Architecture is not art

Architecture is not art, Artlies, issue No. 68 guest edited by Mary Ellen Carroll launched at Third Streaming with a night of presentations from the contributors and moderated by Cynthia Chris. Thursday, May 12, 2011: 7:30 Morteza Baharloo Sexual Symbolism in Oriental (Iranian) Architecture and Art. 8:00 Mark Waisuta, International House of Architecture. House Plant 8:30 Terry Adkins. Anechoic Ornette (Each person contributing their own expression to create a form.) About the issue: Art Lies is excited to announce the release of Issue No. 68, Architecture Is Not Art, featuring Mary Ellen Carroll as Guest Editorial Contributor. Envisioning an issue on “art and architecture,” Art Lies found a perfect interlocutor in the Houston- and New York-based conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Like Carroll’s Prototype 180—which made “architecture perform” in the Sharpstown subdivision of Houston by rotating “an acre of land and the existing single family home”—No. 68 enacts a series of shifts, reversals and contradictions, pushing the contents of Art Lies into “collateral disciplines…including policy, history, law, science, economics and the media.” Starting with the premise, “Architecture is inherently a political act, be it in the public or private sector…,” Carroll writes with Peter Noever in an introductory text: “The magazine itself was taken as a structure to be considered, with the possibility for it to be ‘destroyed’ if necessary. Risks would be taken. This risk was determined variously by the contributors themselves and is relative to their own intentions and practices.” Issue No. 68′s provocations and positions include: Morteza Baharloo on the symbolic history and potential of Tehran’s Azadi Tower, Asmara M. Tekle on the authoritarianism of the American lawn, Cynthia Chris on indecency and cable television, Eva Hagberg on Philip Johnson and oil! and Houston, and Marcos Sánchez and Mark Wasiuta of International House of Architecture on domestic marijuana production. Thoroughly interdisciplinary, No. 68 features novel collaborations: Simon Dance and Shezad Dawood map “Miscegenous London,” Florian Idenburg and Paula Hayes conceive “Neuroforms” and Renée Borgonjen and Berend Strik rally “Against Standardization and Sanitization.” Mevis & Van Deursen supplant the façade of the journal—and a cover featuring Michael Höpfner—with an essay by Domenick Ammirati.