilkinson
  ‘Today, art production is just as likely to take place on a laptop as in a paint-splattered loft; nevertheless, the studio retains its aura as the ultimate site of creation’

• Memories of a Bauhaus student, AR September 1968, George Adams
  ‘ What made this school of art different from others? Naturally, the group of modem artists teaching there, and the promise of their revolutionary teaching methods were a great attraction’