The art of collaborative structural design: Structural art in the age of cross-disciplinary collaboration

While laying the foundations for an understanding of structural design as a potentially higher form of achievement, this paper argues that Billington's conception of structural art also established it as the work of a heroic creative genius driven solely by engineering values. By clearly distinguishing structural art from the domain of architectural achievement, the concept contributes to a separation of the two disciplines, and offers little support to those seeking to establish cross-disciplinary collaborative approaches to structural designing. With the criteria defining works of structural art primarily employed to describe completed works of art retrospectively, new questions to be considered may be what kind of design processes will lead to structural art? Do desirable types of design processes necessarily exclude other disciplines? This paper argues that responding to these contemporary challenges may bring about new interpretations of structural art and draw more attention to efforts directed at bridging diverging values already early on in discipline specific education.