Non-landmark Landmark

Definition

The non-landmark landmark is the anti-icon icon: a building that delivers the iconic commission's demand for a landmark while refusing the figural, freestanding object the word implies. Donald Dewar's phrase for Enric Miralles's winning Scottish Parliament design: "Miralles… wasn't looking for a great landmark building, he wasn't trying to build the highest tower in the whole of central Scotland as a mark of importance of the Parliament… . What he was talking about was a building that grew out of that site, was not simply imposed on that site" (quoted p. 127). Jencks generalizes it into "a concept [that] looms very large in the age of the iconic building": "the idea of growing organically out of the site, has a long pedigree in Italian architecture and that of Frank Lloyd Wright" (p. 127). The critical consensus he cites — Robert Booth's "a landscape rather than a landmark building at the heart of Edinburgh" — makes the Scottish Parliament "very much part of this maverick trend, one that tries to invent the anti-icon icon (i.e. the building that is very visibly not there)" (p. 127).

The lineage Jencks assembles: Aaron Betsky's Landscrapers — "buildings that nestle into the ground but nevertheless have a striking image," defended "in a time of ecological stress" (p. 127); Koolhaas's attempt to "Kill the Skyscraper," realized as the CCTV loop ("a feint echo" avoided by making the 301st building not a skyscraper at all, pp. 107, 111); and Peter Eisenman's landform for Santiago de Compostela — "a non-building with an opera house, museum, and libraries… the structure that, more than any other, is an anti-icon icon," a "real hybrid of landscape and architecture" (pp. 162, 168). The Parliament itself: "city fabric wiggling into the countryside," blending the Royal Mile into Arthur's Seat, with a turfed outdoor assembly for 10,000 (pp. 118, 126–27).

Key Thinkers

• Charles Jencks — the concept's systematizer (pp. 127–28, 162–68): the anti-icon icon as one of the genre's characteristic paradoxes, alongside the "blurred signifier."
• Peter Eisenman — the deliberate anti-icon practitioner: the City of Culture designed "totally 'other' than Bilbao" — "They wanted an alternative to the figural object of Gehry, so we gave them a landscape" (interview, pp. 164–65).
• Donald Dewar & Enric Miralles — the Holyrood coinage and design (pp. 115, 127).
• Aaron Betsky — the Landscrapers thesis the book cites (p. 127; not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Iconic Architecture — the genre the non-landmark landmark tries to have both ways in: "very much part of this maverick trend" (p. 127).
• Enigmatic Signifier — the semiotic strategy that makes an absent landmark readable ("the building that is very visibly not there").
• Iconic Paranoia — the double-bind confirmed by the contradictory testimony: Wark wanting "a landmark for Scotland" while Dewar praises the non-landmark (p. 127).
• Weak Architecture — the anti-monumental lineage (Solà-Morales) with which the maverick trend rhymes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Iconic Building (Jencks 2005) — the Dewar coinage and Miralles design (pp. 115, 127–28); the maverick trend assembled with Betsky, Koolhaas, and Eisenman (pp. 127, 162–68); the "Gathering Place" tragedy and the Fraser Inquiry (pp. 126–31).

Open Questions

• Is the non-landmark landmark a genuine third type, or an icon in denial — "having it both ways" (Jencks's own note on Koolhaas and Eisenman, p. 127)? The Canberra Parliament (the flag as ultimate icon, buildings "sunk out of sight") is the test: its suppression of the building is its icon.
• Does the ecological warrant (Betsky) survive the Holyrood cost record — the £40 million estimate becoming £431 million — or does the anti-icon buy its modesty with the genre's most catastrophic cost overrun (pp. 128–29)?