Landmark project: An artist's impression of the 2012 aquatics centre
13 April 2012

We are now leaving the age of icons. The "iconic" building - that is, a building designed in unusual, attention-seeking shapes, generally by an architectural celebrity - was to the recent boom what opulent art deco skyscrapers were to the Roaring Twenties, and orotund post-modernism was to the time of the Big Bang.

Those styles reached peaks just as the financial wave broke beneath them. The greatest of 1920s towers, the Chrysler Building, was completed just after the Wall Street Crash. Just as surely extravagant "iconic" architecture, which gave London the Gherkin and Zaha Hadid's under-construction Olympic Aquatic Centre, is rapidly receding. Sell curves and spikes and glossy surfaces, is the cry; buy oblong austerity and hair shirts.

Iconic architecture started as a way for aspirant cities to draw attention to themselves, the first and best example of which was Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim of 1997. Soon ambitious municipalities from Salford to Margate to Taipei were commissioning opera houses and airports and art galleries from the likes of Gehry, Lords Foster and Rogers, Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava. Next commercial developers followed suit, proclaiming that their towers, like the proposed Walkie Talkie and Helter-Skelter in the City of London, were iconic and, therefore, a public asset as well as a source of private profit.

Now Norman Foster, who not so long ago was conjuring expressionist fantasias from Siberia to New Mexico on a seemingly weekly basis, announces he is cutting 300 jobs. Frank Gehry has cut his Los Angeles office by half. Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, Richard Rogers's practice, has cut 35 staff. Zaha Hadid has also made redundancies, although her office insist that this is a "rebalancing", to address the fact that she now has an unprecedented number of projects under construction.

From Spain come reports that a 34-storey Gehry tower has been frozen, as has Foster's rebuilding of the Nou Camp stadium and a Rogers plan to carve a shopping centre out of an old bullring. Perhaps most symbolic was the reception given to the Mobile Art Pavilion - definitely an icon - commissioned by Chanel and their head designer Karl Lagerfeld from Zaha Hadid. On its appearance in Central Park, the New York Times's architecture critic lascerated the pavilion, which contains "an exhibition of artworks inspired by Chanel bags" as a tasteless display of luxury and consumerist vanity. The pavilion is now unlikely to appear in London as previously planned.

It's not good to hear of redundancies anywhere, and there's little pleasure in talented architects being thwarted, but there is a silver lining. Now it might at last be possible to bury the dread word "iconic", which was being used to describe almost any specimen of tat or developer's greed the world over. Each era has its hollow buzzword (once, when Prince Charles was rampant as an architectural tastemaker, the word was "heritage") but "iconic", even though architects have been announcing its death for years, was remarkably enduring.

What was pernicious about the idea of "iconic" architecture is its assumption that just by making a building look spectacular, you make it good. It is an architectural term for the use of people who don't want to think about architecture.

In reality good buildings can be square or round, dazzling or restrained, short or tall, gloss or matt, as can bad buildings, and the world's back catalogue of great architecture runs from chaste Brunelleschi to the refulgent baroque. What makes them good is the skill, passion and intelligence with which they are planned, shaped and given detail.

Thus the greatness of Gehry does not lie primarily in his ability to make outlandish shapes. What is nice about Bilbao is the way it picks up clues from it surroundings, part industrial and part urbane, and juggles with them and transforms them. Before Bilbao, Gehry's reputation rested on the way he took the humble materials of Los Angeles's back streets - chain link fence and plywood - and made them beautiful.

What is good about Hadid is the way she reconstructs the normal relationships of buildings - what is inside, what outside, what should go above, what below, what is ground level - much as 20th century painters rearranged the body or the face. As in art, rearrangement leads you to experience the familiar in new ways, except that in architecture the experience is bodily and three-dimensional.

The idea of "iconic" architecture gives little value to such artistry and nuance. While it trades on the names of famous architects, it does not respect what they do. It cares only about the look, and the signature. As a result, imitations become easy. Towards the end of the icon boom, mediocre practices were pumping out Hadidesque or Gehryesque projects as if they were fake Louis Vuitton luggage or Rolexes.

Now that the word "iconic" is expiring, it is just possible to imagine that people might actually appreciate architecture, as opposed to the labels attached to it, a little more. Another dumb buzzword will be along in a minute - "sustainable" is already well-placed as the successor of "iconic" - but one can at least hope.

I doubt that these famous architects, as they go through the grim business of shrinkage, will be looking on the bright side. Gehry, now aged 80, would be forgiven for heading off to a well-earned retirement, but he shows no sign of this, perhaps fighting on behalf of his younger successors to his practice, perhaps because he wants no other life but his work.

hOWEVER, if hard times mean that such architects are no longer valued as trophies but for who they are, they might find that there is indeed a bright side. Less celebrated architects, if only they can find commissions, might also enjoy working in a less hysterical and overheated culture. They might find less pressure to show off and more appreciation of subtle qualities, and of straightforward professional skills.

Personally I am glad that the age of icons has left its mark on London, at least in the case of the Gherkin and the Aquatic Centre, as I am glad that the Roaring Twenties gave the world the Chrysler Building. I am also glad that this age is not running on forever, and that ersatz icons, like the Walkie Talkie, are unlikely now to be built. Most of all I am glad that a desiccated, worn-out, cynical word has finally met its end.

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