The division between art and architecture has long been a rigid one, with few artistic movements, such as the Bauhaus and postminimalism, merging the two. However, in the last ten years, artists, following the examples of Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, and Frank Stella, have turned to architecture with renewed interest. Some depict and analyze familiar buildings, probing their personal, cultural, and political associations, while others construct playful, dreamlike structures liberated from practical concerns.

A number of artists focus on specific buildings, copying and exaggerating their qualities to convey the sensory experience of the space. One of the pioneers of this genre, Rachel Whiteread famously cast the interior of an entire 19th-century house in 1993, turning intangible space into hulking, room-sized plaster volumes. Her more recent casts of the interior of a water tower and the area underneath a fire escape have further exposed marginal spaces while creating new, imposing forms. Rirkrit Tiravanija, another early practitioner, made a splash in 1999 when he built a full-scale wooden replica of his East Village apartment in New York's Gavin Brown enterprise and opened it to the public 24 hours a day. For a solo show this year, Tiravanija rebuilt his casual Thai eatery in a gallery space and reconstructed Matta-Clark's dumpster home alongside it. In the field of painting, Sarah Morris riffs on flashy, modern buildings in abstractions such as The Kodak Theater [Los Angeles] from 2005, and her ceiling painting for the Lever House in New York references modernism while merging with it. German photographer Vera Lutter turns the lens of her camera obscura on famous European monuments, but by displaying her negatives instead of positive prints, she renders the familiar structures ghostly and strangely luminous.

Another group of artists appropriates architectural forms, but throws utility out the window, creating environments that are pure fantasy. Felix Schramm slams full-scale rooms through gallery walls, leaving viewers to dodge looming shards of drywall, while Polish artist Monika Sosnowska unnerves gallery-goers by adding gaping holes in the ceiling, labyrinthine corridors, or bulging walls. In his paintings, sculptures, and gallery interventions, Daniel Arsham collides architecture with rock shards and dripping stalactites, and Monica Bonvicini intimidates viewers with her combinations of stark architecture, enormous text, and S&M accessories. With a sleeker aesthetic, Liam Gillick's brightly colored, minimalist structures, such as his 2002 exhibition The Wood Way , are meandering explorations of abstract forms and text-based narratives. Merging playfulness with viable design, sculptor Jorge Pardo's conceptions for his own home and the Mountain Bar in Los Angeles glow with the same fiery warmth as his candy-colored lamps. Another pioneering artist-designer, Andrea Zittel has produced a line of living units that make pleasure portable; her Escape Vehicles are compact pods that open to reveal a personalized retreat. But it's in the realm of painting that the wildest architectural fantasies abound — artists like David Schnell, who are unfettered by structural physics, are free to imagine a world of floating houses, tilting walls, and freeways winding endlessly in the sky.

-BR