Complexities, Discrepancies and Ambiguities: assessing the disciplinarity of Herzog & de Meuron's architecture through Judd's generic art

Abstract

Focusing on the 2002 architecture exhibition Herzog & de Meuron: Archaeology of the Mind, the paper examines the disciplinary issues at stake for Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron when engaging with art praxis, using the work of Donald Judd as a theoretical framework for the discussion. The trans-disciplinary practices of both Herzog & de Meuron and Judd had and continue to have the ability to question the disciplinary limits of architecture and the arts, and indeed, the presence of the modernist arrangement of disciplines as a whole. The paper argues that, through assessing Judd's theoretical and practical position on disciplinary distinctions within the arts after the minimal art debates of the 1960s, it might be possible to more clearly understand what sort of conditions may have been inherited in some way by the twenty-first century and Herzog & de Meuron's claim to conducting transdisciplinary practices.