Architecture and Crisis: Re-inventing the Icon, Re-imag(in)ing London and Re-branding the City

Author: Maria Kaika
Year: 2010 (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(4))
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/kaika-2010-architecture-and-crisis.md

Summary

Kaika departs from the standard reading of iconic buildings as "signifiers of economic success" to examine them as symptoms of crisis and of "mutations in the institutions and elites" that promote urban development. Using the City of London (Swiss-Re "Gherkin" and its siblings), and foregrounding the Corporation of London's institutional crisis (1970–1990) and reform, she argues, via Castoriadis's Imaginary institution of society, that iconic architecture functions as part of the "radical imaginary" — helping an institution in crisis to reinvent its identity and re-brand the City.

Key Claims

• From success-signifier to symptom of crisis: "the City's new iconic commissions stand as signifiers of a period of crisis"; they are "not as signifiers of London's international economic power, but as symptoms of changes in the institutions and elites that promote the City's new urbanity."
• Castoriadis and the radical imaginary: the "actual imaginary" expresses an already-constituted collective identity; the "radical imaginary" institutes "images and symbols for something that does not actually exist yet." During crisis, "iconic architecture produced under moments of economic and institutional crisis can be understood as a type of tootm that contributes towards configuring and instituting new significations ... in need of re-invention." Even the economy "exhibits most strikingly the domination of the imaginary at every level."
• The Corporation of London in crisis: the internationalization of London's economy after the 1970s challenged the Corporation's "closed club" character; the loss of the ECB to Frankfurt was the "invasion of the real" (Žižek); open threats of abolition forced reform. The Corporation "reinvented" its image — charitable outreach, a media campaign — and its spatial identity via the 2002 Unitary Development Plan favouring tall buildings: "an ode to the Corporation's new identity and a visual coup d'état."
• New patronage, new elites: the traditional elite (St Paul's, the Bank of England, Lloyd's) gave way to the "transnational capitalist class" (Sklair); contemporary "icons" "operate more as branding objects for transnational corporations or as speculative objects for real-estate developers" — buildings "as detached from the urban public and as disinterested in enhancing public space as the elites who commission them."
• Method: a "polyvocal" approach — 100 interviews with City workers (mental maps of landmarks) plus key informants — "outside the traditional frame."

Connections

Concepts: Iconic Architecture · Star Architecture · Neoliberal Metropolis · Ideology
Authors: Maria Kaika
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Who Wins and Who Loses in Iconic Culture (Goudsmit) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"The article ... offers a new approach ... not as [signifiers] of London's international economic success, but as symptoms of mutations in the institutions and elites that promote the City's new urbanity."

"[I]conic architecture produced under moments of institutional crisis can be understood as a type of tootm that contributes towards configuring and instituting new significations."

"[T]he economy exhibits most strikingly the domination of the imaginary at every level." (Castoriadis, as quoted)

"Towering over the City's traditional signifiers, the City's new buildings constitute an ode to the Corporation's new identity and a visual coup d'état."

Open Questions

• If the icon is the self-image of an elite in crisis (rather than a signifier of success), does this vindicate or undercut the "Bilbao effect"/branding justification, and what does it mean for the everyday residents/workers who experience these buildings as detached?