A wide range of contemporary art practice has used the residential highrise: as a source of inspiration, object of commentary, or a site of action. In varying ways, such projects intervene in and shift the typological and social meaning of the highrise. They sometimes work to add ‘difference’, by uncovering particularity or activating local context. Other times they may work to amplify and enhance this form’s repetitious effect – the way in which it appears not only to be everywhere the same, but also everywhere the force of same-ing. The particular qualities of the highrise – its scale, repetitive formal qualities, and radically novel modes of living –has, from the outset attracted the attention of artists. It is as if the features of this built form solicited art practice: bringing it into being as a necessary supplement to the highrise’s under-ornamented, deracinated, functional self. Indeed, in the west, and in Britain in particular, art practices associated with this form have both consolidated and amplified the distinctiveness of the highrise. Art in this context is not simply the representation of an existing condition. Art practices have operated as a mediating technology in the making and unmaking of highrises.

The research builds around three questions:

 (1) What visual art projects have been undertaken with the primary focus on modernist residential highrises, either as subject or context or both?

This question provides the basis for a selective audit of existing artistic engagements with the highrise that is illustrative of key trends, evenly documented, and international in scope.

 (2) Under what circumstances do such projects come into being? By whose initiative and to what ends? How, particularly, have artistsused the specific trope of the highrise as a source of inspiration, object of commentary, or a site of action?

Of specific interest here is the ways in which socio-technical aspects of the highrise itself (scale, repetitious logics, height, density) posed specific opportunities and challenges for artists.

 (3) In what ways does art reflect or shape the wider typological and social meaning of the highrise? Has it operated as a mediating imaginary for this architectural form and, if so, in what ways and to what ends?

This line of inquiry explores the connection between the ‘work’ art does in and around the formal setting of the highrise, as well as wider questions to do with the latter’s varied social fortunes.  Specifically, we explore the proposition that art has been drawn into the orbit of the highrise as a ‘supplement’ to its functionalist logics.

The Highrise project research team (Cairns, Jacobs and Strebel) have recently joined with Professor Andrew Patrizio (Edinburgh College of Art) [hyperlink to Patrizio] to seed a project that investigates the relationship between art practices and the residential highrise. There is no existing substantial scholarly account of art and the highrise. The documentation that exists is mainly in the form of fragmented project-linked reportage, small catalogue contributions, artists’ books, and web sites