Common Visual Language of Architecture and Fine Arts – The Meaning Change of the Square

Abstract

The modern and late-modern tendencies of architecture, as well as the geometric abstract trends of fine arts, have, since the beginning of the 20th century, engaged with the same areas of the visual language. Since that time, the creators of the two arts have met, become parallel to and interacted with each other. They have followed the same changes in the intellectual climate, in several cases along the common denominator of a similar approach and geometric language. The same architectonic thinking, very similar structures generated by the same visual basic grammatical operations and the same set of forms can be observed.
At the same time, the meaning – even the meaning of the same formulas of design language – is always changing, depending on the context of the period, intellectual climate, creative approach, world vision, specific field of arts, oeuvre and a number of other conditions.
The meaning of the common ‘fetish’ of modern fine arts and architecture, that is the meaning of square has continuously changed from period to period and from artist to artist since the beginning of the 20th century; however, since the 70s onwards and after the post-modern paradigm shift, it changed dramatically, and in a similar way for several artists of both fields of art.
The former meaning of the square turns into almost an opposite concept in the sculpture of Sol LeWitt and the architecture of Arata Isozaki. The visual language invention, functioning similarly for both arts, realized by the American artist and the Japanese architect, is to create a whole beyond rationality, constructed from rational parts by means of overstraining repetition. As a result, this logical system paradoxically leads beyond logic.