Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings?

Author: Deyan Sudjic & Charles Jencks
Year: 2005
Source type: article (published exchange / debate, The Observer)
Raw file: raw/articles/sudjic-jencks-2005-can-we-still-believe-iconic.md

Summary

This four-letter exchange between critics Deyan Sudjic and Charles Jencks (The Observer, 2005) debates whether the iconic building is dying or here to stay. Sudjic argues the icon's days are numbered: it is a product of celebrity culture and brand competition, its "Bilbao effect" figures misleading, and its over-exposure will reduce it to "old hat." Jencks counters that icons are enduring because they operate through "enigmatic signifiers" — multiple, mixed metaphors, many pointing to nature or the cosmos — which provoke continued public and critical response. The debate turns on whether the icon is sustained by economic/media spectacle (the "Bilbao effect") or by meaningful symbolic content.

Key Claims

• Sudjic (position: the icon is dying): iconic architecture is the symptom of celebrity culture and "competitive branding," not architectural value; detached from taste, it serves city boosters who want a "simple solution to a complex problem."
• Sudjic: the "Bilbao effect" is a travesty — visitor numbers dropped from 1.3m (first year) to 975,000 within three years; "it needs content." Architecture reduced to a "one-liner" produces "the Costa del Icon" on the Thames.
• Sudjic's genealogy: the lust to build icons is ancient — Hitler/Speer, Stalin/Iofan, Mussolini, Marcos, Saddam Hussein — rooted in "the fear of death and of hubris and vanity," though today's commissioners are democratically elected city politicians.
• Jencks (position: icons are here to stay): icons are sustained by economic/social forces larger than architecture, notably the decline of religion and of all shared belief systems; "weak belief" means "anything can be an iconic building."
• Jencks: the key mechanism is the enigmatic signifier — multiple, sometimes contradictory metaphors ("mixed signs") that "give the enigmatic form a certain charge," e.g., the Swiss Re "gherkin" as missile/spiral-screw/pinecone/cosmic skyscraper, Gehry's fish, Calatrava's wave, CCTV's "dog and doughnut."
• Jencks: to make better icons we need "a new iconography" — design multiple meaning into form and relate form to nature, so "the iconography of the iconic building... asks to be found."

Connections

Concepts: Iconic Architecture · Star Architecture · Spectacle
Authors: Charles Jencks · Deyan Sudjic · Frank Gehry · Rem Koolhaas
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) · The Age of Spectacle (Dyckhoff) · Reviewing the "Bilbao effect" (Lorente)

Direct Quotes

"Missing from the debate so far is a comparison with previous landmark buildings. The Parthenon and Pantheon were obviously reductive monuments built by rulers to impress, control and delight their people... The decline of religion is a key shift in the veneration of icons, but just as important is the decline in all ideologies and shared public belief systems. 'Weak belief' characterises our global culture." (Jencks)

"It leads to projects that have the same relationship to an authentic, multilayered city as Starbucks does to a family-run Milanese espresso bar." (Sudjic)

"These mixed signs are 'enigmatic signifiers,' and ever since the Eiffel Tower was first hated, and then loved, they have come to dominate the iconic building." (Jencks)

Open Questions

• Does Jencks's "new iconography" (nature/cosmic referents) resolve the critique that iconicity is mere brand spectacle, or does Spencer-style criticism undercut both positions?
• Who is right about the Bilbao effect's longevity — the key empirical dispute of this exchange?