UCLA AUD Fall 2026 Events: "Moving Things About: Architecture & Art, and the Conditions of Making," a conference organized by Mariana Ibañez and Benjamin Freyinger

November 13, 2026, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

Art and architecture occupy distinct cultural and disciplinary territories, yet their practices repeatedly intersect. This conference considers how the conditions in which architecture and art are made, encountered, and circulated to shape their meaning, use, and value. Bringing together recent history and contemporary practices, “Moving Things About” examines how distinctions between art and architecture are constructed through questions of purpose, place, use, authorship, audience, and value. Rather than seeking to collapse disciplinary boundaries, it asks what those boundaries make visible: why similar objects, spaces, projects, or ideas can acquire different meanings as they move between cultural contexts, and what these shifts reveal about the institutions and systems of value that surround them.

For much of the 20th century, the White Cube provided an enduring framework through which the relationship between art and architecture could be understood. Emerging from modernist ideas about abstraction, functionalism, and the suppression of ornament, the white, cubic, unadorned space promised a seemingly neutral backdrop—one in which art might be encountered independently from the contingencies of everyday life. Yet this neutrality was always constructed. Architecture did not disappear; rather, it established the conditions through which art was seen.

The persistence of the White Cube is perhaps as significant as the many models that have developed alongside it. Museums have moved into existing buildings; temporary structures and installations have become cultural destinations; festivals have produced their own architectures; and artists have increasingly engaged buildings, environments, infrastructure, and public space as both medium and subject. Architects, meanwhile, have designed for artists, collaborated with them, made exhibitions and installations, and produced work that circulates within the institutions and economies of art. What emerges is less a progression from one model to another than an accumulation of different—and sometimes contradictory—ideas about what art and architecture are for, where they belong, and how they acquire meaning and value.

The significance of this question today lies in the fact that the cultural landscape is increasingly fragmented and contested, while the physical, social, political, and institutional contexts in which work is produced have become difficult to treat as background. The fantasy of neutrality remains powerful precisely as context is increasingly foregrounded. At the same time, the distinction between art and architecture continues to carry disciplinary and cultural weight, even as practices repeatedly complicate it.

“Moving Things About” takes this condition as its starting point. Bringing together projects from recent history and contemporary practice, it considers different positions architects and artists occupy in relation to one another: artists acting as architects; architects working with artists; architects making spaces for artists; architects making art. These categories provide an initial structure, but the encounters between them open broader questions. What happens when ideas, techniques, or objects move between art and architecture? How are they transformed by medium, scale, context, audience, or institution? When does use confer value, and when does uselessness produce value of its own? What kinds of authorship and expertise do the two disciplines claim, share, or exchange?

A series of terms cuts across these practices: use and uselessness; high and low; medium; affect; scale; context; authorship; audience; and value. Rather than simply classifying work, these terms provide ways of examining how cultural distinctions are produced. A house made for an artist, an architect’s painting, an artist’s building, a museum, and a temporary installation may occupy very different cultural positions even when they share formal, spatial, material, or conceptual concerns. Putting them alongside one another makes those differences—and the systems of value that sustain them—available for scrutiny.

“Moving Things About: Architecture & Art, and the Conditions of Making” | Schedule

9:00 to 9:10 am
Welcome and Introduction

9:10 to 10:10 am
Panel Discussion 1: Mattering

“Matters”: as things that matter — and as material. Matter is both that through which something holds meaning and a medium: the underlying material condition or framework that enables something to be made. Things being made are not architecture. Architects de-artify things — raiding, reworking, and transforming existing materials, practices, and meanings.

10:20 to 11:20 am
Panel Discussion 2: What We Make of Things

The things we make; how we interpret things; and what we make of our current context, situation or milieu. This doesn't demand novelty. There is a set of things happening around us. There are things lying about, what should we make from them and what should we make of them?

11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Panel Discussion 3: Of Use and Value

Taking “Useful / Useless” seriously, “of use” can mean having utility, but it can also concern use itself. Architecture has historically justified itself through use in a way that art has not had to; putting the two together destabilizes that distinction in a productive way. Use and value can be understood as one and the same: use can describe pragmatic utility; reciprocally, it can also assert value. In this sense, art and architecture can occupy both tangible physical space (usefulness) and abstract cultural space (value). These values shift over time, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly, as context and milieu change. Iconic buildings can become empty relics nearly overnight in architecture. Likewise, movements end, cultural values change, and artworks lose their value in art.

12:30 to 1:00 pm: Closing Remarks

1:00 pm: Reception

Please bookmark this page and stay tuned for updates, including a roster of speakers. This page last updated October 6, 2026.