Ce n'est pas une tour.
To state that the decline of monumentality coincides with the rise of modernity it is not anything original. According to Charles Jencks, the appearance of this new genre, which he himself named the iconic building, has finally replaced the urban monument. When people stops to believe in God, they don’t believe in anything. They believe in anything. As banal as it may be. So if, in principle, anything can be a work of art, anything could also be an icon. But it is not so. If a building wants to be iconic must have a provocative image that generates controversy. Let anyone talk about you even if it is to criticize you. In essence, the iconic building is the simple application of the shock and awe military doctrine and the wow effect factor, as Mayor Bloomberg a few years ago called for the new singular New York City buildings. Although Deyan Sudjic argues that the iconic building is a fading fashion and it will eventually disappear, Jencks claims that the iconic building is here to stay.
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| Jean Nouvel 'Torre Agbar, Barcelona' (1999-2005) |
It is said that, after dismissing the Italian architect Renzo Piano, Agbar chose Jean Nouvel as the architect in charge of designing their new headquarters. In a first meeting with the client, the French architect presented three tower proposals. At one point during the presentation, Nouvel took out a Montecristo cigar, the same one that Mies van der Rohe usually smoked, from his jacket, and, placing it upside down, said: “but this one is my favorite”. Decontextualizing, shamelessly, both ‘La trahison des images’ by René Magritte and the Adolf Loos’ Dadaist proposal for the Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition. Next he added that “I think it also evokes the towers of Gaudí's Sagrada Família, and the stone millstones of Montserrat too” and ended up prophesying that “I am convinced that it can become a city icon”.
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| Norman Foster 'Swiss Re HQ, London' (1997-2004) |
Two years earlier, Norman Foster had received a similar commission from Swiss Re. The insurance company wanted to build a new headquarters on the ruins of the Old Baltic Exchange. A building destroyed by an IRA bomb on 10 April 1992 at 9:20 pm, in the heart of the City of London. To justify its absolutely banal form, Lord Foster was forced to bring together a good number of excuses. At the end, the energy performance of the building, which is supposed to consume 50% less compared to other similar buildings, ended up becoming its main, if not the only, argument. However, Madelon Vriesendrop, playing with possible analogies, ended up disguising it in a missile, a lipstick, a matryoshka doll or a cucumber form. And that's how it's finally known today: The Gherkin.
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| Ivan Leonidov 'Institut des Statistiques, Moscou' (1929-1930) |
A few years ago, while walking through one of Centre Pompidou's lost corridors, I discovered a project by Ivan Leonidov which I have never seen published anywhere before. So much controversy, if one had copied the other, and it turned out that both had plagiarized a project, still unpublished today, with more than half a century of existence. A kind of unusual building-manifesto for which the city seems to be nothing more than a mere backdrop. In this case, its shape is explained as a container of new functions. An object in the service of the then new socialist man. The fact is that if Nouvel states that this type is not a tower, it may be because he, intimately, thinks that it is, paradoxically, a socialist icon. Looking at it again, but from a historical perspective, this Leonidovism* revelation as a forerunner of this new architectural genre, which is the iconic building, would not be so strange either.
[*] In a 1930 Stalinist purge report on the petty-bourgeois tendency in Soviet architecture, Leonidovism (a term referring to the work of Leonidov and his disciples) is described as pure aestheticizing graphism, of technical and professional insufficiency, contrary to dialectical materialism and, of course, of being cosmopolitan.