Architecture and art have been stalking one another for a long time. John Ruskin celebrated the Gothic because of its seamless integration of art and structure. At about the same time, Gottfried Semper identified cladding as one of the four key elements in architecture. It led to a host of misinterpretations, most notably to the proposition that a decorative skin could be laid over the structure of a building, thus obscuring its function in favour of its aesthetic appeal. More recently, the work of architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind represents an architecture aspiring to the condition of art. The new National Museum of Australia in Canberra is a local example- although the Brisbane architect, James Birrell, was arguing for architecture as art in the early 1950s, commenting that ' ... ultimately architecture is a visual art, a language without sound or word, communicating solely by means of lines, planes and forms arranged in space.' 1 For its own part, art has often aspired to the condition of architecture. Sculpture has a long tradition of this, from Tatlin and the Constructivists through to the monumentalism of Minimalism and land art. Even painting, in its eternal denial of the flat surface, has often appropriated the terminology of architecture and sought to simulate the experience of space, most notably with Minimalism and the New York School which today is often interpreted as a kind of metaphor for the experience of the city, especially with its use of ' institutional ' scale and elemental structural forms. But deliberate cross-over exercises in art and architecture are relatively recent. Artists like Mary Miss, Rachel Whiteread and Tadashi Kawamata have made structures which, if not... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline