The iconic building is here to stay

City

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 3-20

  Jencks, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 49949105794     PISSN: 13604813     EISSN: 14703629     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13604810600594605     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. The debate on iconic building within the profession of architecture waxed and waned since the early 1960s and Nikolaus Pevsner's strictures. It was revived, in Britain, in the summer of 2004, when critics Deyan Sudjic and Peter Murray, among others, were joined by the architect, Graham Morrison, in attacking the genre and its deleterious effects on the Thames River, the emergent "Costa del Icon" Morrison's paper, 'Look at me!', was reprinted in The Architects Journal and The Guardian, 12 July 2004.
2. My answer to this was 'The truth about icons', The Architects Journal 9 September 2004, pp. 20-24.
3. Previously, Deyan Sudjic had repeatedly attacked iconic buildings in his Observer column, most notably his 'Landmarks of hope and glory', Observer, 26 October 2003, p. 6.
4. Such arguments were also answered by two English architects, Peter Cook and Piers Gough, in various debates, at the Architectural Association, among other places, in the summer of 2004. This was the time the English professional press amplified the arguments; for instance, see the headline article and leader 'End of the iconic age?', Building Design 23 July 2004, p. 1 and Editorial.
5. On the occasion of the publication of our books, Deyan Sudjic and I debated at various points in 2005 (such as the Hay-on-Wye Festival) and in the pages of Prospect (June 2005, pp. 22-26).
6. His book, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World was published by Penguin Books (Harmondsworth, 2005);
7. my The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma, by Frances Lincoln (London, 2005). Reviews in several professional publications compared our positions.
8. Miles Glendinning's The Last Icons, Architecture Beyond Modernism, published by Graven Images, Glasgow, in the Spring of 2005 became the subject of a BBC2 Scotland Newsnight debate between us (17 March 2005), and also the pretext for another larger debate, this one in Glasgow organized by the architectural magazine Prospect, in mid-April 2005.
9. My views on the possibilities and problems of contemporary iconology in architecture were spelled out in 'Towards an iconography of the present', Log (the New York architectural journal), Fall 2004, pp. 101-108.
10. Peter Eisenman and I debated the iconic building at Columbia University, 6 November 2005, and some of this was posted on the web of Metropolis 18 November 2005.
11. Critical American reaction has been led by the Columbia University historian, the Englishman, Kenneth Frampton and is being published in an anthology, Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (University of Minnesota, 2006).
12. See also Harvard Design Magazine, no. 23, Winter/Fall 2006, pp. 65-69.
13. For the quotes and sources on the change of meaning at the Place de la Concorde, see my The Iconic Building (op. cit.) ('Surprising conclusions', p. 217, n. 3).
14. Barry Bergdoll has recounted the changes in his 'Enlightened problems', Royal Academy Forum, reprinted in The Architectural Review, October 2001, pp. 91-92.
15. For these phrases see my The Iconic Building (op. cit.) where they are discussed at length; I first aired the issues, particularly the concept of the "enigmatic signifier", in The New Paradigm in Architecture ('Multivalence and the enigmatic signifier', pp. 29-36, Yale University Press, London, 2002).
16. For a recent survey of decline see the report discussed by Ruth Gledhill, 'Liberal and weak clergy blamed for empty pews', The Times, 5 March 2005
17. for the earlier quotes from 2001 see Ruth Gledhill, 'Christianity almost dead says cardinal', The Times, 6 September 2001;
18. The Leader, 'We can be moral without religion', in The Observer, 9 September 2001, p. 22;
19. Chris Gray, 'Anglicans become minority for first time in 467 years', The Independent, 7 September 2001, p. 1.
20. See Note 1, and the following text.
21. See Note 1, and the following text