Iconic Hyperinflation

Definition

Iconic hyperinflation names the saturation failure of the iconic genre: when every city and corporation seeks the same effect, the gestures cancel each other. Jencks states the thesis through Sudjic, endorsing it "in part": "This is the way to an architecture of diminishing returns in which every sensational new building must attempt to eclipse the last one. It leads to a kind of hyperinflation, the architectural equivalent of the Weimar Republic's debauching of its currency" (Sudjic, quoted p. 135). The city-scale form is the "world fair": "who wants to live in a continuous World Fair, where each overstatement shouts down the last?" (p. 17); Las Vegas and Shanghai "both translate the inflated construction of the icon from the building into the city as a whole… The result is a permanent exhibition of landmarks, indeed, an exhibitionism of trademarks" (pp. 17–18). Alsop's Middlehaven masterplan is the test case: "a riotous assemblage of colors and shapes… in effect it's the world fair as urban strategy. Here Sudjic's objections are proven right, each gesture overwhelms the next. The result of simultaneous exclamation is white noise, not significance" (p. 154).

Jencks's counterweights: Venice — "every palazzo tried to upstage the preceding one… and sometimes got away with the crime. Only a spoilsport would wish Venice to sink into oblivion… but its example should remind us that the dark side of iconic building should not obscure its potential for pleasure and invention" (p. 135); and the regulated-competition condition — "the dark side… has also resulted, where competition is extreme but also regulated, in such marvels as Venice" (p. 135). The diagnosis sits inside the genre's economics: "This over-endowed shopping center, bursting through its sequins… had become that self-fulfilling prophecy—the icon" (p. 16) is success; the same mechanism at city scale is noise.

Key Thinkers

• Deyan Sudjic — the hyperinflation thesis and its Art Nouveau terminus: "Perhaps, like Art Nouveau which flourished briefly at the end of the nineteenth century, the icon has become ubiquitous just as it is about to vanish" (quoted p. 143). Jencks's rebuttal: "Critics, like historians, are not above hoping their prejudices will become self-fulfilling prophecies. But Gaudi has well outlasted Pevsner's censure… The iconic building is not a nine-day wonder, but a future condition that has deep causes" (p. 143).
• Charles Jencks — the concession-and-rebuttal structure: the Las Vegasization danger is "real" (pp. 17–18, 134–35, 154), but the Venice precedent shows the genre can produce "marvels" under competition — and the deeper causes (commerce, belief-decline) make the genre structural rather than fashionable (p. 195).

Related Concepts

• Iconic Architecture — the genre whose universalization produces the saturation.
• Spectacle — the exhibition-city as the spectacle's urban form.
• Iconic Paranoia — the attention-competition mechanism hyperinflation overheats.
• Bilbao Effect — the policy formula whose universal emulation generates the effect's own cancellation: "the mutual cancellation of effect through architectural inflation" (p. 134).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Iconic Building (Jencks 2005) — the "world fair" worry (pp. 11, 17, 134–35, 154); the Weimar hyperinflation quote and Sudjic's kitsch campaign (pp. 134–35); the Venice counter-case (p. 135); the Las Vegas/Shanghai "Late Cowboy Capitalism" pair (pp. 17–18); the death-of-fashion rebuttal (pp. 143, 195).
• Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings? (Sudjic & Jencks 2005) — the same-year exchange stating Sudjic's position in debate form: the icon as product of celebrity culture and "competitive branding," its over-exposure reducing it to "old hat"; Jencks's counter that icons are sustained by deeper economic and ideological forces.

Open Questions

• Is hyperinflation a monetary analogy that can bear empirical weight (visitor decay, brand fatigue), or a polemical metaphor? The wiki's attention-decay findings ("visuality peaks, function lasts") give it a mechanism Sudjic's column lacked.
• Does the Venice case prove the saturation is survivable under regulation — and if so, what regulation? The book's answer ("regulated competition") is asserted, not specified.