Buildings and the loss of public arts

The first sentence of the Preface of The Judicious Eye reads: ‘Painting and sculpture once counted with architecture as “visual arts”’. This thought strikes one as strangely reversed: surely architecture, with its invitations to movement, sound, smell (not to mention numerous pragmatic, extra-sensory conditions), must be the art, not painting and sculpture, to have escaped the category of ‘visual arts’. But with a historian and author of the stature of Joseph Rykwert, one should of course expect that he means what he says. And he does.