The Art-architecture Complex

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. While architects such as Zaha Hadid and Herzog & de Meuron draw on art to reanimate design, architecture has inspired fundamental transformations in painting, sculpture and film, subjects which are also explored here. The book includes an extensive conversation with Richard Serra. At the same time, Foster delineates a "global style" of architecture, as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, analogous to the "international style" of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today's global style conveys the look of modernity, both its dreams and its delusions. In these ways Foster demonstrates that the "art-architecture complex" is a key indicator of broader social and economic trajectories and in urgent need of analysis and debate.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A coeditor of October magazine and a number of books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic as well as the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, and Compulsive Beauty.