When Architecture and Abstract Art Speak the Same Language

By Simon Kenny | 6 min read

Abstract art and architecture share a fundamental creative vocabulary built on form, space, light, and proportion. Both disciplines manipulate these elements to generate a direct physiological response in the human body. Research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics confirms the connection is a biological reality, driven by the human nervous system’s measurable response to fractal complexity.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, not in a particularly academic way, but in the way you think about something your hands already know. Before I worked with paint in any serious sense, I spent years building things: carpentry, property development, furniture design.

These disciplines teach you to think in three dimensions, to understand how weight distributes, how light falls across a surface, how a structure earns the space it occupies. When abstract painting eventually became my language, that spatial consciousness came with me.

The more I have explored how painters and architects have historically approached their work, the more I find a shared cognitive process: a sustained conversation about what it means to shape human experience through organised form. The neuroscience now backs up what practitioners have understood intuitively for a century.

What do abstract art and architecture share at their creative core?

Both disciplines organise form, space, and light to act directly upon the human body. Abstract painting uses a two-dimensional surface to create the sensation of depth, volume, and movement through colour relationships, proportion, and scale. Architecture does the same in three dimensions. The cognitive goal in both cases is identical: shaping human experience through spatial logic.

The most rigorous historical proof comes from Le Corbusier, who operated simultaneously as a Purist painter and modernist architect throughout the 1920s and beyond. His Modulor system, developed in 1945, rooted both his canvases and his buildings in the proportions of the human figure via the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci sequence.

He described it as “a range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things.” The mathematical syntax governing his paintings fed directly into the floor-to-ceiling ratios of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.

The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, institutionalised this alliance. Its Preliminary Course placed painters including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers at the centre of architectural training. Students analysed form, colour theory, and material properties long before they ever touched a drafting tool.

The 1923 Haus am Horn, the first Bauhaus model house, brought this synthesis into physical form. It was a building where avant-garde abstract art and functionalist architecture merged into a single expression, proving that Gropius’s founding manifesto was not aspiration but an achieved method.

Claim: Le Corbusier’s Modulor system, published in 1945, applied the Golden Ratio and human body proportions to regulate both his two-dimensional Purist paintings and his architectural projects, including the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.
Source: Le Corbusier’s Modulor and the Debate on Proportion in France, Architectural Histories journal; Art Institute of Chicago archival records on Still Life Filled with Space (1924). Verified June 2026.

What does neuroscience reveal about why abstract art and architecture affect us in the same ways?

Research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics shows that human beings are biologically predisposed to respond positively to fractal complexity. Using eye-tracking technology and Visual Attention Software, researchers demonstrated that architecture rich in proportional complexity commands involuntary visual attention before cultural conditioning is activated. The eye lingers on the organisation of visual structures, triggering a measurable reduction in psychological stress.

What makes this finding so directly relevant to abstract painting is that the same mechanism governs the response to layered abstract canvases. Computer analysis of Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings demonstrated that his intuitive drip technique generated complex statistical fractals, a quality now termed Fractal Expressionism.

Psychological studies confirm that mid-range fractal dimensions in visual art produce universal aesthetic appeal across cultures, genders, and ages. The brain processes the ordered chaos of a dense abstract canvas in precisely the same way as a forest canopy or a richly ornamented facade.

In contrast, surfaces with low complexity fail to hold the gaze. The Max Planck researchers found that the human mind is essentially unresponsive to blank concrete walls and flat glass curtain walls, and this induces visual fatigue. For painting and architecture alike, richness earns sustained attention. Emptiness without tonal depth loses the body before it can move the mind.

Claim: Mid-range fractal dimensions in abstract painting produce universal aesthetic appeal, reducing stress and restoring attention in ways physiologically identical to viewing natural environments, according to psychological studies using fractal analysis.
Source: Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock’s Fractals, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; Max Planck Institute, “Near-natural, fractal architecture promotes well-being,” mpg.de. Verified June 2026.

Which buildings opening in 2026 best demonstrate architecture functioning as abstract art?

Two major cultural buildings opening in Los Angeles in 2026 represent the clearest contemporary expression of this synthesis. The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, designed by Peter Zumthor and opening in May 2026, elevates 110,000 square feet of gallery space 30 feet above Wilshire Boulevard on seven structural blocks.

Placed on 40 seismic base isolators engineered by SOM, the building’s interior palette is deliberately painterly: galleries coated in dark red, indigo, and black silicon-based paint, with terrazzo floors embedded with white shells referencing the prehistoric oceanic past of the La Brea Tar Pits site.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects and opening in September 2026 in Exposition Park, takes a radically different approach. Its 300,000 square feet are formed from over 1,500 custom fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, producing biomorphic curves with no right angle in sight.

A central oculus pulls daylight deep into the interior. Yansong conceived the building as “a sculptural, organic form shaped by light, clouds, and the surrounding tree canopy.” Housing over 40,000 works of art, it stands as one of the most complete contemporary expressions of architecture and abstract art completing a single sentence together.

Claim: The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, designed by Peter Zumthor with structural engineering by SOM, opened to the public in May 2026. The building rests on 40 base isolators and uses silicon-based interior paints in dark red, indigo, and black.
Source: Official LACMA institutional press release, lacma.org; SOM structural engineering records. Verified June 2026.

How does an abstract painter bring architectural spatial thinking to the canvas?

Barnett Newman was precise about the spatial ambition behind large-scale abstract painting. He said: “Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts.” For his 1951 solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, he attached a note instructing viewers to stand close, deliberately positioning his canvases to envelop peripheral vision entirely.

Mark Rothko painted on a massive scale for the same reason: to draw the viewer inside the emotional field of the work, provoking not observation but immersion. Both men were doing in paint what the greatest architects do in concrete and glass.

My own route into this understanding was practical rather than theoretical. Years in carpentry and property development taught me to read a space before I entered it, to understand how volume distributes light, how surfaces carry weight, how a room communicates its own logic before any furniture arrives.

When I work now with a palette knife across a large-format canvas, building layers of paint with real topographic depth, ridges and compressions, recessions and sudden brightness, that spatial instinct governs every decision. These ideas were central to my TEDx talk in Richmond in January 2026. You can read more about my practice on the about page.

My work has sat in architectural spaces across hospitality, corporate, and private contexts, from the chef’s table at Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus in London to the JW Marriott Bengaluru. In those settings, a large abstract painting does more than fill a wall.

It reorganises the room: establishing focal lines, anchoring furniture groupings, directing how a person moves through the space. The gravitational pull of a heavily textured, large-format canvas works on the body before the eye has consciously registered why. Architecture functions in exactly the same way.

The psychology of how abstract art and architectural space generate related physiological responses is explored in more depth in the Pillar 5 series on this blog. How abstraction shapes and defines corporate and commercial environments is covered separately in my article series here.

Claim: Barnett Newman explicitly designed his paintings to envelop the viewer’s peripheral vision, creating what he described as a “space-dome.” For his 1951 solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, he attached a typed note instructing viewers to stand at a short distance from his canvases.
Source: Barnett Newman’s Sense of Space: A Noncontextualist Account of Its Perception and Meaning, Digital Commons, Trinity University. Verified June 2026.

The conversation between structure and expression

The relationship between abstract art and architecture keeps drawing me back, because my own experience of making confirms it. Structure and expression are not opposites. The most alive painting I have stood in front of holds its spatial logic with the quiet authority of a great building.

Both invite you in, and both refuse to let you leave unchanged. Whether you are exploring abstract originals for a domestic interior or considering a commission for an architectural space, the spatial thinking behind each work is always part of the conversation.

To browse large-format originals, visit the paintings gallery. To enquire about a commission for an architectural space, get in touch directly.