Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture by Gevork Hartoonian

Author:Gevork Hartoonian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

NOTE

1 Pilar Viladas, “Inconspicuous Consumption,” New York Times Magazine (13 April 1997): 25.

5

The Iconic and the Critical

Simone Brott

Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and ipso facto an extension of ideological capital, as he wrote in 1944 in Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 What troubled Adorno was the iconic nature of cinema – the semiotic category invented by C.S. Peirce where the signifier (sign) does not merely signify, in the arbitrary capacity attested by Saussure, but mimics the formal-visual qualities of its referent.2 Iconicity finds its perfect example in the film’s ingenuous surface illusion of an unmediated reality – its genealogy (the iconic), since classical antiquity, lay in the Greek term eikōn which meant “image”, to refer to the ancient portrait statues of victorious athletes which were thought to bear a direct similitude with their parent divinities.3 For the post-war Hollywood film spectator, Adorno said, “the world outside is an extension of the film he has just left” because realism is a precise instrument for the manipulation of the mass spectator by the culture industry, for which the filmic image is an advertisement for the world unedited.4 Mimesis, or the reproduction of reality, is a “mere reproduction of the economic base”. It is precisely film’s iconicity, then, its “realist aesthetic … [that] makes it inseparable from its commodity character”.5

Adorno’s critique of what is facile in the cinematic image – its false immediacy – glimmers in the ubiquitous yet misunderstood term “iconic architecture” of our own episteme, 50 years on, for iconic architecture is not a formal genre or style so much as it is a rebuke. In the unfolding global financial crisis of the present moment, and 11 years after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York, iconic architecture is widely viewed with a degree of shame and perhaps hypocrisy. Nor is this a developed critique, like the Frankfurt School philosopher’s diatribes on film and music between the two wars. In the digital age of mediatic simulation since 1997, and the appearance of buildings such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, iconic architecture loosely refers to the cult of architectural image in the globalized culture industry. It is a simple concept, uncontroversial, grasped and graspable by everyone in any number of audacious buildings since the Guggenheim such as the new China Central Television CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, the Seattle Library and the Signature Towers (or Dancing Towers) in Dubai: products of the iconic architecture industry that achieved fame through the spread of raster-based computer-generated imagery (CGI) prior to their construction and completion; projects which, prima facie, have no formal or aesthetic relationship with each other.

Yet to those within the discipline, such buildings are implicitly defined by way of a dead-on iconicity: the uncanny surface resemblance between the built work and its fake (simulated) reality in the digital model that is both the building’s identical twin and its exalted reason for being. The “virtual” twin exists eternally in a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.