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Miles Glendinning is about to publish a highly controversial book called The Last Icons – Architecture Beyond Modernism. Prospect has been given exclusive right to publish extracts from the book in which Glendinning explains the origins of the debate

11 Feb 2005

by Miles Glendinning

Throughout the centuries, architects have tried to build not only for the present, and for themselves, but for the community at large, and for future generations. Partly, that was a result of the sheer effort and expense needed to erect monumental, permanent buildings – something that has always marked off architecture from the other arts – but it was also influenced by the strong religious views that pervaded and structured society from antiquity right up to the 20th century. If one believes in an all-powerful deity, a force that enfolds, and values equally, everyone across all eternity, then the interests of the wider community, including even people unborn, are just as significant as those of the ephemeral present moment, and those of the immediate owners and designers!

Of course, nobody seriously or literally believes in buildings to last forever. As Ruskin makes very clear, it is as a metaphor that eternity can shape our buildings. Although there have been many important exceptions, as a general rule the buildings that have exerted the strongest hold on people’s imagination over the centuries – not least through their ability to support and ennoble radical changes in use and association – have been those built to last, by whatever definition.

This insistence on building for posterity and in solidarity with others, on building to link past and future, was not just something of the ‘traditional’, pre-industrial age. Nor was it something literally associated with massive stone construction: it was a matter of spirit rather than substance. It carried on even into the 19th-century era of industrial and capitalist revolution, where it was expressed through the controlled, ordered modernity of historicist eclecticism. Buildings were constructed with novel methods and materials, yet were energised with powerful and enduring ideals; and vast new urban areas were built to house novel activities and building types, yet were unified by an overall civic vision.

The same concern with building to last, with building firmly bedded into a dense supporting social infrastructure, continued into the post-1918 age of agnostic socialism and abstract architectural modernism. By the mid 20th century, architecture became energised by a passionate ideal of social progress, and by a utopian yearning to sweep away the old elitism and traditional architectural monumentality, as part of a broad renewal of the life of society – a movement whose excesses of utilitarian collectivism ultimately led to the discrediting of the ‘social’ Modern Movement in the 1960s and 70s. Yet it, too, continued to uphold architecture’s basic ‘hierarchy of decorum’, which demanded that the most important buildings or building programmes – whether a medieval palace, a Victorian church or a post-1945 new town – should be conceived with seriousness and idealism, and executed in a consistent, substantial and enduring way, insulated from base or commercialised values.

Of course, more ephemeral or sensational kinds of structures have always existed throughout the centuries, ranging from the hovels of the poor to the vastly expensive temporary pavilions of royal pageants or 19th and 20th century world’s fair expositions. And there were also structures at the border-line of architecture and sculpture, such as commemorative statues or war memorials, which were built to last, yet chiefly emotional in their impact. But despite all of these, there was still a clear dividing line, understood by everyone, between architecture and sensationalism, architecture and commercialism, architecture and gimmickry. Anything that stepped too far over the line in whatever way, like the wildly over-decorated mundane commercial buildings of the 1890s – buildings like Edinburgh’s North British Hotel or Jenners store – risked marginalisation and even ridicule by contemporaries.

Only from the 1980s and 90s, with the global revival of triumphalist capitalism, the shift in economic emphasis from production to consumption, and the rise of architectural Postmodernism, did that situation fundamentally change. The combination of rising wealth with the jettisoning of the old corporate or civic restraints of the 20th century was an explosive one for architecture, which began to become far more explicitly and proudly intermeshed with property development, and with commercialism in general. For the first time, buildings began to be looked on purely as images or marketing objects, with their designers disembedded from any social context; and the old unifying planned-city coordination of the Georgian, Victorian and modern ages was jettisoned in favour of an anarchic fragmentation governed by the competition ethos. Atomisation went hand-in-hand with ephemerality: the idea of architecture as something for future generations was brutally chopped off at the present, and made the preserve of the new, powerful conservation movement, whose activities were strictly corralled into heritage zones.

In the five years since publication of Clone City (Miles Glendinning and David Page 1999), it has become clear that the hope we expressed there, that a revived Modernism might act as a redemptive white knight, was horribly mistaken. What has happened instead has been a second, more comprehensive ‘failure’ of Modernism, stemming from a very different, and even more damaging extremism than that of the postwar ‘social’ era – and leaving a feeling of final disillusionment.
The wider economic and cultural context of these years is all too well known: namely, a burgeoning of market capitalism into an ever more comprehensive straitjacket of commodification and competition. In 2000, for instance, a firm of ‘branding consultants’, ‘Interbrand’, argued that ‘just about everything and everyone is capable of being a brand’. Of course, international globalisation has many very positive aspects, and is doubtless even essential. Yet, just like the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, its dark side cannot tidily be washed away, especially as its advocacy has taken on a new note of harsh paranoia since 2001 – giving added edge to the well-known polarisation first sketched out in 1995 by American academic Benjamin R Barber, between world-wide triumphal capitalism (‘McWorld’) and world-wide reactionary conservatism (‘Jihad’).4

Within architecture, the new global advance of McWorld has coincided, disastrously, with the global revitalisation of Modern architecture we so naively advocated in Clone City. McWorld has invaded and taken over the Modern Movement, to produce a monstrous freak: McMoMoTM. The ‘failure’ of Modernism in the 70s – still an era dominated by the forces of production rather than consumption – was a lesser ‘fall’ – a case of means rather than ends, of too much (and too skimped) of a good thing. But with McMoMoTM the most fundamental ideals of the Modern Movement, as we will see, have been thoroughly corrupted, and turned into their opposite: into mechanisms of commercialisation and alienation. This time, there can be no going back; there is no second chance.

How do we recognise this new and pernicious mutation of Modernism? As one might expect, McMoMoTM forces itself on our attention most immediately in its blatantly commercialised forms. Here, it seems at first glance to be no more than a Modernist re-styling of Postmodern image-making, substituting all-round style for added style, using the metaphoric, utopian vocabulary of Modernism as a simple rhetorical cloak, and ransacking the whole of the early and mid 20th-century Modern Movement in the manner of open-cast mining – despoiling and ripping apart everything in the way.

Just as in the Postmodern era, the most aggressive aspects of McMoMoTM are closely associated with the building of cultural complexes for city-boosterism. This is an essentially cosmetic and conservative approach to urban regeneration, pervaded of course by property development interests, and largely disembedded from the social fabric of the real city around. In its argument that museum-cum-shopping-cum-festival complexes can inspire the revival of entire towns, it rather naively relies on old-style architectural determinism, re-badged as a branding process, and exploiting the three-dimensional image-making potential of Modernism. What is at work is a double process of branding: of the places, and of the designers. In his 1961 bible of hard-sell, Reality in Advertising, marketing sage Rosser Reeves explained that brands ‘establish contact with the subconscious of the consumer below the word level. They do this with visual symbols instead of words ... They communicate faster. They are more direct. There is no work, no mental effort. Their sole purpose is to create images and moods’. And each brand or product has to be framed as something absolutely unique and individual in its potential selling impact – what Reeves called the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’, or USPTM.5

The branding of buildings and architects is a process that started in America, where even the early postwar MoMo was always a prop to corporate capitalism, but the top brands in today’s ever-shifting hierarchy of ‘signature architects’ include as many European as North American names. In their designs, the Modern Movement’s entire stock of motifs and symbolic metaphors is plundered and coarsely exaggerated with the aid of computerised design, and the work of a constellation of ‘poetic masters’ is quarried for motifs, indiscriminately lumping together present-day figureheads with early pioneers such as Corbusier or Aalto. The results vary kaleidoscopically from tangled ‘zoomorphic’ mounds, expanded to the scale of vast museums or concert halls, or the smoother, shinier gestures of blob-architecture, to the buildings which pose as fractured crystals or geological land-forms, or the urban plans drawn up as poetic collages. But whatever the outward dress, the reality behind it is the same: a relationship solely between the hero-designer and the marketplace, with nothing around or in between.

Appropriately, for a still essentially postmodern programme, these projects are laden with ironies and self-contradictions. Just as, more generally, the extension of market ‘choice’ across the public services often diminishes the perceived quality of provision, within architecture the competition principle proves ultimately self-defeating. For example, contrary to Reeves’s Unique Selling Proposition, with every town vying to construct a signature building, the overall effect is one of monotony and loss of identity, especially if several signature buildings are gathered together in an architectural zoo. And the ranking of so many heroes, in finely graded branding categories, serves only to reduce them to dwarves. Like busts of Stalin or Kim Il-Sung, they can only create the desired effect singly: several together merely look ridiculous and undignified.

Indeed, the most common word used to denote such a project – ‘icon’ – in the original Greek can equally mean ‘mirage’ or ‘false representation’. For all the word’s connotations of religious preciousness, one now knows that any building described as an icon (or as a signature, gesture or flagship) will, almost by definition, be at best empty of meaning, and more likely, something of monstrous vulgarity! As design critic Stephen Bayley restrainedly puts it, ‘the demands of powerful branding – instant recognition, zero ambiguity, testing negative for any but the most simple associations – are often at odds with the niceties of great architecture’.6

And while the older-established signature masters continue for the moment to maintain their ascendancy through branded image-making, they also have to look uneasily over their shoulders at the fresh phalanxes of ever more ruthlessly nihilistic younger architects, with names sounding like nightclubs or commercial websites, moving up behind them, fusing the traditional Modernist rhetoric of democratisation and accessibility with media practices of popularisation. Things that would have seemed outlandish a few years ago are now seen as hardly worthy of remark: the involvement of fashion designers in the styling of new blocks of apartments, or the transplantation from television to architecture of the sensationalist competition-show model – an especially insidious and corrupting formula, already implanted in the literary world (The Big Read), which has been introduced to architecture through programmes such as Restoration, the numerous home-makeover series, or the Stirling Prize programme and other ‘Best Architect’ competitions. In a manner that would have shocked the gentlemanly postwar modernists to the core, architects now merge with developers, to provide a ‘total brand’. One well-regarded younger firm claimed, typically, that an architectural reputation was important only as a ‘valuable marketing tool’.7

Ultimately, as in popular television or journalism, all that matters is to shock and to grab the attention long enough to clinch a ‘sale’: even government minister John Prescott freely argued that the chief aim of architecture should be ‘the wow factor’. With the increasing influence of television, the process of creation of architecture can potentially take on some of the characteristics of soap-opera. With today’s frenzied post-religious search for the ‘sacred’, everywhere and anywhere, one of the best-selling product groups within McMoMoTM is that of the architecture of tragic melodrama, with the populist brand-leader, the ‘super-limo’ version, being naturally the multi-designer ‘Ground Zero’ redevelopment proposed for New York. This collage of licentiously emotionalistic gestures and metaphors is both an architectural zoo and soap-opera at the same time, with its shards of glass, paths of heroes, landscape traces, bridges of light, flapping doves of peace – a mountainous cathedral of pseudo-religious kitsch which carries to an extreme the self-negating character of gesture architecture.8 Where postwar Modernism maintained an extensive social infrastructure – whatever its defects of paternalism or dirigisme – today’s isolation of the designer from any context other than the marketplace reduces all community interests to branding devices.

But however attention-grabbing these gestural excesses may be, they are by no means the worst of McMoMoTM. They are actually only its outer symptoms. The depth of the crisis, and the all-pervading character of today’s commercialisation of architecture, are only revealed when we try to sort things out in the time-honoured manner of 19th and 20th century architectural debates, by appealing to some reformist or critical alternative. This has been seen most recently in the sudden upsurge of attacks during 2004 against ‘iconic architecture’ – to the point where, by spring 2004, one could talk credibly of an ‘anti-icon movement’ or a ‘new iconophobia’.10 What we rapidly discover is that these critical alternatives, too, have become commodified, and transformed into the elite marques at the top of a hierarchy of branding and product badging which spans the entire built environment.

This is the real tragedy of our predicament: the fact that the mortal damage to the contemporary Modern Movement is being inflicted below the water-line by an insidious corruption of its underlying ideals of aspiration, theory, research and criticism – whether utopian, abstracted, idealised, speculative or scientific-progressive in character – in other words, by the subversion of anything that might stand in the way of McMoMoTM. If the gross blob-buildings are the base-level of McMoMoTM badging, then the complex, intellectualised projects represent its more subtly corrosive ‘upmarket’ end. A key role here has been played by the much-feted architectural culture of the Netherlands, whose prestige has swept the rest of us along in its wake; but all countries bear a share of the responsibility. Indeed, theoretician Manfredo Tafuri anticipated, as early as the 1970s, the argument that Modern Movement utopianism would find itself driven, by its own internal intellectual dynamic, to corrupt itself into capitalist ‘instrumentalism’, and Kenneth Frampton pointed in the 80s to the ‘self alienation of an avant-garde without a cause’.11

This threat, however, was not comprehensively realised until the late 90s. By then, a succession of critics, led by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, had finally succeeded in subtly commodifying all possible critical and sceptical stances on the built environment – multi-disciplinary academic research, avant-garde protest manifesto, mixed use community participation, war-memorial emotionalism, and so forth. They converted ‘theory’ itself into a selling and branding device, piggybacked on to the insistent demand for the fostering of a ‘creative class’ as part of a strategy of urban renewal, bound up ultimately with the advancement of property development. In the process, intellectual criticism and exploitative image-making have become ever more inextricably entangled: for example, Koolhaas is able to play a leading role in the world of iconic marketplace design, while at the same time lamenting that ‘now we are left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture’; within the pages of Content, creative ideas and advertising are bewilderingly jumbled together, and we are left with the suspicion that everything is potentially part of ‘Junkspace’.12

The overall thrust of these ideas – the intellectual ‘edge’ of McMoMoTM – is still essentially postmodern, in its stress on the inherent ‘uncertainty’ and ‘indeterminacy’ of society and the built environment. And this line of argument powerfully serves to clear away any obstacles to the spread of capitalism, by converting the old methodical certainties of the Modern Movement to chaotic ‘game’ processes or collage patterns. Like two complementary brands, the subtleties of upmarket McTheory neatly complement and reinforce the crudities of McIcon, and the concepts dreamed up by the elite – whether intellectually ‘elevated’, such as the organic or land-form metaphors of architecture, or straight-forwardly stylistic, such as the fetish for soaring, sail-like roofs or for ‘sensuous’ juxtapositions of timber and metallic facade finishes – duly trickle down in simplified form to the lower end of the market. The two are the same thing, badged differently, like ‘base-level’ and ‘executive’ versions of the same mass-produced car. As one architectural journal editorial column bluntly put it: ‘Curiously, the case for resourcing the more esoteric extremes of architectural education is most convincing when theoretical discourse is couched in the starkest economic terms; as a powerful selling point in the marketplace where architecture competes to attract the brightest minds.’13

The iconoclastic boldness of Modernism also legitimised the final discarding of the traditional hierarchy of decorum, which debased any differentiation between different levels of ‘quality’ in architecture to a mere matter of levels of branding. In the process, for the first time ever, architecture has ceased to be something concerned with tomorrow, with building a future for those yet to come. Indeed, it has ceased to concern itself with the substance of buildings, and instead has cheapened itself into another consumption device for the instant moment, an advertising discourse in which medium comes before substance, digital images are as ‘real’ as buildings, and the selling message conditions what is built. It is precisely by focusing its attack on real buildings, rather than on a discourse or a system of values, and wasting time arguing whether building ‘x’ or ‘y’ is an icon or not, that today’s ‘anti-icon movement’, however well intended, falls down. The resulting inconsistencies were well highlighted by Jencks in a recent defence of the beleaguered iconic movement. But when it came to identifying positive attributes of the icon, Jencks tried to have his cake and eat it. On the one hand, might is right: there can be no resistance to the unstoppable power of market capitalism, whose alienation and paranoia can be reflected by icons through their ‘negative charge’. But on the other hand, there is rich symbolic meaning: the ‘many puzzling and emergent shapes’ of icons reflect ‘reference to nature, the patterns of the cosmos, the forces of material production whether artful or living … as unmistakeable a trace as the Christian Cross was an icon of a former period’. But surely the first of these contradicts or swallows up the second? In an all-powerful market, can such flowery metaphors be anything more than upmarket advertising slogans?

The Last Icons by Miles Glendinning ISBN 0-9547103-2-0 is published by Graven Images. It is available online at www.gravenbooks.co.uk and from RIAS Bookshops in Edinburgh and Glasgow, price £9.50 plus p&p. It is also available from Form at The Lighthouse, Glasgow.

Contact Graven Images 83A Candleriggs Glasgow 0141 552 6626, RIAS Bookshops at 15 Rutland Square, Edinburgh 0131 229 7545 and Bourdon Building, Scott Street, Glasgow 0141 332 9414 or Form at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and The City,
11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow 0141 225 8422.

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