Texto de Graham Morrison no jantar de entrega dos “Awards for Architecture” promovido pela AJ/Bovis, uma reflexão deliciosa sobre a iconografia e os perigos do culto exaustivo da chamada ‘body language’ arquitectónica.

Existem mais alguns essays de leitura obrigatória no sitio oficial da Allies and Morrison

Entretanto os dias são demasiado atarefados para manter uma agenda digna para publicação aqui no Aspirina, prometo manter a coisa activa dentro de alguns dias.

The Trouble With Icons

I want to start by taking a position.

I am suspicious of architecture which makes pompous claims for itself. I think a design that sets out with the conscious intention of being Iconic is unworthy. And, I think a pre-requisite of a good design is one which contributes to its context.
There is a pattern for designs that think well of themselves to be called names like boats or dogs. The parallel to ‘Sea Princess’ and ‘Rex’ are names like  Spiral, Cocoon, Cloud, and Vortex. These names suggest volumes of poetic wonder. What they have in common is, they are all ordinary buildings distorted into unnecessarily complicated shapes, enclosing repeating floors of prosaic space, but whose main purpose is to attract our attention. They all want to be Icons.
I think this fashion for Iconic design is like the sport of High Diving. For the diver, marks are awarded principally for the degree of difficulty. Each element of the dive must be clear for all to see, and the dive must complete with an entry into the water with a graceful minimum of splash. For the designers of our fashionable Icons, the task is very much the same. Making an easy task look sensationally difficult is often their speciality, although entering the pool or the architectural arena without a splash is, I suspect, rather unappealing to them.
Descriptions of the dives like ‘A flying forward double somersault with twist’ bring the images of several recent buildings to mind. Add a ‘reverse take off with jack-knife’ and you will have a spectacle that will simultaneously confuse the critics, impress the students, and momentarily delights the public. The further addition of a ‘half twist before entering the water’ will ensure that a wink and a smile will be caught by the correct camera angle for world wide publication.
Apparently, in future competitions, extra points will be added for style in ladder climbing [no problem here], and also for swimsuit presentation but, I think, this is where the analogy begins to get out of hand.
I am not actually against Icons. I think we need them.
Although we live in a secular age, we still need familiar and reassuring reference points.
With traditional Icons, such as temples or churches, no longer holding the same significance, we need to replace them with new forms which confirm the change in our values, continue to make our evolving cities more legible, and to give us pleasure. In the rush to fill this void, designers have been falling over themselves to apply the Iconic treatment to every imaginable building type. The trouble with these new Icons is discriminating between those which are worthy from those which are not. We must be clear that their impact will be both lasting and beneficial. If they are going to be visible, they have to be good.
So, what exactly is an Icon? Clearly, the modern architectural Icon has come a long way from the devotional paintings venerated in Byzantine churches. These were always anonymous, imbued with humility, and were regarded as windows to something greater; a meaning appropriated by the IT wizards for the symbol on our computer screens giving access to the infinite world beyond.
The alternative meaning, ‘a person or thing, regarded as a representative symbol that is important and enduring’; is a meaning appropriated by our media attentive culture, for the phenomenon of the celebrity. This is the architectural Icon.
It is therefore a building that is highly visible, often provocative, and in its physical form, emphatically carries cultural signals far beyond its need to accommodate space. It is intended to attract attention and, as a design, it is easily reduced to a logo.
These icons are becoming our new landmarks.
Obvious examples are The Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre, and even the new Scottish Parliament Building. This group of modern Icons, all mauled before they could be loved, have a real value in their ability to simultaneously signal both their function and their public importance. They convey the true spirit of their age. They are both useful and memorable. I have no trouble at all with this type of Icon.
There is, however, a second group, which try very hard to be like the first, but suffer from the fact their public importance is less obvious. They are the less significant building types and may not always deserve the profile their sponsors demand.
This is the group I wish to focus on. This is where, in my view, the trouble with Icons lies.
Now here, I have to mention the very significant effect of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Though I am not convinced it is a great work of architecture, it is firmly in the first category as its public credentials are clear. Its significance, to me, as a building however, is less in its extraordinary shape and surface, which many now think to be formulaic, than in the general acceptability of its formal abstraction.
Here, we have an important building whose representation to the outside worlds bears little obvious indication of its content, and while we are all now attuned to recognising such structures as cultural buildings, could it be that this abstract formula, which disguises a building’s content, be further applied to more prosaic accommodation?.  If so, any building at all could be an Icon.
With Bilbao, ‘celebrity architecture’ in all its low-cut and high-rise disguises had come of age. It was certain to be followed by a torrent of imitators.
As it happened, the launching of the Guggenheim coincided with a new public appetite for the Bling-Bling architectural image. The investment in buildings by the Lottery and the consequential interest from the press provoked a demand for ‘finished’ images, often prepared rather too early in their design process. They encouraged the representation of a single uncomplicated idea, a ‘one-liner’, an architectural word-bite,  that once in the public realm was considered sold and would be difficult to change.
A competition developed for attention, and as this increased, each image had to be more extraordinary and shocking, in order to eclipse the last. Each new design had to be instantly memorable; more Iconic. It was, and is, a fatuous and self indulgent game.
We only need to take a trip down the Thames and look at the buildings on the river bank from Southwark to Wandsworth to see its effect. On what I now call the ‘Costa del Icon’, we see an endless array of second-rate architecture all shrilly demanding individual attention and without any relationship to each other; celebrity misfits in a policy vacuum, their impact further diminished by ubiquity. How many landmarks does one city need?
We remember the original presentations for many of these buildings. With sophisticated computer imagery and carefully lit models, they were all very seductive, but seeing their over-egged claims realised, we are left disappointed and suspicious.
Learning from this, I wonder if we shouldn’t ask ourselves some simple questions before handing out more approvals and plaudits to these ‘visionary’ auteurs.
The first might be,
Within the order and balance of the city, is there a value in the representation of essentially prosaic accommodation as Icons?
The answer to this may well be ‘Yes’, but we must be clear there is a difference between something that surprises and delights and the equivalent of the school show-off who, tediously, makes a lot of noise.
Second and more obvious,
‘Why does it look the way it does?’ Why does this proposal seem to have all the modesty of a party outfit belonging to Elton John?
I think an Icon can often be a disguise for an alternative agenda. Sometimes a design is little more than a marketing strategy presented as a cultural flourish, and sometimes an Icon is used to elevate the design debate to an unimpeachable artistic level simply to deflect criticism from its content.
Third,
Is it simply trying too hard? Is its accommodation compromised by the need to project its Iconic image?
If the ordinary is forced to look extraordinary, it may increasingly be at the expense of doing its ordinary task well.
And fourth, concerning the public realm,
‘What contribution, other than the sense of itself does the Icon make to its context?’
The seductive images almost always focus on the building as an isolated object. An object that is often hermetic and usually self-referring. These images rarely look at the consequential space that is formed.
Our cities are made of a tradition of normative buildings which form our streets and lanes, our squares and avenues.  These familiar spaces, the public realm, are more valuable to us than any individual building.  It is the quiet strength of their normality which allows the Icon to be special. We need to look at the city as a whole and no Icon should leave it worse off.
Too many Icons and the fabric of the city is distorted, but too few Icons and the city is dull. For Icons to have validity, they must positively contribute to their context.
Before I finish, I would like to touch on two examples of ways in which, I think, Icons fail to do this and may end up working against us.
The first deals with what I feel is the Icon’s illusory regenerative qualities, and the second deals with the Iconic form being used in an attempt to secure a lucrative planning approval.
Everyone talks about the Bilbao effect. About how one remarkable building can change the perception and boost the economy of a city. But, we are short of evidence for the claim that architecture in the form of a single gesture, however theatrical, can have such restorative powers. Without Easy-Jet, it is far from certain the small economic gains in Bilbao would be measurable at all. But now every failing town or institution has thoughts about some kind of architectural Icon which they hope will be their salvation.
They are seeking an elixir.
It is as if they were the gullible recipients of those ‘medicines’ dispensed by the Victorian quack doctors whose drugs were spiked with alcohol and gave only temporary and illusory comfort to the afflicted.
As the elixir of the Icon is dispensed and its curative effect is seen to be less than was hoped for, it is almost as if the very presence of an Icon is to shine a grim spotlight indicating exactly the areas that are struggling. After all, the jolliest murals were always painted on the gable walls of the most disadvantaged housing estates.
At the London Metropolitan University on the Holloway Road, the elixir has been dispensed by Daniel Libeskind. The new graduate centre, entitled ‘Orion’ [yet another name] and formed from three intersecting shards of grey metal,  is a further development of the crumpled thinking seen earlier at the V&A. Despite the far-fetched claims of his web-site for the origin of his concept, the design is little more than a cultural placebo, a distraction, that  quite possibly, in failing to deal with the real organisational issues of the university, inherited from decades of poor estate management, may do more long term damage than good.
The second example is of a proposal for a new office building. The question here is; Is being Iconic enough of a justification, for what some see as a vast and unwelcome structure?
The office building is the true chameleon of our time. We have seen it mutate from a Miesian ‘ideal,’ into a post modern palace, into a hi-tech machine, into organic forms, and now blobs dressed up as art. Strangely, for a building type so concerned with efficiency, these changes in its skin are rarely market or customer led. They are more often than not, driven simply by the need to get a planning approval.
The latest example of this mutation is the chiselled object of angular art. We saw this at London Bridge, where the planning inspector applauded Renzo Piano’s assembly of glass shards, and hailed it as an artistic success. It has now been followed, with almost Darwinian predictability, by the proposal for Elizabeth House at Waterloo.
If  the confused assembly of ‘Donuts on sticks’ in Liverpool, known inexplicably as ‘The Cloud’, is regarded as its ‘Fourth Grace’, then the proposal at Waterloo must be Cinderella’s ugly sister.
This domineering, elephantine project of 1m sq.ft, is made entirely of glass and is claimed to reflect light in a way that is varied and beautiful.
Enormous it is, beautiful it is not.
Its formidable design team, which includes an artist, is at pains to persuade us that this sister of Cinderella is an object of merit and that it has all the delicate cultural credentials for her gargantuan foot to fit the magic glass slipper of public approval. I think they are in difficulty as, try as they might, it isn’t going to fit.
I find it hard to blame the development team for their attempt, as the design, after all follows the lead of some other, perhaps better regarded, Icons where the surface of the building is similarly [and abstractly] packaged as art.
In summary, the trouble with Icons comes when there is either pretence or lack of authenticity. Add to this the competition for each new Icon to eclipse the last, and the trail of designers blindly following a fashion and you have a recipe for the betrayal of sound architectural values.
So, in my view, there are good icons and bad icons and for the latter, I offer a new definition for our architectural lexicon.
A  Bad Icon is  ‘the built representation of an unsupportable claim, a meaningless or pompous gesture, which exceeds the reasonable representation of its content, initiated either by vanity or expedience, in which the efficient working of its accommodation is compromised and the context in which it is built is left worse off’.

I can think of four designs for Icons which work well.
First, Will Alsop is producing another very unusual form but which resolves the difficulties of layers poor estate management Goldsmiths College and successfully integrates it with and the urban fabric of New Cross.
Second, is Richard Rogers’ proposed tower in Leadenhall Street. Although taller than Swiss Re, it manages, without any loss of design integrity, to cleverly extend the public realm as it meets the ground, and with each succeeding floor receding from the last,g in size, develops the form of a thin vertical wedge which brilliantly defers to St Paul’s.
Third, and to my surprise as I was an initial sceptic, is the London Eye. Its sheer scale, directional quality and design integrity and its contribution to public delight in London, makes it a welcome addition to the city.
And fourth, I do admire the work of Herzog and De Meuron. Their recent competition winning scheme for the new cultural centre at the city of Flamenco, Jerez, is a thoughtful response to a significant site and avoids the complicated and contorted geometries of their rivals. Theirs is an architecture which rarely repeats itself, avoids the formulaic, and always derives real significance from its context. Their metaphors are carried through to an integrated conclusion.
These projects demonstrate that it is possible to produce buildings that combine the accommodation of something essentially prosaic with a powerful response to context and without compromising integrity. They are in my view all worthy Icons.