Porter Tom - Will Alsop

As a fine art student in the late fifties, when I became interested in his Purism theory, Le corbusier was initially known to me first and foremost as a painter. It was only later that I realized that the Purist rules, explored through the medium of paint on canvas in tandem with Amde Ozenfant for refining and simplifying form and dispensing with ornamentation, were a rehearsal for Le corbusiers ensuing and epic architectural contribution to Modernism and a machine-age aesthetic. However, I also came to learn that the relationship between his painting and architectural activities, like his reputed penchant for cross-dressing, was separated by a work regimen divided by the two halves of the day Le corbusier spending the morning painting, and dressing for the part, and the afternoon, assuming more formal garb and donning his trademark bow tie, working as an architect. On subsequently visiting his atelier atop the Molitor Building in the Porte dAuteuil district of Paris I also realized that his double life was also reflected in the two clearly demarcated studios separated by a large central pivoting door one custom-designed facing east and dedicated to painting and the other, facing west, specifically for designing architecture. Although I came to realize that Le corbusiers persona embraced both the role of the artist and the architect being considered by many as the epitome of the total artist the expression of this duality not only smacks of a split personality but it also reflects the schism that, despite the attempt at a full-blooded transfusion during the Baroque period, had caused the gradual separation of fine art and architecture into discrete disciplines. However, this schism had not always existed. According to the theory proposed by Op artist Victor Vasarely, this bifurcation results from two major influences that can be traced back to the Renaissance the very period when the architect, the painter and the sculptor, equipped with an intelligence capable of multi-channelled expression, could be one and the same person. Firstly, the increasing separation and specialization of roles within art and science, and, secondly, the birth of the notion of the independence of the work of art which, spurred on by the beginnings of archaeology in the 1440s, was fuelled by increasing interest in the detached and surviving relics of the ancient Roman culture which became collectable as portable art objects to be displayed and admired in their own right. However, it was during the mid-nineteenth century, when the separation of artists and architecture finally became compounded by the revolution in economic development caused by industrialization, the advent of Modernism and the implementation of capitalist economics. With capitalism came a shift of patronage from church and state which left the artist marginalized literally cut adrift from society. Finding themselves alienated, impoverished and metaphorically homeless within the culture of a capitalist society, artists saw themselves as Bohemians vagabonds who actively opposed established authority and conventional wisdom. Bohemianism not only created the still-lingering stereotype of the starving artist, but it also spawned the notion of the avant-garde and the primacy of an art for arts sake, i.e., exclusively concerned with itself and providing an aesthetic experience that was essentially independent of any utilitarian or socio-cultural agenda. Moreover, the term avant-garde as it is understood today emanates from this period and is found in the writings of charles Baudelaire who clarified the position of the artist as a maverick intellectual and as self-alienated from the emerging bourgeois culture and changing nineteenth-century capitalist dynamic. A sad by-product of this legacy today is the occasional attempt to reintegrate the artist into the design process of the built environment usually to bring a splash of colour to a faade or to embellish a space. There is also the tragedy of a so-called public art. Occasionally portrayed as art escaping from the rarified atmosphere of the gallery and museum and into the public domain, it is equally derided. This is due to the casual dumping of third-rate and self-indulgent sculptures that, more often than not, are characterized as turds in the piazza. Having personally crossed the divide from fine art into architectural education in the sixties, this writer later became aware of and excited by the early projects, both unbuilt and realized, of Will Alsop an enthusiasm and source of inspiration shared by successive cohorts of both local and visiting Erasmus Diploma students. Here was an architect whose design work often viewed as outrageous and controversial by the mainstream had, it seemed, seamlessly and successfully transferred from the exuberant experimentation of his student days into the professional realm. Moreover, Alsop represents a new and singular breed of architect whose