Design Art Papers 2025 | No. 13

a square and a circle. The center is found in the very navel of the human body. [6] The processing of this drawing by Leonardo gave it immense notoriety, probably also because the Enlightenment ideals coincided with such a vision, which was beginning to take shape through the separation of humanity from the mysticismof theMiddleAges (inwhichthephysical bodywas controlled, punished, substituted to the spirit) and through the empowerment of reason through scientific knowledge - a delimitation of the world according to one's own human capabilities. This also explains why a similar drawing— one that proposed a cosmic framing of the human being within the world, positioned between the micro- and macro- universe, createdby the equally complex figureRobert Fludd (1574–1637, a physician, astrologer, mathematician, and cosmologist)— although produced about 100 years before Leonardo’s, never achieved a comparable impact. In the modern period, Le Corbusier posed the problem of adapting housing to the proportion of the human body, according to an organic system, based on natural growth units (which had been scientifically validated in the meantime, through the studies of Adolf Zeising, in 1854). But whether he managed to apply them, in a social context where the rules of production increasingly took into account technical and economic considerations, is something to be considered. The period of human progress, emancipation, and self-empowerment inWestern civilization, now referred to as the Anthropocene, demonstrates that the effects of this era, particularly in terms of habitation and resource management, are embedded inmatter itself [7] . Anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus considered it a mistake to apply the norms of the scientific and industrial West throughout the world to the detriment of several equally legitimate world projects. He sought to demolish any dominant model and lamented the destruction of human diversity, and thus questioned the idea of one civilization’s superiority to another and that of human rule over nature. Thus, Straus was concerned with ecology before this word became a necessity in our vocabulary. 2 / „All theWorld is aMuseum: Access to Cultural Heritage Information Anytime, Anywhere” If the cultural heritage —beliefs, conventions, and systems of meaning— has over time influenced society in all its materializations, art has mirrored it to the same extent, also reflecting how we subsequently relate to this heritage once materialized. If in the distant past of human existence, building settlementswas an integral part of nature, todaywe are concerned with ways to reconnect these natural bonds, focusing on environmental protection and sustainability. By following the temporal relationship between human beings and their preferred setting of celebration within both society and the arts, we can observe that for prehistoric people this rolewas fulfilled by the nature–cave–cosmogony triad, for the ancient world by the public square, for the medieval period by the church, and for the modern era by themuseum. Thus,observingtheroleofartinthearchitecturalconfiguration of thecontemporary artmuseumcanamount toaquickdive into the current imageof contemporary society. If initially the artists went out in nature to make Land Art, in the street or in abandoned/alternative spaces to manifest performatively or installationally, at the same time, following the scandalous example of Duchamp's Fountain, their entry/return to the museum is something that consecrates them, at the same time generating the reinventionof theMuseum's image and function. In this sense, the contemporary museum’s architecture becomes a piece of art, specially configured; it becomes a metaphor that can accommodate the most protean artistic manifestations, thecharacteristicsofwhichrequireaspecially dedicatedor arrangedspace, asanalyzedbyChaterineMillet, in Contemporary Art. History and Geography [8] . The great white cube, conceived as an ideal exhibition space, is in fact the institutional counterpart of the cleaned- up industrial premises that transavant-garde artists and alternative galleries began occupying at the end of the 1960s. In time, even somemuseums adapted by converting similar spaces for their own use. Examples include CAPC Bordeaux, which occupies former warehouses and invites artists to create works on the scale of its vast ship-like building, and TateModern, which took over a former power plant and encourages artists to develop interventions within its enormous Turbine Hall. Stimulatedbythepossibilityofhavingadirectand immediate impact by circulating some uncomfortable ideas, which extended to institutional criticism, some artists invited to operate in these places resorted to intrusive interventions in the physical body of the museum’s space. Thus, Doris Salacedo, a Colombian artist, created, in 2007, a huge crack along the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in her intervention called Shibboleth, suggesting that modern art museums implement a form of exclusion, as 20th-century modernism histories have so far failed to address the contributions of non-European cultures. Fred Wilson, invited to intervene in the arrangement of the collections of objects in the Maryland Historical Society Museum, reconfigured the showcase of metal exhibits, by mixing luxury objects exemplifying colonial grandeur with torture items, through his intervention, called Mining the Museum. Metalwork (1793-1880). After ALife Ahead is an excavation-intervention that resembles a sci-fi landscape made by Pierre Huyghe in a disused ice rink, made in 2017 for Sculpture Projects Münster, in Germany. A kind of biotope, it featured live animals, chimera peacocks (a genetic mutation), and bees, an incubator for the growth of cancer cells and augmented reality. Through this intervention, the artist wanted to erase the gaps between history and nature. In the Zoodram 5 installation from his retrospective at the Pompidou Center in 2011, he used a replica of Brâncuși's Sleeping Muse mask to make it available, in an aquarium, to a crustacean that inhabited it. A duo of Romanian artists, Anca Banera and Arnold Estefan, took Huyghe's gesture further with a kind of replica of this installation, also starting from a work by Brîncuși, reproduced in salt, The Wisdom of the Earth , which they completely removed from a historical and museal context to leave it to unmediated interactions with animals in a field. The video of this interaction was seen in 2024, while being exhibited in the UnWorlding solo exhibition, at the Art Encounters Foundation in Timișoara. Through these extensive installations, create new forms of interactionbetweennatural systems andartificial constructs, referring to: „Adorno's idea of natural history aims at reconciling, in form and in content, the opposing forces of natureandhistorywith theaimof overcoming thedivisionof natural being and historical being that Adorno considered to be the central problemof critical social theory [9] ”. This perspective can also be linked to the reflections of Levi Strauss, who proposed a new approach to the relationship between the concrete and the abstract (systems of human meanings). „Compared with others, inserted into an ensemble, illuminated by the play of similarities and differences, put in relation to what is said about them, these objects begin to speak. They turn out to be meaningful. They are elements of discourse, vectors of intelligence, and not inert matter [10] .” The break between the sensible and the unintelligible- the worldof thingsandtheworldof ideas- thusblurs itsrelevance, contributing fundamentally to the total transfiguration of the world of art (the foundations of structuralism). This classical dividing line (from Plato onwards) between the intelligible and the sensible establishes the demarcation between the sciences and art—ideas and rationality on one hand, sensations and emotions on the other. The need for a reconciliation between intelligence and emotion, because, in Adorno’s view, both are necessary to judge what is good and bad, with intelligence functioning as a moral category, hasmeanwhile been validatedby neuroscientists, who show that emotions play a coordinating role in decision-making. PierreHuyghe also talked about the intelligenceofmatter, by reversing the places took-up by the viewer and the object of contemplation—the work of art, or, froma post-production perspective, a mélange of objects and matters. In doing so, he democratized the gaze: it no longer belonged solely to the human observer but was shared, evoking the uncanny Lacanian idea that theobject of our look or glance is, in some sense, looking back at us of its own accord. Nicolas Bourriaud talked about these implications of the gaze that turned from things to us, through the creation of Pierre Huyghe. He also made a kind of historical chronology of the gaze in relation to the contemplated object. „In the past, you had to raise your eyes to the icon, which materialized the divine presence in the form of an image. In the Renaissance, the invention of the centrist monocular perspective transformed the abstract viewer into a concrete individual; the place assigned to him by the pictorial device likewise isolates him from others. […] Perspective gives the gaze a symbolic place and gives the viewer a place in a symbolic society. Modern art will modify this relationship, allowing multiple and simultaneous points of views for a painting; but shouldwe not speak of import, since thismode of interpretation existed, in various forms, in Africa or the East? Rothko or Pollock inscribe in their work the need for a visual envelope, everything being supposed to encompass, even immerse the viewer in a chromatic ambience [11] .” All the World is a Museum: Access to Cultural Heritage Information Anytime, Anywhere is the title of a study presented by Matthew Nickerson at a conference [12] , exploring the possibility of replacing audio devices for broadcasting information to visitors with a mobile phone application. This can extend the reach of cultural heritage even beyond the walls of the museum. Meanwhile, many of the world's museums have switched to such digitization, making the viewer's relationship with the work of art enter a new era of direct and fast all-in-one access. But this can also coincide with a displacement of attention, from the art object to the device that contains everything, something that can also call into question the very necessity of the physical existence of such spaces, which in the future would be easier to maintain as simple repositories, or even simple configurations and virtual archives. One should not lose sight of the fact that, in the name of this direct mediation, the viewer’s subjective dialogue with the work is being lost, even though it should remain a unique moment- one that is experienced repeatedly, in the fullness of our perceptive and interpretive capacities, and not reduced merely to accessing a volume of informational ideas. If theworld is currently perceived as a global village andman is embedded in the Matrix, in this new era of digitalization, when everything is documented and recorded, gaining a virtual correspondence, more powerful and efficient than the real one, how do we really manage this immense archive/museum and to what extent does it truly reflect tangible reality? 3 / Symbolic Forms of Architectural ReconciliationwithNature through Artistic Installations To work „like nature”, as Joseph Beuys as Joseph Beuys said in describing how an artist, and indeed all humans, should function in society, means integrating ourselves into the larger organism of the living world, to maintain a functional equilibrium, which he metaphorically explained through the image of the human body itself, and the physicality of its functions [13] . Tadashi Kawamata's temporary interventions on various buildings (derelicts, such as an abandoned hospital, a disused bridge, a church ruined during the war, but also museums, business houses, and even a nightclub), suggest a vision of urban growth that is unstoppable. But it possibly also suggests a fusion between human existence and the modes of existence specific to other realms, as indicated by the dynamics of the spatial constructions within these works. These constructions evoke both the scaffolding used in building renovations and the enormous nests —such as those built by sparrows under the roofs of buildings. A similar discourse is that of Tomas Saraceno, who usually combines art, engineering, and architecture in his practice, andalsocollaborateswithpeople fromanextensivescientific repertoire to realize his vast structural constructions. They are incorporated/anchored in museum spaces and refer to unseen aspects of reality, such as the cellular or molecular level, or toother formsofexistencethat influenceus,without us noticing their existence. The Cloud City installation, made for the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, brings together the knowledge from chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, and cosmology to create a structural image of polyhedra. It combines multiple universes —bacteria, clouds, neural networks—whilealsoincorporatingelementsofarchitecture and gardening, reflected in the surrounding environment captured on its glass facades. The work is thus also an extension of themuseum's architecture. His work, with certain species of spiders in the forests of Ecuador, was inspired by the way cosmologists or astro- physicists tried to explain how the universe was formed, fact described by a type of cosmic structure analogous to 331 330 / / / / Caiete de Arte și Design / nr. 13 / 2025 / / / / Publicație a Centrului de Cercetare și Creație în Artele Decorative și Design / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /