This dissertation deals with the legacy of André Bloc, who proved to be the central figure of a world-wide network of architects, artists, critics and theorists prominent within the architecture-sculpture debate. Abstract: In the 1950s, artists, sculptors and architects began to use the mass availability of concrete to create a previously impossible fusion of architecture and sculpture. This dissertation engages this understudied moment in the history of modern art, focusing on the mutual influences between sculpture and architecture as they engaged with concrete. It pays particular attention to those works that left the concrete “brut”—that is, “raw” or unfinished—and thus produced a rough aesthetic that has become an icon of post-war art. (…)
Read more: Angelique Campens, Béton Brut : André Bloc and the architecture-sculpture debate(PhD diss., UGent, 2022). https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8755696
Expo: devitrine #6
The architecture-sculpture network/
André Bloc and his journals
“(…) a few sculptors proposed collaborating directly in designing living architecture. Some architects even behave like real sculptors and their work includes original inspiration worthy of our epoch.” -Espaces Sculptés – Espaces Architecturés, Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture, no. 53 (May–June 1966), III
The writer, architect and artist André Bloc (1896–1966) was also the editor, and founder, of several important journals: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (1930–present), and its spin offs Art d’Aujourd’hui (1949–1954) and Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture (1955–1967). Through these magazines Bloc aimed at creating a network bringing together architects and sculptors.
Drawing from the holdings of the Faculty Library Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University, devitrine #6 shows some results of research in this endeavour. For the exhibition, we selected approximately 60 articles from L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui and Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture from the library’s extensive journal collections. (…)
devitrine #6: Curated by Angelique Campens
from 24 November 2022 until 24 January 2023
opening: Wednesday 23rd, 2022, 6 PM invitation
