Schwarz
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Architecture's place in art history: Art or adjunct?
In a community discussion of the look of Chicago led by a working group of three faculty and three visiting journalists from the University of Chicago's Franke Institute for the Humanities, W.J.T. Mitchell observed that he and his fellow faculty tend to take the local built environment for granted, depending on newcomers to provoke them to notice its qualities. Invoking Walter Benjamin's observation in his essay of 1936 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Mitchell concluded that Benjamin remains correct in claiming that we receive architecture in a state of distraction. (1) In this case, however, distraction was not working through architecture in the sense in which Benjamin imagined it working, to redemptive revolutionary effect. Here it was the contemplative reporters for Time, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune who had the most to say about how buildings engage problems of visual culture, while the faculty related to their own built environment in a mode of distraction unharne ssed to empowering revelation. (2)