ARCHITECTURE ≠ ART: A Reader

A publication examining the relationship between contemporary art and architecture through contributions by artists, architects, and theorists, ARCHITECTURE ≠ ART: A Reader explores how architectural languages enter the field of visual culture and how artistic practices appropriate spatial, scenographic, and structural forms of thinking. Rather than questioning whether architecture can be considered art, the publication focuses on the processes of translation, mediation, and reinterpretation through which both disciplines continuously reshape one another.

Included in the publication is Jasmina Cibic’s essay “Spielraum,” which examines the methodologies underpinning her long-term research project of the same name. Through reflections on architecture, choreography, film, exhibition design, and political rhetoric, Cibic analyses how modernist architecture operates as a performative instrument of statecraft and ideological representation. Drawing on case studies ranging from world expositions and parliamentary interiors to diplomatic pavilions and monuments of the Non-Aligned Movement, the essay outlines her approach to architecture not as static form, but as an active scenography through which collective identities and political desires are staged, negotiated, and reproduced.