Expanded Field, the book and the from which it evolved, is both an expression of our passion for installation work and an exploration of the overlapping territories of contemporary practice. The project began in 2011, when the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art invited Envelope principal Douglas Burnham and Ila Berman, then director of architecture at California College of the Arts, to create an installation on the conjunction of contemporary art and architecture as the third installment of the center’s series, The Way Beyond Art.

The boundaries between art and architecture have continued to blur in recent decades, giving rise to installations whose conceptual, spatial and material trajectories have produced a new and expanding network of the domains of architecture, sculpture, interiors, and landscape. Installation is not only a means to experiment with architectural ideas and emerging technologies, but also a strategy to foreground the conceptual and experiential dimensions of architectural and urban environments.

The project looks to the legacy of Krauss’s expanded field by exploring the realm of art and architecture across a broad terrain of installation practices. Despite their wide diversity, the specific works exhibited in this book operate as a representative set intended to emblematize a larger conceptual matrix—the taxonomical categories of the expanded field—while generating a dialog between art and architectural practices that focuses on the complexity and productivity of their relations rather than the re-inscription of their disciplinary boundaries. Far from providing a comprehensive overview, these works operate as points within a field whose connections and crossovers define a larger territorial matrix intended to become more dense and expansive as this field is populated over time.