Jencks vs. Sklair: What Is the Iconic Building?

Framing

This debate stages two rival accounts of what the iconic building is and does. Charles Jencks, the postmodern theorist of the "enigmatic signifier," reads the icon as a durable symbolic genre — a building that carries multiple, often contradictory meanings and thereby provokes continued public and critical response. Leslie Sklair, the sociologist of globalization, reads the icon as a hegemonic project of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) — a systematically produced, marketed, and inserted artefact whose fame and symbolic significance serve the "culture-ideology of consumerism." At stake is whether the icon's value is intrinsic (a meaningful symbolic form that answers a real cultural need) or instrumental (an ideological tool that converts public space into consumerist space and legitimates capitalist globalization). The two thinkers share a starting point — both insist the image is central to iconicity — but they diverge sharply on what that centrality means and whether the icon can be redeemed.

Positions

Position A: Jencks — the icon as meaningful symbolic genre

For Jencks, the iconic building is a genre that is "here to stay" because it answers a deep cultural need: the decline of religion and of all shared belief systems. The monument "has lost its power to persuade," and the iconic building — an "icon without a clear iconography," an enigmatic signifier — takes its place. The icon works through multiple, mixed metaphors ("if you scratch an iconic building hard enough, it bleeds such meanings: overtones of the sun and water; fish and animals; crystals and our body parts"), and the best icons are "cosmogenic," alluding to nature and the cosmos. Against the "one-liner" (the reductive, brand-driven icon), Jencks proposes a "code of good practice" and a "new iconography" that designs multiple meaning into form. The icon is thus a normative category: it can be done well or badly, and its value is intrinsic to its symbolic content, not reducible to its economic function.

Key texts: The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) · Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings? (Sudjic & Jencks 2005) · Contextual Counterpoint (Jencks 2024)

Position B: Sklair — the icon as hegemonic project of the TCC

For Sklair, the iconic building is not primarily a symbolic genre but a hegemonic project: iconic architecture is "produced, marketed, and inserted into cities" as part of a systematic project of the transnational capitalist class, "defending ideas rather than territory." Iconicity is defined by fame plus symbolic/aesthetic significance, and "there is no minimizing the centrality of the image in the production and iteration of iconicity." The TCC (with its corporate, state, technical, and consumerist fractions) acts as the "authorized agent" of the icon, and the starchitect's symbolic capital is attached to it. In the global era, iconic architecture "strives to turn more or less all public space into consumerist space" through the culture-ideology of consumerism — the belief that "human worth is best ensured and happiness is best achieved in terms of our consumption and possessions." The icon is thus an ideological category: its value is instrumental to capital, and its symbolic content is a vehicle for consumerist belief rather than an end in itself.

Key texts: The Icon Project (Sklair 2017) · Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism (Sklair 2010) · Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization (Sklair 2006) · The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary Architecture (Sklair 2005)

Additional Positions

• Sudjic (sceptical of both): the icon is a product of celebrity culture and "competitive branding," its "Bilbao effect" figures misleading ("it needs content"). Sudjic doubts whether the contemporary icon sustains any real content at all — a position that undercuts Jencks's normative redemption while also questioning whether Sklair's ideological reading overstates the icon's coherence. See Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings? (Sudjic & Jencks 2005).
• Brott (the icon in crisis): the iconic project is "in crisis" — once "the principal technique of neoliberal globalization," iconic architecture is now "an emptying out of the architectural commodity," so that "the architectural image no longer reifies capital but refers only to its empty self." This suggests the icon has died as a meaningful genre, leaving both Jencks's symbolism and Sklair's ideology as descriptions of a spent form. See Modernity's Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture (Brott 2012).

Key Texts

• The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) — Position A: the icon as durable symbolic genre.
• Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings? (Sudjic & Jencks 2005) — Position A and the Sudjic scepticism.
• The Icon Project (Sklair 2017) — Position B: the icon as hegemonic project.
• Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism (Sklair 2010) — Position B: the icon and consumerist ideology.
• Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization (Sklair 2006) — Position B: the image's centrality.
• Modernity's Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture (Brott 2012) — the crisis position that undercuts both.

Current State

The debate is unresolved and has shifted. Jencks's normative redemption of the icon (the "enigmatic signifier," the "new iconography") has been challenged by the empirical finding that "visuality peaks, function lasts" (Alaily-Mattar et al.) — the pure-image icon is subject to the attention-cycle's decay — and by the crisis diagnosis (Brott) that the icon has emptied out into a self-referential commodity. Sklair's ideological reading has been criticized (Lang's "Iconic Ordure") for overprivileging representation/image over the material production of the icon. The debate now turns on whether the icon's value is intrinsic (Jencks), instrumental (Sklair), or empty (Brott) — and whether any of these accounts survives the platform turn, in which the algorithm, not the critic or the TCC, increasingly decides what is seen.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

This debate is central to Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture and semiotics & representation areas. It stages the two dominant frameworks for the icon — the semiotic (Jencks's "enigmatic signifier") and the ideological-economic (Sklair's Icon Project) — that the Alaily-Mattar empirical study operationalizes together. It also connects to the icon's role in capital circulation, the culture-ideology of consumerism, and the question of whether the icon can be redeemed or is necessarily a tool of capitalist globalization.