Joseph Rykwert (professor of history of architecture)
The relationship between architecture and design and architecture and the other arts is part of our global cultural scene. Works of art now cost more to buy and sell than buildings cost to construct, so there is also a financial relationship between the two, which is why sometimes some countries had a law demanding that an x percent of the cost of the contract be spent on the works of art and now architects claim that their buildings are in fact works of art so that they can absorb the whole of the contractual sum. Are buildings works of art? I am not sure this is a kind of definition that it's worth making. But I think certainly the way in which the notion of the work of art has been extended after Duchamp -that means really in the last 50 of 60 years - means that there is no concept of avant-garde and there is no concept of a work of art which has a place. That is what architecture offers: a place. If there is no place for the work of art, the work of art becomes a part of the non-place. This is why an American architect of some note, James Wines has called the famous definition of the "work of art in a public space as the turd in the piazza".