Still, this is a time of crossover and appropriation. Every summer, we're treated to temporary structures such as the Serpentine Pavilion in London—the 2014 edition is designed by architect Smiljan Radić as a kind of immense luminous toadstool—or the annual installation at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, this summer, a project called Hy-Fi: a series of towers built of biodegradable bricks by The Living (architect David Benjamin). Both might fulfill Serra's definition of art through their lack of toilets alone. Similarly, a number of emerging architects—such as Oyler Wu Collaborative in Los Angeles or Situ Studio in Brooklyn—have experimented with structure, materials, and digital fabrication by creating beautiful installations that meet the criterion of having no utility whatsoever.

At the same time, artists are riffing on the built environment, as evident in two of last year's blockbuster exhibitions: the Rain Room, by rAndom International, at the Museum of Modern Art, and James Turrell's dematerialization of the Guggenheim Museum in his light piece Aten Reign—a work that could be considered belated revenge on behalf of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell who protested the design of Frank Lloyd Wright's museum more than half a century ago as inhospitable to their art.