Exhibition André Bloc and the architecture-sculpture debate: the magazines
Installation views exhibition VANDENHOVE Center for Architecture and Art Rozier 1, 9000 Gent BE June 13, 2022 The exhibition showed a selection of around 60 articles from the magazines L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture, held in architecture library Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (UGent), which focus on the relationship between art and architecture. These include articles on architectural sculpture, art integrations, sculptural environments, museum buildings, museum displays as well as private sculptural homes often executed in beton brut. The exhibition illustrated the arguments made in my dissertation and, in particular, examines the dissemination of sculpture and architectural hybrids under the influence of the editor, writer, architect and artist André Bloc (1896–1966). His influence on the interaction of architecture and sculpture was particularly evident through his role as editor in the journals he founded: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (Architecture of Today; 1930– present) and its spin offs, Art d’Aujourd’hui (Art of Today; 1949– 1954) and Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture (Today Art and Architecture; 1955– 1967). These magazines distributed both ideas about and images of the overlaps between architecture and sculpture. In these journals, readers came into contact with the basic concepts of the architecture- sculpture debate— especially the idea of the “synthesis of the arts” and the social role of aesthetics—as well as with examples of architectural sculpture and sculptural architecture.