Architecture as performance: Sigurd Lewerentz's uncut bricks

Might architecture be reconceived as an art that is performed? David Davies’s performance theory claims that all artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as performances themselves. But is architecture, like music, a ‘performed work’ in Davies’s terminology? Davies thinks not, characterising architecture’s ‘executory performance’ as internal to generating an artistic vehicle associated with a physical object. By contrast, I contend that architectural notation performs a dual role: an executory function (facilitating construction) and a role in articulating an artistic statement (thereby establishing its status as art). Here, the architectural ‘score’ is recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, arguing that his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks articulates an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists.