Bump for revised version. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the last few sentences but I think this is a major improvement. I needed to get this posted before I had to go somewhere.
Art is an esteemed and sacred part of our identity as humans. It shows us the essence of cultures and eras and carries with it emotion manifested into the medium the artist chose. It can inspire us and move us, but the one thing it does not do is physically sustain us. Of the three human necessities, water, food, and shelter, two mediums facilitate any one of these. One is the culinary art, the second is architecture; what I believe to be the greatest of all arts.
Architecture is the most vitally important art to human beings. Our society is literally built on and around buildings; if they were all generic gray boxes our collective mood would mirror the drabness of these structures. Besides the fact of beauty, we could not live the way we do without buildings. Humans are the only species that have adapted to nearly any climate on Earth and this is due almost solely to buildings.
Architecture also transcends a single form of art; in fact, it is the manifestation of several arts. It takes proficient drawing and creative skills to conceptualize a building, but the physical building of the structure is closer to making a sculpture. Unlike a sculpture, however, every square foot of this building must function cohesively with the rest of itself. No matter how beautiful a building is, if it doesn’t complete the task it was built for it’s simply a leviathan sculpture.
More than any other art, architecture can inspire us. It inspires other arts and can influence and define an entire era. The Empire State Building was so revolutionary in it’s time that it not only was an icon; it was a cultural manifestation of everything that generation stood for. Architecture also defines the way people superficially think of a city or a place. Until 2001, the iconic skyline of New York City was the Empire State Building in Upper Manhattan and the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan.
Buildings are required for survival. Architecture is required for almost everything else in our daily lives; creative output, inspiration, and carrying on our artistic legacy. Painters have their beautiful masterpieces, musicians have their timeless songs, but at the end of the day we do not lay our heads in these paintings or take physical refuge in a song. This job and privilege lays with buildings, and architecture’s job is to make this building beautiful enough to be the considered the greatest of all arts.