Fig 1 -The Expanded Field, diagram by Rosalind Krauss. Reprinted from Krauss, R. (1979). Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October, 8, p. 37
Rosalind Krauss was a prominent art critic in the ’60s and 70s. Her essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded field” (1979), is highly influential. Its usefulness for architecture was that of amplifying the perception of its limits.1 Her text addresses the idea of expanding the previously prohibited terms of architecture and landscape.
Krauss’s essay documented the tendency in the ’60s towards blurring the boundaries between art and architecture. Leading towards an expanded field in which art and architecture are not separate fields but rather two ends of a connected spectrum of disciplines which can intermingle, connect and critique each other. Her text illustrates the relationships among the various disciplines that constitute the newly expanded field of architecture. In that Krauss sets up a diagram of relations and distinctions that for the first time placed the sculpture of the 1960s in its relationship to other, non-sculptural arts, such as landscape and architecture.2 Krauss explains how sculpture had become obsolete and lost its way. Sculpture, at the time of writing the essay, had a strict set of rules and its own internal logic: impervious to change.3
For Krauss the quality of sculpture was not universal but distinguished by its memorial and monumental features; its steady loss of such precise constraints has instigated the fixation of the base creating a structure alien to its site. Thus sculpture entered a negative condition.4 Sculpture as Krauss represents in her diagram seemed to be suspended between the two negative connotations of landscape and architecture. Krauss argued that by simply reversing the negatives while preserving their polar opposites in accordance with the diagram, they could now be conveyed positively.4 This begins to stretch the assumed binaries of the field ampliforming it into an ‘expanded field’. Thus, modernist sculpture started the exploration of external spheres, emerging into something that was not sculpture but also ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’.5
It is this field, where ‘architecture’ and ‘not architecture’ are brought into question that will be explored. For as Krauss professes:
“In every case of these axiomatic structures, there is some kind of intervention into the real space of architecture ... the possibility ... of mapping the axiomatic features of the architectural experience--the abstract conditions of openness and closure--onto the reality of a given space.” 6
If this is true for sculpture in its postmodern field, we might be able to approach architecture in a similar manner and thus expand its field in its present investigative condition.
Krauss developed a new classification approach that recognized the expansive field that sculpture was starting to occupy demonstrating sculpture’s malleability as a medium, however, she understood the problem of defining modern artistic practices whose most innovative moments seemingly demanded the expansion of conventional disciplinary boundaries. Krauss’s diagram integrated site construction opposite sculpture and marked sites opposite axiomatic structures with landscape opposite architecture on one level and non-landscape opposite non-architecture parallel. As Krauss observes,
“… The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended.”7
From this one can generate an expansion of the field. Anthony Vidler remarks that out of this emerged for architecture
“… three new unifying themes, ideas of landscape, biological analogies, and new concepts of program.”8
Krauss provided sculpture with a strong position in post-modernism. It was this influence that helped the reading of site-specific art and sculpture.
Subsequent to when this text was written’, the boundaries between art and architecture have and are continuing to blur, giving rise to a variety of work that surpasses Krauss’s exertions; such as installations whose conceptual, spatial, and material courses have produced an expanding system of interrelations between the domains of architecture, sculpture, and landscape.9
1: Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, ed., Retracing the expanded field (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014), 98.
2,3,4,5,6,7, : Rosalind krauss, “Architecture and the expanded field”, in The Anti-aesthetic: essays on Postmodern culture, ed. Hal Foster. (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 30-44.
8: Anthony Vidler, “Architectures expanded field,” Art Forum (april 2004): 142-147.
9: Ila Berman and Douglas Burnham, Expanded Field: Installation Architecture Beyond Art (California: oro editions, 2015).
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