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Blind spot in the visual field of art-architecture criticismStefania KenleyIndependent ScholarEach part of the title – the “art-architecture” continuum, its “visual field” and the presence of a “blind spot” in criticism – are examined in relation to the notions of significance, image and value.I start by questioning the current tendency of isolating architectural criticism, as well as the theory and history of architecture, from the territory of visual arts and its specific critical discourse. Historically, art and architecture critical writings have not only shared common origins, but their object of study has lead to similar methodologies based on visual perception. Continuity within this field can be observed from Vitruvius’s definition of architecture as a practical discipline and a theory created around the significance of what is produced.Drawing upon the continuity of art-architecture criticism, my book Du Fictif au reel spans between two key moments of the XXth Century: the collaboration of artists and architects during the first European avant-garde movements and the paradoxical kinship between New Brutalism and English Pop art after World War II. It includes examples taken from literature, sculpture, painting, photography, architectural and urban design, where the image creation is central. Questioned in a historical perspective, a new vocabulary appears like a cast left by the classical concepts of permanence, beauty, suitability or harmony. This new lexicon is formed by notions like the – ephemeral, expendable, transient, ugliness, excess, formlessness –revealing a change of aesthetic criteria.This change adds to a more alarming phenomenon whereby the architectural criticism, meant to establish the value of projects or buildings in a wider framework, could simply indulge in flattering the market forces through the lens of convenience. If disconnected from the viewer’s visual perception, or from the inhabitant’s experience and senses, the discourse can only serve profit-oriented media. This artificially created “blindness” of architectural judgement is what I finally propose to expose.&#160;Stefania Kenley has been an artist and an architect since 1986 and has taught architecture since 1990 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Architectural Association School of Architecture and the University of Greenwich in London. In 2005 she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Paris VIII, with her thesis From a Pastiche to the Original, Traces and Trajectories of the Independent Group (1952-1956), directed by Professor Jean-Louis Cohen. In Paris, after teaching history of architecture at École Spéciale d'Architecture, she gave a series of lectures on modern and contemporary architecture for art history graduates at the University of Paris IV - La Sorbonne. Part of the editorial board of Architecture and Culture journal and member of the Association d'Histoire de l'Architecture, she has been writing extensively on art and architecture (for architecture criticism see “Essays” on website: https://stefaniakenley.wordpress.com).