Iconic Paranoia

Definition

Iconic paranoia is Jencks's account of the icon's deliberate provocation of hostile response as a productive condition: "paranoia… is an essential part of our media situation" (p. 7). The iconic building not only tolerates attack but is designed to attract it — "the insults often add a welcome frisson, the desired element of controversy and column inches—publicity" (p. 7) — and the successful icon, by the book's repeated formula, seeks "that strange combination of admiration and disgust, delight and paranoia" (p. 196). The mechanism runs in both directions: architects calculate the outrage (Bofill "calculated by Bofill as carefully as his self-comparison to Michelangelo"; the Selfridges store "designed to get into the 'Outrage' column," p. 16), and critics cannot help amplifying it — "Critical hypocrisy… is flushed out by the icon" (Pevsner "taking a bit too much pleasure in describing the sin," p. 30). Jencks's Nietzschean maxim: "use paranoia, as Nietzsche advised his supermen to do, in order to overcome the existing order" (p. 16).

The concept explains why negative metaphors ("a car accident with no survivors," "wet cardboard," "skeletons") do not damage the icon but constitute its fame — and why the "fury of one's competitors" must be "directed toward an impersonal public good" to avoid the Medici fate ("Envy is a plant one should never water," p. 28). It also grounds the landmark/icon distinction: "If you propose any icon the instant response is negative because it challenges perception: it is the nature of an icon. None of the other schemes were icons. They were landmarks" (Alsop's office, p. 145).

Key Thinkers

• Charles Jencks — the book's running thesis (pp. 7, 14, 16, 25, 27, 30, 149, 185, 195): paranoia as the icon's "frisson of overturning," the amplifying engine of its media aura, and a necessary "electric charge" without which a building "lacks" iconicity.

Related Concepts

• Enigmatic Signifier — the form whose openness invites the aberrant readings that generate paranoia; "the uncertain enigma coalesces into precision" when the atmosphere becomes electric (p. 80).
• iconic-architecture — the genre whose democratic egalitarianism ("any shed can be a temple") "engenders paranoia because any building type can now have its moment in the sun" (p. 14).
• Misfired Metaphor — the failure-mode paranoia exposes; the supercharged situation turns "little hints" into "big consequences" (p. 84).
• Architecture as Media — the mechanism by which the icon's aura is ritualized: "only the newspapers, magazines, and TV can engender the proper aura" (p. 72).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Iconic Building (Jencks 2005) — the founding account: "paranoia… is an essential part of our media situation" (p. 7); the Outrage column as designed destination (p. 16); the Medici warning and the impersonal-public-good rule (pp. 28–29); critical hypocrisy "flushed out by the icon" (p. 30); the Ground Zero "Battle at Ground Zero" as supercharged metaphorical inquisition (pp. 80–85); Alsop's competition-hostility thesis — "you cannot deny public the right to be hostile. It is an important part of the iconic building… otherwise it lacks an electric charge" (p. 149); the Swiss Re mixture "just the right mixture to inspire a bit of paranoia. New and threatening it is, but in familiar ways" (p. 185).
• The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) — the sequel's "double bind": architects "damned if they don't compete to be outrageous, and damned when their risks look stupid."

Open Questions

• Is paranoia a property of the building (designed provocation) or of the media ecology (which manufactures outrage for circulation)? Jencks's account slides between a Nietzschean-superman reading and a structural-media reading.
• Does the paranoia account survive the platform turn — where outrage is algorithmically amplified before the building is even built — or does it date the book to the newspaper era its examples come from?