Modernity's Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture

Author: Simone Brott
Year: 2012 (Log 26, New York)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/brott-2012-modernitys-opiate-crisis-of-iconic.md

Summary

Brott reads "iconic architecture" through Adorno's critique of cinema: iconic architecture is defined not as a style but as a rebuke — a mimesis of virtual reality, the digital "twin" of the built work. It installs a new subjectivity in the encounter with the architectural commodity, hypostatizes digital space, and produces alienation. The essay argues the iconic project — epitomized by the Guggenheim Bilbao as "modernity's opiate" and its "Bilbao effect" as a Faustian debt — is in crisis both as a technique of neoliberal globalization and as an emptying out of the architectural commodity. It closes with a dialectical-materialist reading of Gehry's "crushed brown-paper bag" UTS building in Sydney, against the idealist (Hegelian/Neoplatonist) historiography of Bilbao.

Key Claims

• Iconicity as mimesis: like Adorno on film, iconic architecture is "too close to virtual reality" — defined by the uncanny surface resemblance between the built work and its simulated digital model, whose "virtual twin" is both its identical twin and its reason for being.
• Iconicity as ideology/subject-formation: iconicity is "not mere deception but the installation of a new subjectivity in the social encounter with the architectural commodity"; it "ensures the mystification of the commodity fetish." "Mimesis is a technique of distraction."
• The Hegelian/idealist frame: despite its self-image as pragmatic/materialist, iconic architecture is a return to Platonism by way of Hegel's Neoplatonism — the digital "Geist" as supersensible idea governing matter; the closer the surface gets to the digital image, the more it renounces corporeal existence. This "hypostatization of digital space produces a systemic 'alienation'" — the building becomes a "subject," the tourist a commodity relation.
• Bilbao as opiate: the Guggenheim is "the apotheosis of the iconic project," the materialization of the false continuity of modernity. Its famous "Bilbao effect" is a Faustian exchange creating an "object debt" (Mauss) to be repaid: "In its own abused syntax [the museum] put the city 'on the map,'" but "the city's own citizens have vanished (the real Bilbao effect that is never discussed)." Bilbao is "empty, a mere opiate of modernity."
• The crisis of the iconic project: once "the principal technique of neoliberal globalization," iconic architecture is now "no longer a failed project on the side of global capital, but an emptying out of the architectural commodity" — "the architectural image no longer reifies capital but refers only to its empty self." "It is in this sense that iconic architecture is in crisis."
• Historiographic opposition: Bilbao reads as synchronic/Hegelian-idealist (ahistorical "pure present"); Gehry's UTS facade reads as an attempt at a diachronic, dialectical-materialist reading of modernism's collapse (recalling Pruitt-Igoe) — though it, too, reproduces the mythic image. Gallery to Tafuri's "critical value of the image" and the paradoxical nature of image-critique.
• For dialectical critique: "to apply ... a proper Marxist, i.e. dialectical-materialist, account of buildings such as Bilbao is necessary."

Connections

Concepts: Iconic Architecture · Spectacle · Ideology · Critical Architecture · Architectural Object
Authors: Simone Brott
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Building the Picture (Baan) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"For the purpose of iconicity is not mere deception but rather the installation of a new subjectivity in the social encounter with the architectural commodity."

"[T]he hypostatization of digital space produces a systemic 'alienation,' transforming social relations in the city into commodities through capital's intervention via the aesthetic image."

"In its own abused syntax [the museum] put the city 'on the map.' Though this image draws tourists to Bilbao every year, the city's own citizens have vanished (the real Bilbao effect that is never discussed)."

"[I]conic architecture is no longer a failed project on the side of global capital, but an emptying out of the architectural commodity ... the architectural image no longer reifies capital but refers only to its empty self."

Open Questions

• Can iconicity be separated from ideology, or is every "iconic" reading (including Brott's critique) captive to the image it critiques — the Tafuri problem she herself raises?
• If Bilbao failed its city's citizens, on what evidence (population, economy) does the "real Bilbao effect" rest, and how does it complicate the "function lasts" thesis of Alaily-Mattar et al.?