SIMONE BROTT: When I sat down to write something about iconic architecture, that seemed to me nobody was paying any attention to these buildings in a serious way, it seemed to me that it wasn’t a formal genre or a style, you know, like what we would call Modern architecture or Deconstruction. As much as the word “iconic architecture” was a rebuke or an insult, this entire genre of work was being traded in a very dismissive way. Just like Hollywood, we both love and hate iconic architecture. For some reason, I think this dismissal of the iconic is wrong, and that these buildings need and needed and deserved a theory to explain this phenomenon in architecture. So I created a theory grounded in the very superficiality of the image that was being derided, that I show has become an instrument of ideology.
I am Simone Brott. I am an architectural theorist, a writer, a critic, and a senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, in the architecture school. And my book is Digital Monuments: The Dreams and Abuses of Iconic Architecture.
The motto of my book, if you like, is, Iconic architecture is the opiate of the masses. Not the traditional icons of the architectural canon like, say, the Eiffel Tower. But I’m talking about the spectacular digitally driven architecture of the last 20 years, which I see as a new form of media, a kind of television that screens subliminal messages via the digital image—exploiting our psyche, our unconscious, for the purposes of capital in the contemporary city. The really hallucinogenic buildings that I have in mind, like Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Norman Foster’s Gherkin, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, were all introduced to us by the mass exchange of computer-generated imagery produced for developers and the so called masses alike, that flood websites like ArchDaily sometimes 10 years before a building is built—if it even gets built at all—have become in a sense more valuable and more real than the final building itself.
I coined the term “digital monuments” to describe this science fiction double reality that I experienced personally when I first saw some of these actual buildings on the ground. The building seems to flicker between the digital image you know, and the real building that appears before you. It’s like being inside a J.G. Ballard novel. I argued in the book that this encounter confirms the capitalist desire for a total indistinguishability between the digital model and building, and therefore the derealization of reality itself. The profound wish of the iconic architecture industry is to one day make the digital model itself simply appear on site, because the rule of digital world capitalism is that reality must never interrupt the ideological circuit of the image. That’s why I say that iconic architecture today has more in common with Hollywood cinema than with the architectural canon. The problem with this, the problem with this mesmerism of the iconic, is that it acts like a golden calf for the digital urban masses.
Of course, the iconic project is a principle technique of neoliberal globalization, and its real goals are to solve serious financial problems. Such megaprojects are made possible by colossal debt arrangements, 30-year-long mortgages that have the capacity to generate savage distortions of capital and social collapse, including the financial crisis in Greece and Spain, triggered by speculative iconic development, and worse, of course, mass deaths of workers and human rights violations on iconic construction sites.
My work has always been a study of architectural images. So I deal with photographs, film stills, and footage of architecture and cities, and this is how I think through architecture, this is how I critique it. But in my book, this was crystallized where the architectural image is no longer even representational, but a concrete object with determinant effects in the world. It changes the way we understand the agency of architectural images in finance and geopolitics. They subliminally control us and affect seismic changes and destruction in the world in this insidious way that turns on life and death.
In terms of theory the book was first inspired by my reading of Theodor Adorno’s critique of Hollywood cinema in the middle of the twentieth century. His problem with the cinema was that he felt it was too close to reality. He says that the picture that the factory worker sees on the screen is just an extension of his work in the factory. And he’s referring to this industrial repetition but he’s also talking about this sort of slippage between the filmic image and reality itself, that he says is completely indistinguishable and therefore, as his argument goes, it becomes an extension of ideological capital. Adorno’s dislike of the cinemas is notorious and unpopular in the academy. When I read it, however, I felt his critique of the iconicity of Hollywood cinema—which does not mean, you know, the icon such as, you know, Marilyn Monroe; it has a semiotic meaning—that his critique of Hollywood cinemas iconicity, which means its false immediacy and the indistinguishability of the screen from reality, I thought this critique was rather prescient, because iconic architecture now operates through this robbing of us of reality.
Why are all the books on iconic architecture books of beautiful imagery, books promoting digital fabrication? There seemed to be a dearth of books on the so-called left about this topic. This is how I ended up launching a whole investigation of my own into what do we call the Left and the Right in architecture? Is there even such a thing as a left, you know? Can we even use that word now? So I’ll give it a very simple black and white definition: by left I simply mean academics and theorists. Now, of course, many academics and theorists are on the right. You will see, though, anyone who dares to go on the right in academia now becomes unpopular and hated. It’s dangerous to not be aligned on the left. The problem is, we don’t have a proper left either. The architectural left today remains impotent in its ongoing failure to provide any substantive leftist critique of the current situation of current architecture or any alternative to its ideological program.
You know, of course, this is an exaggeration. There are people writing, you know, Marxist critiques of architecture. Of course, there’s a whole field called planning, you know, urban planning. There is a strong kind of Marxist debate against cities today and the problems of cities. But in architecture there is not much, it is simply seen as the enemy. The reason for this I suggest is that the architectural Academy is not a real left, but what Mark Fisher, who died some years ago, he had this concept called capitalist realism. This is what Mark Fisher would have called a fake petit-bourgeois left. The left has adopted a variety of hackneyed fashionable themes that don’t seem to address architecture at all. The left has a campaign now for increased social responsibility. This means, you know, advocating for sustainable architecture, which seems incredibly hypocritical in an industry responsible for some 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and Australia. Another campaign is for equity and greater inclusion, which if you look into this, it’s nothing else but domestic identitarian politics—it’s not equity for people all over the world.
The so-called postcritical movement adopted by practitioners, which is usually associated with another kind of fake category: the architectural right, in quotation marks. This idea of the postcritical practitioner is, put simply, the idea that theory and critique are now redundant. We simply need an empirical architecture. We need a pragmatic architecture, or we need, sometimes it’s called, a materialist architecture. As I say in the book, this is of course a perversion of Marx’s term “materialism,” which means class struggle. In architecture it means the more simple philosophical term, you know, embracing material reality. So there was an argument against the postcritical, but there was never a theory that would replace the materialist, pragmatic, empirical kind of model of architecture, which was emptied of all intellectual content and reflection. So this postcritical movement became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the left failed to provide any alternative to contemporary architecture as it exists. Saying something is bad is not good enough.
