Publications

Back to school

By: Jane Watt

Jane Watt profiles collaborations between artists and architects at two newly built schools, in the third of the six-part series ’Navigating Places’.

For a number of years one of the most common commission opportunities has been for artists to produce work for new building projects. The adoption of a Percent for Art policy by the Arts Council of England in 1988 went a long way to encourage the commissioning of art in new public spaces. This pot of gold became much richer and shinier with the introduction, in 1995, of National Lottery-funded capital projects. The lottery funding criteria encouraged the integration of artists in building projects that, in turn, helped to raise the position of the artist from an add-on, or afterthought, to a design team member. Collaboration and open dialogue across the design table – between architect, landscape designer, engineer, project manager and client – are promoted in design briefs and the aforementioned funding criteria. However, as a practitioner and researcher in this field, I know that, unfortunately, such ideals are not routinely achieved. All too often artists and architects are brought together in what the American writer and commissioner Tom Finkelpearl calls 'forced marriages'1. Although the architect may have had a glimpse of the artist's previous work at the...

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