ZEITGEIST TODAY

In an age where cities like Dubai and Beijing are producing record numbers of ‘iconic’ buildings, the status of genuinely iconic architecture is rapidly disappearing. The brand-name, one-liner building has become a ubiquitous presence: the iconic is the new generic.

How to design a truley Iconic building today?

Today there is everything at the same time we are faced with a culture of remix and hybridisation, the new is a combination of everything that was before, combined, connected, joined in a vast excessively demanding concentration we are living the

re vival

re mix

re tro

re turn

which eventually leads towards a disappearance of everything, nothing is really and when it arrives it is gone already. (trends, tastes, lifestyles)

is a building more iconic in its absence?

because it will never fail and become out of fashion...?

or does it become iconic in its disappearance?

through the by-product of nostalgia?

or as in disappearance conceived as a symbolic act?

The world trade center has always been iconic but after 9/11 its iconicity obtained a state out of reach, the erasure of St. Louis‘s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex (Yamasaki) became an icon of modernism failed The palace of the soviets became legendary in its absence, in its pure manifestation on paper-to such an extend that urban planning even in a later state would adapt itself to the non-existing palace, (in orientation and also height).

All these examples of Iconicity are connected to certain events in time and loaded with historical significance and meaning.

But how to design a building in a state of dissolution, a dissapearance that can be experienced not only on a mental but also visual and spatial level? Is it possible to actual design disappearance?