© Mick Hayles

Anthony Caro offers a description that sounds whimsical for the two large outdoor structures he has erected on the grounds of his permanent summer retreat in upstate New York; he calls them “sculpture-architectures.” But the work itself is anything but whimsical, representing a serious investigation into that Bermuda Triangle that separates sculpture from architecture.

Considering the origin of sculpture as a decorative accessory to architecture, it is not surprising that most attempts to integrate the two have come from the field of architecture. It is a territory explored by Elizabeth Diller and Riccardo Scofidio with what could be called performance architecture, and equally by John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi. The Modern Movement suppressed the role of architectural sculpture when architecture itself became sculpture, albeit of a minimalist kind. As a result of this sudden banishment, sculpture has had to reinvent itself in terms of both technique and content...