Fuck Iconicism

In yesterday's post about circles I touched on the philosophical intentions behind the collective embassy project. As I am sure you are all gagging for a more detailed position, here is the text written in condemnation of the iconic. Framed by a particularly anti-consumerist stance it is basically a love note to Superstudio, accepting and rephrasing their ideas for the specific context of my project.

Objects are cultural DNA

Architecture is the idea behind or contemplative purpose of a building that defines the form and the space. Therefore building ultimately represents an analogous relationship to nature of contemporary society. Humanity is intrinsically attached to objects and their creation. Both running in parallel to our origins and propelling us towards our future, they are a manifestation of their creator and users’ collective psyche. This confers enormous responsibility upon objects to immortalise cultural values and define future ones. They are the mode by which culture survives and thrives.  The resultant bond creates a reciprocal relationship whereby objects influence users as much as they are influenced. The shifts in this balance of power provide the impetus for humanity’s material and cultural growth.

Infinite objects used finitely

When placed in the political framework of conflict and interrogation, objects diversify into the taxonomy of types. Prototypes emerge to meet fresh needs; over successive generations they are gradually sculpted through an organic process of selection into types. The most successful, i.e. the most persistent, become archetypes.  Some may die, as society deems them obsolescent, but the cultural knowledge is not lost. This DNA is conferred for future generations’ benefit through more successful iterations. Therefore each artefact does not exist in isolation, but as part of a continuum that projects it across time.

Finite objects repeated infinitely

However contemporary culture has almost totally subscribed to the principles of consumerist capitalism. The system works through a rigid adherence to forces of the free market. Here the priorities regarding objects and their creation are entirely alien to their fundamental relationship with humanity. Wrenched from their duty as custodians of our memory, objects are forced into slavery. They are now by-products, stripped of any meaning. Each reiteration is the generic result of a predetermined economic checklist, superficially optimised to maximise its new value as a unit of consumption. Its service to the market hideously mutates the object to suit external pressures and arbitrary trends. Now isolated and finite, objects become the sole preserve of the present. Upon their exhaustion, they are consumed and the economic machine spits out a new wave of wilful criteria, to simulate evolution. The object must be ‘new’, or nobody will buy it. The nature of the evolution is unimportant, merely that is appears divergent enough to mimic a new type or prototype. Discrete waves of consumption and production simulate the growth of cultural knowledge, but in actuality merely recycle it. This neurosis is engaged in compulsively, perpetuating objects simply by default.

So what of the creation of objects? The designers and architects have not scuttled into caves, awaiting the revolution of the political artefact. So what purpose does architecture now hold? The architect is a necromancer, charged with conferring new un-life on the viral objects of consumerism. It is therefore impossible to resolve an architectural response to the problem of developing a building without serving the machinations current system.

Here we see the devolution of architecture into the iconic.

It is skyscraper that truly embodies the contemporary paradigm. Their motives are intrinsically linked to the vicissitudes of the free market because the fundamental logic behind them directly linked value of land.  The type is defined by a plastic response to the rigid questions posed by the market.

Pre Iconic Monolith

Such unilateral dictation forces the form of skyscrapers to adopt some projection of humanity, to prevent the inevitable rejection of such a desolate concept in its raw state. They attempt to exert some illusion of control over the market forces that predetermine the majority of form. With so little room for manoeuvre, the default resort is to attach meaning to the building by synthetically connecting it to recognisable reference points in collective culture. These elements constitute the architecture of the building by forming the basis of an origin myth, that self justifies its existence in the city and by extension culture in general. By far the most common myth chosen is a representation of ‘selective aspirations’. Achieved by creating or recycling architectural and cultural motifs with discrete meanings and amalgamating them into a visual manifestation of the desired ideal.  This can be seen in the slavish adherence to neoclassical rationalism during the Enlightenment, or the moral superiority of Pugin’s Gothic applied ornamentally to toxic factories and schools alike. 

God's own architecutre

However the maturation of skyscrapers finally ossified this economic parody of architecture. As mentioned above, the stringent parameters of their realisation, coupled with the inherited monumentality of scale, cemented the tower’s purpose as a symbol to advertise the success and power of its owners. Despite existing in typological ubiquity, inherent resistance to discourse and reinterpretation fixes buildings at specific locus in history. 

Such ozymandian feats of individual expression retard any possibility of change from the original message, conferring a totalitarian persistence of those ideals across history. Their finite message must therefore be simplified to the lowest common denominator to ensure continued acceptance by a consensus. This totally devalues the building’s idea, i.e. its architecture, relegating it to an icon. Under these conditions, architecture is conscripted into codifying and immortalising the current system.

Chicago Tribune Competition 1922

However though sharing the same aim, to store the collective memory of its civilisation, iconic buildings are not monuments and thus incapable of true cultural aspirations, merely facsimiles of them. The flaws of these buildings are myriad, but perhaps their greatest sin is the resultant imposition of the power and aspirations of the few unilaterally on the many, especially on such a flimsy premise of authority. They are unable to convey any other meaning or hold any sense of collective identity, so unable to function as vital cultural DNA. 

They negate political discourse by yelling their statements across the city, so that nobody can hear themselves think.

I met a traveller from an antique land. Who said: 

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelly

Nemesis (It's not imperialism honest)

The iconic could perhaps be forgiven in the brutal economic world of commerce, but it has insidiously pervaded across the whole taxonomy of building. The new US embassy in Nine Elms highlights the expansion of this economic architecture and exemplifies the ubiquity of the economy in contemporary culture.

The architect sought to resolve the apparently elitist attitude of a more traditional compound, by placing the Embassy in a park. Though alluding to other urban parks in London, the integration of security into the landscaping immediately prevents a truly public space emerging; ensuing conflicts between civil liberty and private security will have only one outcome.

The new embassy aims to embody the self-proclaimed ideals of transparency, openness and equality. These aspirations constituent the iconic metaphors that aggregate into a physical manifestation of American Self Image.

The inherent strength of such a platonic form clearly defines the true purpose of the façade as this outward expression of desired identity. Both invincibly monolithic and delicately crystalline, each elevation reads as a veneer that shrouds the clandestine mass within. In organising the internal plan and external circulation and access, the spiral simultaneously alludes to the labyrinth. Like the mythical lair of the Minotaur, the embassy defines American interest. In their totality these structures state an explicit and unilateral purpose, to create a triumphant monument to the supremacy of an autonomous nation.

An Architectural Advertising Campaign

The old world of autocracy, supremacy and empire is no longer acceptable and falls woefully short of the problems faced by this new global civilisation. Yet echoes of these ideas persist still; the only difference is method of implementation. The resulting effects on the concepts of nation, state and identity appear negligible. However upon closer inspection we reveal a fundamental contradiction in current geopolitics. 

The dissolution of a few huge nations/states into numerous identities would imply a paradigm shift in the mode of global interaction. However the intrinsic qualities of empire coexist in consumerism. Through the mutation of explicit historical state apparatus into implicit economic bondage, these instruments have been rebranded to imply freedom and benefit to the majority. However the system remains unchanged. 

There persists an oligarchic cabal of powers exerting almost total influence over a global majority. However that underlying contradiction may absolve itself by presenting a solution. 

A new collective world

Therefore to challenge the status quo and subvert the omnipresence of consumerist rule, a new archetype must be established. It must legitimise the position of the collective in culture through its manifestation as a physical object: the monument.

This is a monument to a political position. The building is analogous to the political system that requires it, thus should establish itself in the environment, as the system should state itself to culture. 

The global nature of this position requires the response to be as egalitarian as possible.  However despite their size, the countries (in the broadest sense) occupying the building still deserve a fair sense of civic representation. This dichotomy presents a requirement for a collective monumentality, a simultaneous expression of many individuals’ endeavours and dreams. 

By sharing in a single supermonument, both conditions emerge from thousands of voices whispering together. However this presents its own problems, ones that architecture cannot really achieve.  Architecture is a codifying device that both records the collective history and ensures the persistence of the current system. Ensconced within an inflexible economic framework, it states a fixed idea that is eroded, degraded, mutated or lost over time. Such a fate cannot befall a monument. So to achieve this collective idea for the collective building; architecture must essentially be abandoned.