中国建筑的屋顶欣赏

Often I wonder if the work I am doing with this blog is ever useful or not. I like to see it as a sort of online book, but is it? The most extensive part of the work is to couple an image from the internet to a project. That means sometimes scrolling through thousands of images for the right cloud.

But as the application of iconography infiltrates architecture further – the amount iconographic projects that are being announced this year is unprecedented in architectural history –the presentation of the used iconographies change. The trend seems to focus the association of the public by presenting the image of reference - such as the presenting of the image of the Hokusai Wave by Foreign Office – or even present a collage of images in an animation – as in the case of the Watercube by PTW.

At the presentation of the Centre Pompidou Metz this week the image of the applied iconography was provided. Because the iconography of the Chinese Hat has no arguable connection to the program of the building the architect seems to have made up that he ‘found a Chinese hat on the street in Paris.’ We can laugh about that, but it is a clever pointing to the hometown of the mothership of this branch.

The second iconography is a copy of the 1776-feet iconography of the Freedom Tower in New York. The Centre Pompidou Metz will be 77 meters high, ‘alluding to the 1977 opening date of the original Centre Pompidou.’ Another underlining that this building is just a satellite. Or should we call it a ‘parasite’ that won’t survive without its host in Paris?

At the Projective Landscape Conference in the spring of this year the American architecture critic Robert Somol wondered if we could ever move beyond the notion of ‘the ironic’. The ironic seems related to critical theory and is still widely applied in critical criticism as I pointed out in the post Capitalism and Decadence. It is very tempting to point at all the ironic parts of the design by Shigeru Ban. It will make me look good, and you will enjoy it. So what’s the objection? The problem with the ironic is that it doesn’t bring us further; it is unproductive. The ironic is basically an unmasking procedure that criticizes the status quo by arguing it is dishonest, without ever proposing alternatives. Shall we do some?

What counts at an iconographic building is its form, its per-form-ance. The Centre Pompidou Metz has beautifully complex form that is described by loads of parameters. An iconographic building is not about being truthful, being pure, being original. An iconographic building is about bullshit, plausible truths, new combinations of existing parts. Describing iconography as a ‘decoi-language’ as Rem Koolhaas did in February this year is applying critical criticism at something that is beyond the critical. Even Alejandro Zaero-Polo’s argument for more constructional truth focuses too much on being honest. Iconography equals narratives, plausible representations and composite materials and constructions. And the Centre Pompidou Metz is a grand example of this new architecture.