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Delfina Entrecanales is an unusual cultural philanthropist, her Delfina Foundation in London is an unusual place, and the architectural concept underlying it was born of an unusual international collaboration.

A Spanish architect converts a historic building in upstate New York into an outpost for a Manhattan art dealer.

The artist toiling in solitude has long been a romantic ideal. But it rarely holds in reality, especially for those who work at the civic scale, making pieces that straddle the blurry boundary between art and architecture. These artists rarely work alone, typically relying on a host of collaborators to realize their visions, including studio assistants, fabricators, and even city officials.

Alex Schweder practices what he calls “performance architecture,” installation and event-based work that explores how people comprehend the built environment and how that perception shapes their bodies, social relationships, and desires. 

Allyson Vieira builds monuments—but she uses unexpectedly humble material. Take her 2013–14 exhibition The Plural Present. There, the New York–based artist filled a gallery with Classical ruins: The City Wall, 2013, delimited the space with a colonnade that framed Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance, 2013, three figures striking acontrapposto that echoes the famed Greek statue of the three graces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Andreas Angelidakis is not sure why millions of people are obsessed with cat videos. “It’s a curious thing, what captures people’s attention,” he says. “Architecture is a lot slower than that kind of exchange of images.” 

For Andrés Jaque’s Office for Political Innovation, architecture is the social as well as physical infrastructure of society. Founded in 2003 by Jaque, the Madrid-based practice has employed a mix of architects, engineers, sociologists, interactive multimedia designers, and even anthropologists and marketing consultants in its various projects. 

Halsey Rodman constructed Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room over a couple of weeks this spring, in Joshua Tree, California.