The New Iconic Building?

On October 26, writer Charles Jencks and architect Peter Eisenman spoke at Columbia University in a debate titled “The New Iconic Building?” The debate was inspired, in part, by Jencks’s new book, The Iconic Building, which discusses the role of these increasingly popular, instantly-recognizable monuments in contemporary architecture.

The two speakers are icons themselves—Eisenman is an educator, theorist, and architect whose projects include the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and Jencks has written such seminal works of architecture criticism as Meaning in Architecture and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

The debate was structured into alternating twenty- and ten-minute presentations by each speaker, followed by a question-and-answer period. Jencks began the debate with a broad explanation of the rise of icons in architecture, presenting his view that icons are “multiply coded enigmatic signs”—in other words, that iconic buildings leave room for multiple interpretations and yet remain fundamentaly enigmatic.

During the wide-ranging, sometimes contentious debate, the two frequently disagreed about Jencks’s book—but seemed, ultimately, to agree on the problems of the iconic building. Below are selected excerpts of the debate—beginning with Eisenman’s bluntly critical reaction to Jencks’s introductory speech.

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Peter Eisenman: I couldn’t disagree with Charles [Jencks] more. He tells us what an iconic building is, that it’s a “multiply coded enigmatic sign,” but most of the buildings in his book ain’t enigmatically double-coded signs. The worst example, of course, is Santiago Calatrava. The only thing enigmatic about Calatrava is how he’s so successful. But it’s not enigmatic, I know why he’s successful—because the buildings are one-liners, they’re easy. They are saccharine, they’re not structural at all—you don’t have to know anything about structure. And, you know, why a subway station in New York should look like a bird—that’s probably “multiple coding,” but to me it’s just dumb.

What I’m interested in as an architect and what I find problematic about Charles’s view of the icon, is that it doesn’t distinguish between good icons, or good buildings, and bad buildings.

I think that the real problem with architecture today is the question of the optical. If there’s one thing that the iconic building relies on it’s “opticality”—you have to see it, you’ve got to get it quick, it’s an instant imagery. And I think that opticality is the problem with the buildings in this book, that they rely too much on a first impression, an image, a form, a shape. I think iconic buildings destroy, because of their need for opticality, the possibility of multiply coded enigmatic meanings. For me, iconic buildings cause the individual to become a spectator toward seeing a spectacle, becoming passive. And I think there’s nothing worse that a person or an audience that is passive.

Charles Jencks: My response to what you’ve said is that you haven’t done a very close reading of my book. My book is an attack on the icon and the iconic building. I would agree with many of the things that Peter has said. I say explicitly how to judge an icon in a chapter there. The whole point is that the enigmatic signifier has to remain enigmatic in part, and the viewer has to do a lot of work, it’s extremely important.

The danger—and this is what I spend a great deal of time in the book arguing about—is that [iconic buildings] become one-liners. They destroy cities. They send each other up. In other words, if you have five iconic buildings in a row, they cancel each other out. They have all these problems. But my argument is that the iconic building is here to stay because of the decline of religion, they decline of the monument, the rise of global capitalism, the rise of consumer society and celebrity culture, the rise of corporations and mayors and people who ask for them. And also because the public likes iconic buildings when they are successfully other—that is, when they are successful creative experiments. So, I think—and this is where there’s nothing really between us—I think the real question today is to judge the difference between good and bad icons.

PE: I want to call the attention back to Calatrava, [to the idea that Jencks is] against Calatrava. First of all, Rem Koolhas gets fewer pages in this book than Calatrava. And Rem is under “Iconic Dilemmas,” which is good, whereas Calatrava is under “The Challengers.” Now, the challengers, of course, are the winners at the end. This book is set up like a boxing match and Calatrava is one of the challengers.

CJ: Well, let me say, again, about Calatrava. There is, in that chapter, if you read it ironically instead of reading as if that was praise, you would see that I’m attacking him for being structurally dishonest; that the bird metaphor is a false cantilever; that he compares himself to Frank Lloyd Wright as an organic architect, which is outrageous; that he’s sub-Gaudi. There are many things that are critical of him.

He is a challenger because he so clearly—every building he’s trying to build is iconic and he self-describes them as an iconic building. And he’s challenging the audience.