The Iconic Building

Author: Charles Jencks Year: 2005 (London: Frances Lincoln) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/jencks_2005-iconic-building.md

Summary

Jencks's book-length theory of the iconic building, the full statement that his 2005–2006 articles compress. Against the chorus bemoaning "celebrity architecture," he argues the genre has deep and irreversible causes — commercial and spiritual, amplified by the decline of conventional religions and iconographies — and proposes criteria for judging it: the enigmatic signifier that is "both obvious and veiled," the negotiation between explicit sign and implicit symbol (whose twin failure-modes are "vacuity or bombast"), and Umberto Eco's open work as the genre's semiotic frame. The book supplies the genre's genealogy (ancient icons, Ronchamp 1955 as seminal, Wright's Guggenheim as first "iconic icon," the AT&T 1978 as media threshold, Bilbao 1997 as economic turn), case studies of its winners and losers (Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas, Miralles, Piano, Calatrava, Alsop, Hadid, Eisenman, Libeskind), the Ground Zero "media wars," and a concluding wager that "nature and cosmogenesis" are the emergent iconography.

Key Claims

Definition, doubly stated: to become iconic a building "must provide a new and condensed image, be high in figural shape or gestalt, and stand out from the city"; to become powerful it "must be reminiscent in some ways of unlikely but important metaphors and be a symbol fit to be worshipped, a hard task in a secular society" (p. 22). Its compressibility — shrinkable to a stamp or letterhead — "allows it to become a brand image" but "threatens to make it a cliché or one-liner" (p. 23). The iconic icon is "doubly iconic": a bizarre reduced image and a similitude that provokes metaphors (the building "as fish, mermaid, and artichoke," Bilbao; the Sydney sails).
The urban hierarchy is replaced by an attention marketplace: the old hierarchy of public worth (church, city hall, school, "modest" railroad) has yielded to "a world marketplace competing for attention," where even "attacks on iconic buildings fail to register" because "the insults often add a welcome frisson" (p. 7). The Birmingham Selfridges — a corner shop next to a church — shows the radical egalitarianism: "there is no need for a Selfridges sign or any identification—'the building is the sign'" (p. 15).
The Bilbao Effect, quantified at the source: the $100 million museum (ten "averagely low" De Koonings) drew 1.3 million visitors the first year, 1.1 million the second, 3 million by 2000; 87% came from outside the Basque region, tourist spending rose over $400 million in two years, extra tax revenue exceeded $70 million, and the museum attracted 137 corporate members — "double the initial investment in about three years." The formula: "Post-modernize or sink!" (pp. 18–19). Gehry confirms the brief was explicitly iconic: Thomas Krens and the Basques "said that they needed a 'hit' there, like the Sydney Opera House" (p. 12).
Paranoia is functional: "paranoia… is an essential part of our media situation" (p. 7); critics' outrage is part of the message ("It was designed to get into the 'Outrage' column," on Peter Davey's Architectural Review attack, p. 16); "Critical hypocrisy… is flushed out by the icon" (Pevsner "taking a bit too much pleasure in describing the sin," p. 30). "A great icon need not be a great work of architecture, but it must be a captivating one. It has to move your viscera, whether you like it or not" (p. 54).
Judging the icon — three litmus tests: (1) how the "enigmatic signifiers" relate internally, "how uncanny connotations work as a small, internal world"; (2) the negotiation between "the explicit sign and implicit symbol," where a false step falls into "one of the twin dangers… either vacuity or bombast" (p. 21); (3) the historical wine-tasting education of taste. Evidence that a building is an enigmatic signifier is verbal: "a successful iconic building will always elicit a flurry of bizarre comparisons, a veritable blizzard of idiotic similes, an absolute snowstorm of ridiculous conceits. The icon won't calm down" (p. 33). Success requires being "both obvious and veiled… open to completion in the viewer's mind" (p. 38).
The metaphorical evidence is the primary register: "we map the unknown on to the already said" — hence the blizzard of similes (Bilbao as fish/mermaid/artichoke; Swiss Re as gherkin/pinecone/bullet/penis; Disney Hall as "French fries"/"inverted armadillo"/"wet cardboard"; Ground Zero as slurry wall/skeletons). Metaphors "dominate the iconic building" because iconography proper "has become something of an embarrassment" (p. 53).
Landmark vs. icon: the icon "is always strange and challenging, disturbing and new," while "the landmark makes an impact but a familiar one" (Alsop's office, p. 145) — which is why the public votes for landmarks and against icons (Alsop's Fourth Grace: 19% vs Foster's 30%).
Museum = shop = icon: Warhol's prediction — "All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores" (p. 44) — is realized in the Prada epicenters (Koolhaas's "flagship syndrome" theory vs the $87 million Tokyo store; Herzog & de Meuron's "Prada-Dada"), while Koolhaas plays "both sides of the junk": "Shopping is doubtless the last form of public activity" (Koolhaas, quoted p. 44).
Civic icons and the embarrassment of iconography: "we live in an age where iconography has become something of an embarrassment" (p. 51); politicians "have to make U-turns on the spot and deny a change of direction." Chandigarh's General Assembly remains "the only seat of government to have reached this resolution of iconic building" through local and cosmic symbols (monsoon cistern canopy, solar festival, "reminding man once every year that he is the son of the sun," pp. 48–49), while Brasília is misread as salad bowls, Boston City Hall as a fortress, Foster's London City Hall as "a testicle" — "malapropistic metaphors" that "shoot the architect in the backside" (p. 50).
Ground Zero as the I-word's public debut: a five-act media drama in which "winning competitions isn't really about coming first any more"; Libeskind beat the THINK team (Viñoly) because his "mixed signs" offered "precise denotations and fuzzy connotations" — Freedom Tower/1776 and the slurry wall as denotations, connotations left open — while Viñoly's lattices could be read as "skeletons" (pp. 84–85). The critic (Muschamp) switches sides, the governor decides on the metaphor, and the I-word itself goes circular: whereas the old icon "enjoyed a venerated status because of its reference to a specific saint or valued meaning, now it claimed legitimacy because it validated itself… typical of the mediated world where celebrities are famous for being famous" (p. 68).
Media ritual confers the aura: "A building becomes iconic not just for the reasons I have enumerated but also when it is part of an unfolding media event that takes time… In a secular society, only the newspapers, magazines, and TV can engender the proper aura, establish legitimacy, create taboos" (pp. 71–72). 9/11 — Stockhausen's "greatest work of art ever," the surviving curtain-wall fragment that De Montebello called "Already an icon" with the three qualities of "Permanence, connection to the event, and expressiveness" (p. 70) — became a negative miracle through pure media repetition; the Twin Towers were iconoclastically targeted "because it was so aggressively a symbol of the wrong kind of world trade… the two upright strokes of the dollar sign" (Marina Warner, p. 99).
The iconic building is a bet: Koolhaas's CCTV — won against the "301st skyscraper" logic and re-won up the Chinese hierarchy — shows the genre's gambles; "Iconic building is a bet thrown on to a gambling table, and this comes with potential costs" (p. 112). The Milan-style dilemma: Koolhaas, at the RIBA medal, "lambasts idolatry" — "The idolatry of the market has drastically changed our legitimacy and status even though our status has never been higher" (p. 101) — while re-branding the EU as a barcode ("E-conography") and advising "Go East."
Non-landmark Landmark: Dewar on Miralles's Holyrood — "he wasn't looking for a great landmark building… What he was talking about was a building that grew out of that site, was not simply imposed on that site" (p. 127) — the anti-icon icon shared with Koolhaas's "Kill the Skyscraper" (CCTV), Eisenman's landform at Santiago, and Betsky's Landscrapers. Its costs are tragic-multiplied: £40 million becoming £431 million through construction management, brief inflation, 9/11 security, 15,000 design changes, and the deaths of both protagonists (Dewar, Miralles) leaving a double-bind; "Architecture has to be defended against intimidation by the ignorant" (pp. 128–31).
Misfired metaphors are a class: the enigmatic signifier's revenge — Boston City Hall as fortress, London City Hall as testicle, Piano's Parco della Musica read as "pigs, rats, armadillos" and "kidneys," Calatrava's Tenerife wave as "a teddy boy quiff," Viñoly's towers as "skeletons and hanging bodies." The mechanism: "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… function plus unlikely gesture equals a screw-up" (p. 132).
Hyperinflation and cancellation: Sudjic's verdict, endorsed in part — "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). Yet Venice, where every palazzo tried to upstage the last, is the reminder that regulated competition produced marvels; the danger is the Las Vegas "world fair" in which "each gesture overwhelms the next" (Alsop's Middlehaven, p. 154).
The star system's economics: Philip Johnson's "$2.5 billion worth of work in 1984" and his repeated admission that he was "a whore" (p. 42); mega-fast-build "makes slaves of its workmen"; SOM's thirty major Chinese commissions; the $40,000 Ground Zero fees — "It doesn't matter a damn, Frank Gehry" (Eisenman) — a competition that cost the architects a combined $4 million.
The genealogy of the genre: ancient icons (the Colossus, Dinocrates inflating himself for Alexander); Louis-Philippe's Obelisk Solution — the Luxor obelisk "would not recall a single political event" (p. 197), the first calculated monument against political change; the Eiffel Tower (the Committee of Three Hundred, the ascension experience); de Chirico's metaphysical painting — "the enigma" — as the artistic pre-condition; Eliot and Joyce's fabricated enigmas.
The four conditions of the modern genre: (1) modernist tenets absorbed into mass culture as media ritual; (2) clients affected by metaphysical painting/surrealism via advertising; (3) clients who "want to create monuments without knowing exactly what to monumentalize" — "étonnez-moi ou vamoose" (p. 203); (4) the architect's discovery of the answer: "The successful landmark has to be both enigmatic and expressive, it must suggest much more than it names, and leave the final interpretation, if it ever comes, up to the critics, the public, and the detectives of mystery" (p. 203) — Eco's open work, "open to innovation and new interpretation, there are no guarantees of outcome either way" (p. 200).
The emergent iconography — nature and cosmogenesis: "scratch any iconic building hard today and it will bleed nature metaphors" (p. 208); Ronchamp as temple to nature and alchemical iconostasis, Sydney as exploding flower, Gehry as sun- and weather-worship. The destination: "Cosmogenesis is becoming our Genesis story, one that roots us in time and cultural space, one that orients a global culture grown weary of past dogma" (p. 209) — the Garden of Cosmic Speculation as proto-iconography, quarks, DNA, Gaia and black holes as the "new icons."
Against the death thesis: "The iconic building is not going to go away, and may indeed increase in volume, as long as these widespread forces continue" — the decline of belief and metanarratives, the museum moving into religion's position, money as the only universal (p. 195). The genre is structural, not fashionable; the "new paradigm" of complexity science is the deeper, one-way shift beneath it.

Connections

Concepts: Enigmatic Signifier · Iconic Architecture · Bilbao Effect · Star Architecture · Iconic Paranoia · Misfired Metaphor · Iconic Hyperinflation · Non-landmark Landmark · Open Work · Cosmogenesis · Multivalence · The Duck · Kitsch · Iconicity · Symbolism · Spectacle · Architecture as Media · Surrealism Authors: Charles Jencks · Frank Gehry · Rem Koolhaas · Daniel Libeskind · Zaha Hadid · Peter Eisenman · Santiago Calatrava · Le Corbusier · Umberto Eco · Deyan Sudjic · Tom Dyckhoff · Paul Goldberger · Jane Jacobs · Peter Blake Debates: Jencks vs. Sklair: What Is the Iconic Building? · The Everyday vs. Iconic Architecture · Spectacle vs. Function Themes: The Development of the Concept of Iconic Architecture · The Debate Over Iconic Architecture · The Image Economy Related source notes: The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) — the book's compressed sequel, sharing the decline-of-belief diagnosis and the cosmogenic program · Can We Still Believe in Iconic Buildings? (Sudjic & Jencks 2005) — the same year's Observer exchange, where the book's claims appear in debate form · Contextual Counterpoint (Jencks 2024) · The Edifice Complex (Sudjic 2005) — the antagonist's power-genealogy, published the same year · What is Iconic Architecture? (Brott 2016) · Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization (Sklair 2006)

Direct Quotes

"A specter is haunting the global village—the specter of the iconic building." (p. 7)

"But in a world marketplace competing for attention, decency and deference carry little weight and even attacks on iconic buildings fail to register. In fact the insults often add a welcome frisson, the desired element of controversy and column inches—publicity." (p. 7)

"On the one hand, to become iconic a building must provide a new and condensed image, be high in figural shape or gestalt, and stand out from the city. On the other hand, to become powerful it must be reminiscent in some ways of unlikely but important metaphors and be a symbol fit to be worshipped, a hard task in a secular society." (p. 22)

"This property, which allows it to become a brand image, also threatens to make it a cliché or one-liner." (p. 23)

"We map the unknown on to the already said and a successful iconic building will always elicit a flurry of bizarre comparisons, a veritable blizzard of idiotic similes, an absolute snowstorm of ridiculous conceits. The icon won't calm down… This is the age of the enigmatic signifier." (p. 33)

"It works best when it is both obvious and veiled, a compressed striking shape that is similar to something and open to completion in the viewer's mind." (p. 38)

"All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores." (Andy Warhol, quoted, p. 44)

"The truth is worth underlining since it foregrounds the paradox that a great icon need not be a great work of architecture, but it must be a captivating one. It has to move your viscera, whether you like it or not, and stay around as a memory image that attracts other thoughts into its orbit." (p. 54)

"Permanence, connection to the event, and expressiveness are three powerful qualities of the successful icon." (p. 70)

"A building becomes iconic not just for the reasons I have enumerated but also when it is part of an unfolding media event that takes time… In a secular society, only the newspapers, magazines, and TV can engender the proper aura, establish legitimacy, create taboos, and define what can be said and felt and what is unacceptable." (pp. 71–72)

"Whereas in the past an icon enjoyed a venerated status because of its reference to a specific saint or valued meaning, now it claimed legitimacy because it validated itself. This circularity, or self-referential nature of the sign, is typical of the mediated world where celebrities are famous for being famous." (p. 68)

"Iconic building is a bet thrown on to a gambling table, and this comes with potential costs." (p. 112)

"The idolatry of the market has drastically changed our legitimacy and status even though our status has never been higher… . It is really unbelievable what the market demands [from architecture] now. It demands recognition, it demands difference and it demands iconographic qualities." (Rem Koolhaas, quoted, p. 101)

"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." (Deyan Sudjic, quoted, p. 135)

"None of the other schemes were icons. They were landmarks." (Alsop's office, quoted, p. 145)

"For me the building has to grow from the inside. I call this 'playing close to the bone.' The bone being the budget, the program, the context, and the culture it's in. If you ignore all of that and just make a thing, I think that is not a good icon." (Frank Gehry, quoted, pp. 171–72)

"If somebody puts a new language on the table, it has got to be disconnected in the first instance, it has to be shocking in a way, but not intentionally… It is like you get trained in the new language, over time. So, it's what holds up over time that proves whether it is good or bad." (Frank Gehry, quoted, p. 172)

"U R feeling. Some deep immanent sense that it's not quite what you know it to be." (Peter Eisenman, on the "blurred signifier," quoted, p. 165)

"He underlined the virtues of this obelisk to his Prefect. 'It would not recall a single political event,' he remarked and, he might have continued, 'but it will signify royal power in general.'" (on Louis-Philippe, p. 197)

"The successful landmark has to be both enigmatic and expressive, it must suggest much more than it names, and leave the final interpretation, if it ever comes, up to the critics, the public, and the detectives of mystery." (p. 203)

"Scratch any iconic building hard today and it will bleed nature metaphors." (p. 208)

"Cosmogenesis is becoming our Genesis story, one that roots us in time and cultural space, one that orients a global culture grown weary of past dogma." (p. 209)

Open Questions

The book coins or transmits several mechanisms the wiki has now paged (iconic paranoia, misfired metaphor, hyperinflation, the non-landmark landmark, the open work, cosmogenesis). Do these give Jencks's normative scheme enough content to answer the blank-screen collapse thesis, or do they remain ad hoc rescues of a spent genre?
Eisenman confirms he coined the term "Bilbao Effect" (p. 164) — how does the term's origin change its reception history, given that Jencks and the media popularized it?
Is the "landmark vs. icon" distinction (familiar impact vs. negative-first strangeness) empirically testable the way the Instagram data tested "visuality peaks, function lasts"?
The book is Jencks's fullest statement of the media ritual precondition for iconicity (pp. 71–72, 202): does the platform turn (see The Spectacle, Iconic Architecture, and Social Media) replace or merely accelerate this ritual?