I wanted to add a comment about architecture further to the last entry but on a different track. This is to do with process. Architecture is such a differently paced art-form to the immediacy of painting; so many other factors are involved in the whole creative process, which introduce limits to react to and against. A different kind creative language - though the formal rigours of the visual remain a constant and provide us with a quality control.
Architecture plays such an important role in our lives, yet it is seldom discussed in terms of process, rather in terms of outcomes, or - to sharpen the point - intended outcomes. For the media attention given to major civic additions can be quite frenzied at times. The advertising and publicity of an intended project seems to have usurped the importance of the construction of it in the public’s eyes. We marvel at computer simulations whizzing us through the virtual skies, swooping on graceful parabolas in and out of the space of the edifice in ways that we could never possibly experience for real - unless of course NASA lent us some sophisticated craft to tootle about on.
Take two relatively recent London landmarks: the roof of the Great Court at the British Museum and the Millennium Bridge linking St. Paul’s with the Tate Modern (a cathedral and a wannabe one of sorts). I am not going to be side-tracked into the wobble issue of the later either (though any vestiges of arrogance in structural engineers has since dissipated I am sure). Each of these constructions enjoyed huge media campaigns, and each in their own way has added an über-cool feature that swaggers in the capital. They each, however, have a peculiar visual quality that is part of the experience of new builds that are high-tech in character. The process of designing and translating the design into three-dimensions has somehow negated itself through this very process so much so that it doesn’t feel translated at all - the synthesis feels hauntingly absent. It is a bizarre thing to stand in front or under one of these two landmarks for they still seem to have a virtual reality quality to them, yet in three-dimensional space. They simply do not seem to be “there’. The lines, curves, stantions and geodesic structures zoom or staccato their way through the air, but it is not our air.
The virtual look of a building can be tweaked or drastically altered at the click of a mouse. Software makes radical changes possible with immediacy. A computer simulation of the design provides a client and we the great unwashed also these days with a very clear idea of the look of the finished project before a single keystone has been laid, yet it also creates a misguided notion of the experience of the building.. Think how Giotto would have marvelled at it all, revelling in this facility instead of sweating it out on paper with a need to employ a state of the art system of perspective.
I am not saying that all this necessarily lowers the quality of architecture - maybe our visual experience bank is being mutated as a natural consequence of the evolution of the computer system. It makes me long for the sticky, gutty airiness of painting more though, which feels like -visually- more healthy eating. Maybe I am just getting on a bit and need to watch my intake of refined foods.