Monuments have lost their power to enshrine permanent memories, but society has scarcely lost its appetite for grand structures. Quite the opposite: the self-important building characterises our time, partly because the size of commissions becomes ever larger under late-capitalism and partly because architects and their commercial products must compete for attention. So a strange mood has developed, something of a double-bind, where the architect and society both have misgivings about the iconic building but cannot help producing it, in ever greater numbers and in ever weirder forms. This is a cause for considerable irony, and a little analysis.

Monumental change

Consider the decline of the monument, something that sets in with the rise of modernisation and the constant upheavals of the marketplace. When whole areas of the city, as Marx described them, 'melt into air' because of development, when the names of squares and districts change overnight, what is the meaning of a monument? It can signify anything, and often today that might be an embarrassing change in sentiment. This can be seen clearly in places of revolutionary change or military conflict. Vietnam and Iraq have witnessed the constant toppling of monuments and renaming of squares. But the shift was already apparent in eighteenth-century France.

In the space of about fifty years, the major public square in Paris next to the Tuilleries was re-named and restyled five times. First, in its creation, what was christened the Place Louis XV had a facelift and a new monumental setting for the new monument to the King, an equestrian statue based on that of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. Then, like Saddam Hussein's statues, this was toppled in a revolution, and the square was named after the event, in 1789. Then, after the guillotine had done its work on Danton, Robespierre, Mme Roland, and countless others, the Place de la Revolution was re-styled as the Place de la Concorde--for twenty years. Predictably, with the restoration it was rechristened 'Place Louis XV' and then, on schedule at the appropriate moment. 'Place Louis XVI'. Finally, because of an overwhelming desire to please the people, King Louis-Philippe re-minted the old coin for the area, calling it the Place de la Concorde. More honestly it might have been Discorde. What was the monumental strategy of Louis-Philippe? Where the guillotine was, he erected a large, granite obelisk, borrowed handily from Luxor and, underlining the point of the images and hieroglyphs carved into its surface, pronounced the great lesson for France: 'It would not recall a single political event'. Fantastique! Here is the first icon of calculated ambiguity, call it an 'icon without a clear iconography', or as I term it, an 'enigmatic signifier'. Ever since Louis-Philippe, artists, architects and now the general public have learned to enjoy, or suffer, their perplexing situation. The monument has been toppled as much by commercial society as by revolutions, by branding as by conscious iconoclasm. It's true the World Trade Center was destroyed as a symbol of American hegemony, as an icon of a foreign policy that was hated; but it is untrue to think that Americans ever liked the building very much, or thought of it as a venerable monument worth worshipping. That is, until it was brought down, repeatedly, on TV. At that point, the media gave the ruins and the previous image an enduring religious presence. An icon always has a trace of sanctity about it; it is an object to be worshipped, however fitfully.

Spiritual inflation

And this leads to the second reason that the iconic building has replaced the monument. In our time in the West, as Chesterton's adage has it, when men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. This epigram nicely states the problem for society and the architect. Today, anything can be an icon. The philosopher, Arthur Danto, has drawn the same conclusion in the post-Warhol world of the marketplace: 'Anything can be a work of art'. A Brillo box was Warhol's contribution to this truth, a ridiculously banal object, as unimportant as he could find. Yet with his nomination of the throwaway package, one supported by Leo Castelli and then the larger art world, this ephemeral box became expensive art. Marcel Duchamp, originator of the ready-made fifty years earlier, was piqued; at least his objets-trouves had a sculptural and industrial presence, a surreal charge, a convulsive beauty. Yet Duchamp's ire had no more effect than other attacks on Pop Art. Along with many other contemporary art movements, the politics of the counter culture ushered in the period of pluralism and relativity, the era of post-modernism.

The implications were not terribly pressing in the conservative world of architecture, at least for thirty years. Then Frank Gehry's Guggenheim and the so-named 'Bilbao Effect' did their work. At that point, developers and mayors could see the economic logic of the sculptural gesture (with its many enigmatic signifiers), and the same method was applied to any and every building type. This presented a semantic problem, inverting notions of appropriateness and decorum.