As someone who earns his keep by writing about both art and architecture, I tend to prefer the company of architects to that of artists – and, while we’re at it, the company of architecture critics to art critics.

Greatness in either domain is rare and deserving of all the honor we can bestow. But basic success is a far greater achievement in architecture than in painting or sculpture. To put the matter bluntly, you can be an artist and a total fool, but you cannot be an architect without possessing a store of basic intelligence.

To declare yourself an artist, all you need to do is show up and dress a certain way. Gone are the days when you had to master certain basic skills or even attain a working knowledge of the history of art. In architecture, by contrast, all the idiots have been weeded out by the stringent requirements needed to pass exams. Simply to get a degree, you must know something of physics and engineering, as well as the math that that implies. Once you embark on your career, you must learn about law, economics, and local politics.

I am tempted to believe that it is the mandate of gravity itself that serves to ground and focus the minds of architects.

I was put in mind of all this by an annoying, difficult, and intermittently rewarding book by Mark Linder, “Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism” (MIT Press, 304 pages, $40). The value of the book consists in the simple fact that it raises a question about the interplay of the two disciplines and then answers that question with some thoroughness, at least as regards the theoretical side of recent art. The problem is that, despite the title, it is really (and predictably) about art and the cannibalistic use it makes of architecture.

The architects it examines are those, like Frank Gehry and John Hejduk, who seem temperamentally most like artists.

The author’s investigations into the theoretical underpinnings of Clement Greenberg, Colin Rowe, Michael Fried, and Donald Judd are far too complicated to be recounted here and, while interesting in themselves, are less pertinent to art or architecture than the author believes.

My chief problem with the book is its irritating subtext: that architecture must be reconceived as something like painting (in the two-dimensionality of its facades) or sculpture (in the volumetric drama of its massings) in order for it to have any hope of existential consequence. The author almost seems to think he is doing architecture a favor by wresting it from the utilitarian demands that are in fact the source of its honor and dignity.

But art and architecture have always existed in a strange and complicated symbiosis. In the old days, architecture was a liberal art, one befitting free men, whereas the servile arts of painting and sculpture were not. Now, by contrast, artists tend to look down on architects, as if their practice were fatally corrupted by contact with the real world.

Another irony: Until early in the last century, it was all but impossible to find an important public building, from the Parthenon to Chartres to the 42nd Street library, that did not have abundant art – that is, sculpture – on its facade. Today buildings erected precisely to house art have begun to eclipse the art they contain: The Guggenheims in Bilbao and New York are in essence massive sculptures.

Though this might seem like a victory for architecture, in fact the greatest esteem attaches to the discipline at precisely the moment when it is most in default of itself.

In earlier times, the division between the arts was far less strident. Possibly the two finest architects of the 17th century, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, were, respectively, a very great sculptor and a very good painter. Possibly the greatest architect of the century before that, Michelangelo, was both a painter and a sculptor.

In recent years, however, the borrowings have been more one-directional, with architects aspiring to art rather than the other way around. Men like Richard Meier and Michael Graves try their hands at sculpture, watercolors, and collage. Mr. Meier will be showing his collages at Gagosian in Los Angeles later this month.

Meanwhile, as Mr. Linder’s book demonstrates, architecture critics like Colin Rowe invoke the language and thought of art criticism, as though they wanted to crash a better party than their own. But the compliment is rarely returned. For all his varied interests, Clement Greenberg has almost nothing to say about the art of architecture. Nor, for that matter, do most of the other eminent art critics of the past two generations.

With this in mind, I would risk answering a fool with his folly by trying to vindicate architecture according to the criteria of art criticism. But the temptation is there. A building can be conceived two-dimensionally as a painting, three dimensionally as a sculpture, or even as installation art – the earliest and best – which thoroughly surrounds the inhabitant and gathers him up in its all-encompassing artifice.

You could argue that, five millennia before Kandinsky, architects were acting on the same principles of abstract formal value, in two and three dimensions, that seemed like discoveries in modern times. Indeed, you could even make a case that, from its earliest days, architecture possessed something of the power and privilege cinema is thought to have introduced into the world: An essential component of architecture is the way it unfolds and shows itself visually through time and space.

But at a higher, and more essential level of generality, there is something – a tertium comparationis as the schoolmen said – that is neither art nor architecture but that unites each to the other and to all other cultural artifacts. It is a kind of abstracted human intelligence that lodges within those forms, irrespective of their medium, which has been reconfigured by the human eye or hand or mind.

Late in life, with all his theoretical battles behind him, Greenberg admitted a little wearily, that “all I ask of art is that it be good.” In other words, it doesn’t really matter if a building exemplifies philosophies of flatness or collage or if it can be read as a painting, a sculpture or anything else. The important thing is the immaterial excellence that transcends all material specificity. It is as evident in architecture as it is in painting, opera, and epic poetry, and, in appreciating culture, we must always keep it as the center of our homing.