Is Architecture Art? an introduction to the aesthetics of architecture by Professor John Macarthur was published by Bloomsbury Academic late last year. A Brisbane launch was held at Milani Gallery on 29th May as part of Vokes and Peter’s Garden Variety talks. After a brief description by John there was a lively panel discussion between John, Andrea Bubenick and Aaron Peters, chaired by Josh Milani.
In July the book was awarded as best book on architectural theory for 2025 in a competition held by the London book magazine BookLaunch. The award was made jointly with John Shannon Hendrix and Francesco Proto’s Lacan+Architecture from Palgrave Macmillan. The judges wrote:
Is Architecture Art? flings out ideas like a centrifuge; […] Macarthur’s own view of whether architecture is art, or an art, is—spoiler alert—that it sometimes is. That, he says, is not an equivocation but an acknowledgement that whether it is or isn’t depends on circumstances—and that is the point of his book: that it reviews, very thoroughly, the numerous conditions in which architecture is one thing, or the other, or something in between. [in what] he calls “ a tumbling mismatch of concepts”—hence our view of his admirable survey as centripetal.
-- Booklaunch Issue 24, p12
