What is Iconic Architecture?

Author: Simone Brott
Year: 2016 (SAHANZ 33, Melbourne)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/brott-2016-what-is-iconic-architecture.md

Summary

Brott returns to Adorno (this time his television/film theory as a "language of images" and a "living death") to argue that iconic architecture is not a reflection of external reality but a "regression to an internal architectural poemic" that carries out the "disciplinary rituals of modernism's death." The digital rendering "immortalises the building-to-come," forming a new "hieroglyphics" of the culture industry. She proposes three genres or typologies of iconic architecture — Elysium/1, Loop/2, and Sacrifice/3 — each a legible model of regression that administers a "solution" to the debt of modernist history.

Key Claims

• Iconicity as regression and "living death": following Adorno's account of film as the instrumentalisation of the unconscious and a "hieroglyphic" language, iconic architecture is "the new mimetic technology of the contemporary city" whose digital renderings circulate "in a magical forever space," concealing "architecture's regressive project toward modernist history" and hiding the social reality of the real buildings.
• Historical debt: modernism's failure to deliver "omnipotence and immortality" (Hiroshima, Auschwitz, dystopia) created "systemic guilt — a debt in architectural history," which the iconic industry's vision of eternity conceals in the image. Iconic architecture so "seeks to monetise debt within a collapsed global economy into a veritable currency."
• Three typologies (each a repayment model of modernity's debt):
  • Type 1 Elysium — the "paradise in a bad world" (Gwanggyo, Wangjing Soho, Farmscraper) trading on the green/Elysian fantasy of eternal life; "declares bankruptcy," promising permanent capital "as an afterlife."
  • Type 2 Loop — the self-enclosed loop (Bilbao, CCTV, Möbius-strip schemes, Tokyo stadium) that "locks the spectator in a 'closed loop electric circuit'" and distracts from ideology via an unbroken gaze; it "promises to repay the debt directly, monetising the building into a new form of currency."
  • Type 3 Sacrifice — the sacrificial object (Coop Himmelblau's Guadalajara, Visual and Performing Arts School, Musée des Confluences) that reenacts the burning of avant-garde tropes and "restoration" of historical crisis; a "Left protest that the debt cannot be repaid under any circumstances."
• Iconic architecture as cognition/critique: architecture's purpose "is not to provide liberation from ideology, but to teach the spectator about capitalism and modernity through the historical instrument of the architectural image," enabling negative thought.
• Austerity as the ground: "The only truth today ... is the truth of debt and austerity since 2007/9, the hole from which capital may never resurface" — the hole in the Musée des Confluences as capitalism's self-consuming "black hole."

Connections

Concepts: Iconic Architecture · Spectacle · Ideology · Architectural Object
Authors: Simone Brott · Frank Gehry
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Modernity's Opiate (Brott 2012)

Direct Quotes

"[T]oday the iconic architecture industry is the new executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality."

"[T]he ritual duplication and circulation of digital imagery surrounding iconic architecture ... forms a new hieroglyphics of architectural culture, a Persistence of Vision that spawns the illusion of aesthetic velocity and acceleration."

"The only truth today — the only indisputable reality — is the truth of debt and austerity since 2007/9, the hole from which capital may never resurface."

"[A]rchitecture's purpose ... is not to provide liberation from ideology, but to teach the spectator about capitalism and modernity through the historical instrument of the architectural image."

Open Questions

• Do the three typologies hold as a general analytic, or are they loose groupings of a diverse field of iconic practice?
• How does the "debt" framing here relate to the financialized "indebted man" of Lazzarato (via Bismarck)? Is the debt metaphorical or literal-economic?