ABSTRACT
In 1953 Theodor Adorno he argued that Hollywood film was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish-fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics”—like the picture-language in Ancient Egypt, which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. Arguably, today the iconic architecture industry is the new executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality. Following Adorno’s argument about the iconicity of cinema, this essay theorizes twenty-first-century iconic architecture as an essentially mediatic form that, through the unconscious messages screened by the digital image, teaches the public about modernity and capitalism. To be clear, iconic architecture does not refer to any historical canon, but to the late capitalist genre of spectacular debt-fueled megaprojects, possibilized by digital visualization and fabrication methodologies that have fundamentally transformed the architectural discipline and contemporary city. Iconic architecture today represents regression to an internal architectural polemic that carries out the disciplinary rituals of modernism’s death, and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history.
