Misfired Metaphor

Definition

The misfired metaphor is Jencks's name for the iconic building's most characteristic failure: the "provocative creation" that "may rebound on the creator, become an unintended signifier of exactly the wrong things, an architectural slip of the tongue" (p. 132). The book also calls the class "malapropistic metaphors" — "exuberant signs that on the road to some unspecified Damascus have lost their way… the revenge of the enigmatic signifier, the expressive form with the wrong kind of content. When it misfires it shoots the architect in the backside" (p. 50). Because the enigmatic signifier is open to completion by the viewer, its connotations cannot be controlled: "in the absence of any conventions and in the presence of many ambiguities, and a supercharged situation, little hints had big consequences" (p. 84).

The named cases define the class. Foster's London City Hall "as a testicle" and Boston City Hall "as a fortress" — "inadvertent meanings that were hardly intended" (p. 50); Piano's Parco della Musica read as "pigs, rats, armadillos… bottoms and carrot ends" and its ceiling as "the internal organs of some giant living creature—kidneys maybe" (pp. 132–34); Calatrava's Tenerife wave as Sudjic's "teddy boy quiff" (p. 139); Viñoly's Ground Zero lattices as "skeletons and hanging bodies" — a "journalistic tag" that "proved damaging" and decided the competition (pp. 84–85, 98–99); Libeskind's sunken memorial as "a baleful 'Wailing Wall' architecture," "a Trauma Theme Park," a "mausoleum with a minaret in the middle" (pp. 84–85). The general mechanism: "an architect, not especially trained as an artist, who intends to make a grand sculptural gesture that has never been seen before and yet still make something functional. Caught between opposite requirements, pushed by celebrity culture one way and pulled by a utilitarian philosophy the other, he may be blind to the emergent blooper and fail to see that function plus unlikely gesture equals a screw-up" (p. 132).

Key Thinkers

• Charles Jencks — the taxonomy and its relish: "These bloopers are becoming common enough to constitute a class in themselves and, like all dominant genres, not something merely to be suffered or inveighed against, but also to be relished, like Mrs. Malaprop's wonderful circumloquotations" (p. 132).
• Deyan Sudjic — the chief prosecutor: the "teddy boy quiff," "prefabricated Gaudi, extruded from a toothpaste tube by the yard," "a liver-colored tottering spiral… like something out of The War of the Worlds" (pp. 137, 149).
• Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind — the counter-tactic: Eisenman's "deconstruction" aim of quasi-meaningless form; Libeskind's competitive use of the mechanism ("Viñoly referred in the press to the bathtub as a 'death pit.' I responded by saying that his towers looked like skeletons," Breaking Ground, quoted p. 85).

Related Concepts

• Enigmatic Signifier — the misfire is the enigmatic signifier's built-in risk: the same openness that succeeds "both obvious and veiled" fails as malapropism.
• Iconic Paranoia — the supercharged media situation that turns small connotations into verdicts.
• Spatial Metaphors — the metaphorical reading that misfires.
• iconic-architecture — the genre whose democratic openness makes the misfire unavoidable.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Iconic Building (Jencks 2005) — the founding account: the "malapropistic metaphors" definition (p. 50); Piano's Parco della Musica as the class case (pp. 132–34); the Ground Zero skeleton/Wailing Wall exchange (pp. 84–85); the "screw-up" mechanism (p. 132); the Tenerife quiff (p. 139).
• The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) — the cure stated a year later in the "code of good practice": "more thought on the iconography behind the buildings, more coherence in the use of metaphors, and the careful interweaving of many codes to neutralize those embarrassing mistakes that come with any high-risk venture."

Open Questions

• Can the misfire be designed against, or is it constitutive? Jencks's "code of good practice" implies neutralizable risk; the Ground Zero record (where the winning metaphors themselves — skeletons, bathtub — were then turned) suggests constitutive exposure.
• Is there an audit that separates the misfired metaphor from the aberrant-but-accurate reading? The book treats "testicle" as misfire but "skeleton" as damagingly plausible — what distinguishes a false connotation from a true one the architect merely dislikes?