'Architainment' in a Pluralistic World

Paul Jones’ look into iconic architecture and its ties to regeneration brought up some interesting points to start off this week’s readings. One concept that stuck with me is the idea of  “architainment” as a fundamental tendency within today’s architectural landscape. Jones references Fernandez-Galiano when defining ‘architainment’ as “positioning architecture relative to visual consumption. The ‘surface appearance and visual effect is paramount as buildings are designed from the outside in, from the vantage of an external gaze…“the public” are positioned as consumers of visual imagery” (Jones, 120). At this point in the semester we’ve evaluated and discussed several contemporary buildings and architects that are revered as ‘iconic’ by many (Guggenheim Bilbao, Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, etc.). Within so many of these discussions there always seems to be a mentioning of money and it being the impetus of the building. The idea of ‘architainment’ feels like it revolves around money, as well. After all, as Jones argues, iconic architecture today has such an emphasis on the exterior spectacle of it all: how can the building attract more media, more people, more money? It’s very easy to claim that these new statement buildings are hardly more than methodically contrived attention-grabbers, phony icons.

While I can’t argue that the money-making or fame-seeking approaches are new reasons for constructing iconic buildings, I do find it interesting when considered alongside Charles Jencks’ opinion towards pluralism and our societies today. Jencks argues that the decline of central belief systems and the increasing homage towards pluralism is the dominant attitude and way of life in our world. Interpreting Jenck’s view on our “weak belief” system to mean that it is weak in numbers and unity across a given society (versus a general uncertainty from person to person), it is then understandable why we’ve had such a hard time establishing what “iconic” really means. Everyone has varying opinions and points of view – none of which can really be argued as right or wrong. (However, one could argue that money and its attainment may be one of the most resilient belief systems of all.) Perhaps this is why defining an icon – whether within the architectural field or elsewhere – has become such an elusive and complex task.

Reading Jencks’ blunt breakdown of our global culture was somewhat of a light bulb moment for me – especially since I feel like I’ve had such a hard time defining what iconic truly means and really wanting a clean definition. I continue to refer back to Martin Kemp’s “Fuzzy Formulas” and I think Jencks’ viewpoint pairs nicely with it. There is no exact formula to calculating whether something is iconic or not – most especially in today’s world. There are so many variables and so few central beliefs across the world for any one iconic recipe.

…But could there maybe be one exception in terms of a common denominator – it all comes down to money?