On Iconic

"I’ve always been interested in what gets left out... I’m interested in the tension between what is represented and what isn’t represented, between the articulate and the silent."(1)

Taipei Noniconic. Trevor Patt.

The recent attacks on criticality in architecture, perhaps more accurately described as a feeling of discontentedness(2), stem from a feeling of constriction. A sense that the methods now available to a critical practice, having been established, are closed, and are closing in on the designer. The architect is “exhausted”, “belabored”, “governed” by criticality. Not only are the methods--textuality, resistance, legibility, index, process--known from the beginning, so, it seems, are the results.

Inasmuch as criticality has constructed architecture as a question of representation, so does postcriticality address itself to representation, but representation and what to do with it. In an initial moment of backlash the postcritical movement has coalesced around ideas like shape, mood, graphic, and atmosphere–in their words, strategies of cool easiness. The distinction that has been drawn, then, seems to deal with the amount and prominence of content. While critical architecture presses the imperative of legibility, projective architecture would like to be recieved as mere appearance. Such an easy distinction is not sufficient, however, for “ultimately, the content of art always consists in mere apearance,”(3) How does the postcritical practice address the content still within its appearance?

In the middle of this debate, and significantly muddying the waters, is Charles Jencks’ advocay on behalf of “the Iconic Building.” This broadly drawn category occasionally seems to have similarities with both critical and projective positions, and certainly claims buildings from both camps under its umbrella. The benefit of this indiscriminate inclusiveness is the necessity of revisiting representation in its specific forms in order to sort out the differences in ideology. As a middleground which is not aknowledeged by either postion, the iconic also provides us with a surprising platform on which to reconstruct the relationship between the critcal and postcritical.

Dinocrates; Colossus of Mount Athos, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, 1721.

The definition of an icon cited by Jencks (as well as Eisenman and Somol) is based on the one given by Charles Pierce, in his trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol. Icons are such signs as “serve to represent their objects only in so far as they resemble them in themselves,”(4) that is, signifiers which possess a visual semblance to their signifieds. Having given this definition, however, Jencks returns to a usage closer to the one used in common speech, sometimes allowing the inclusion of signs more closely associated with symbolic and indexical types.(5)

Though Jencks favors an “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” approach to the definition of an icon, he does establishe a few guiding rules from which to begin:
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(6)
In this short passage, Jencks sets up four preliminary qualifications for iconicity. First, speaking to consumption, the building must be new and condensed. Second, in terms of recognizability, it must have a highly figural shape. Third, it must stand out from the city; it must be identifiable. Finally the icon should fulfill the textbook definition of an icon, an invocation of visual metaphor.

These categories, and their apparent ambivalence, illustrate the complexity of situating the icon in the critical/postcritical debate. Robert Somol proposes similar modes for architecture which he bases on graphic expediency. In fact, the how-to list provided in Green Dots 101, Somol suggests that this architectual logo “makes things” rather than describing them, and recommends employing “a precise but vague silhouette,” stressing the need to “always condense.”(7) Furthermore, just as one trait of the icon is its ability to scale down to graphic scale without losing its identity, the logo is also agile enough to scale up from graphic to building and into urban organization.

Despite, these similarities, the icon and logo split ways at Jencks’ third rule. While the logo does emphasize an identity, Somol stresses the need for it to always be neutralized or backgrounded. This stance, ironically, is a direct opposition to the critical project’s use of opposition as a strategy for resistance.(8) This is a minor disagreement, however, the real point of contention–for both the critical and the postcritical– is the fourth rule.(9)

Though seemingly the most straightforward, the most precisely categorical, the relationship of iconic signification to the ‘Iconic Building’ is where Jencks and most of his critics have the greatest difficulty. At first reading, when he writes that the power of the icon is generated by being “reminiscent in some ways of unlikely but important metaphors,” it seems clear that the function of the icon is didactic. This story is familiarly Platonic; the ‘good’ iconic building is one which would point us toward truer forms of truth. Jencks flirts with this construction, and suggests that iconicity can “allude to nature and the cosmos” but then oversteps and claims in his conclusion that “if you scratch an iconic buildng hard enought, it bleeds such meanings... rhythmical growth forms of plants and galaxies. These patterns of nature are the not-so-hidden code of the iconic building,”(10) The iconic building is not simply a mimesis, but, Jencks suggests, embodies truth; it “grows from the inside to the outside and takes up its new metaphors from this growth”(11) This would move the iconic away from a Platonic conception of art, what Badiou calls ‘didactic’ and into the ‘romantic’ tradition.(12)

However, both conclusions find themselves at odds with much of The Iconic Building’s argument. The successful icon, Jencks central thesis claims, is not about a clarity of representation at all, but employs something called the “enigmatic signfiier.” Explicit meaning produces one-liners, whereas the enigmatic signifier is a sign whose dissimilarity to any particular referent allows it to support multiple referents. “Better to be ambiguous and hide behind generalities that transcend time and party than declare something specific.”(13) Abandoning, claim to any truth-content, the icon slips more comfortably into a classical schema. Badiou characterizes the classical conception of art as:
incapable of truth. Its essence is mimetic, and its regime is that of semblance... This incapacity does not pose a serious problem... because the purpose... of art is not in the least truth [but] involves the deposition of the passions in a transference onto semblance. Art has a therapeutic function, and not at all a cognitive or revelatory one.(14)

Taipei 101. Trevor Patt.

A classical schema maintains the role of resemblance, but replaces meaning with performance. This understanding of the iconic building allows us to understand statements by Jencks such as: “a great icon need not be a great work of architecture, but it must be a captivating one.”(15) Not necessarily great, because it need not tell us anything, but necessarily captivating because the real purpose of the icon is to provide a locus in which the public can project an emotional collective. The important role of enigma for Jencks is the implication of an uncertainty that garners enough attention, that forces the formation of a consensus through the naming of a sign. Quite simply, an uncaptivating architecture would not generate enough attention to extract collective emotion from the postmodern subject. Throughout the book he makes it quite clear that the iconic building stems from–and is even, he claims, the inevitable result of–the loss of a global, unifying iconography. As a classical form we can finally define the iconic building then by its intention to enact a cathartic construction of collective identification in an age marked by this loss of collective iconography.

Beijing Province Pavilion, EXPO 2010. Trevor Patt.

1. Said, Edward. On Late Style. xix
2. Baird, George. Criticality and its Discontents.
3. Adorno, Theodore. Late Style in Beethoven. p566.
4. In cotrast, an index refers to its signified not by resemblance but only by real connection while symbols require neither resemblance nor real connection, but established convention or habit.
Peirce, C.S. A Sketch of Logical Critics. p460-461
5. his usage is at least partly justified by the complexity of Peirce’s division of signs, a framework which virtually elimantes the possibility of any sign existing in a pure state of only one type of classification.
6. Jencks, Charles,. The Iconic Building: The power of enigma. p23.
7. Somol, R.E. Green Dots 101. 29, 35, 35.
8. Hays, K. Michael. Reproduction and Negation: The cognitive project of the avant-garde.
9. “the diagram was not iconic, that it, it did not have a visual imageable similitude, a sameness between the object and diagram”
Eisenman, Peter. The Post-Indexical: a Critical Option. p21.
and “to differentiate them from ‘icons’ ... associated with and generally exhausted by metaphorical displacement”
Somol, R.E. Green Dots 101. p33.
10. Jencks, Charles. The Iconic Building is Here to Stay. p60.
11. Jencks, Charles. The Iconic Building: The power of enigma. p203.
12. “In this respect, it is art itself that educates, because it teaches o fthe power of infinity held within the tormented cohesion of a form... it is incarnation.”
Badiou, Alain. Art and Philosophy. p3.
13. Jencks, Charles. The Iconic Building: The power of enigma. p51.
12. Badiou, Alain. Art and Philosophy. p4.
15. Jencks, Charles. The Iconic Building: The power of enigma. p54.