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Ten two zero zero five: Mother of All Arts
Architecture has in the past been described as the ‘Mother of All Arts’ – crudely delineating its perceived position as a discipline that provides the ‘venue’ for other art forms; a container in which many of the arts could literally be encountered in space, or incorporated and grafted on as mural or frieze. Similarly in relation to music, with architecture’s internal forms and spaces recognised as effecting a sounding-board against which sound would reflect or even be amplified, buildings would subsequently be designed around the need to provide matched and complementary surfaces for reverberations: an understood mutual reciprocity before any science of acoustics was formulated. This mapping in built form contributed to architecture gaining its other old moniker, that of ‘frozen music’ – giving a lyrical filter to the experience of the material weight of surround-sound in bricks and mortar or latterly in steel, glass, titanium and ETFE Foil skin. But over the last hundred years, architecture seems often to have lost its confidence as an art form and been intimately caught up with attempts to position itself more as a science, closer to...
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