ancient cities

The modern architecture of Vancouver: iconic high-rise glass condominiums
Source: Karen Wiley.
experiences that are attractive to an international
class of tourists.
While maybe or maybe not physically dominating
the surrounding landscape, icons are explicitly
positioned relative to a visual consumer, considered
either as the visitor standing in front of the
building or, more likely, the viewer of an image of
the architecture in the printed press, on television,
or on film. Accordingly, a successful iconic building
necessarily develops a strong association with place
through an instantly recognizable form designed to
be both distinctive and widely disseminated. It has
also been observed that the emergence of a distinct
aesthetic and language of “icons” reveals the
aforementioned resonance between the architectural
field and the desire of footloose globalized
capitalist interests to give material form to their
status and to extract surplus value from city
spaces.
Recent research has sought to link the emergence
of icons with the consolidation of a transnational
elite of “starchitects,” high-profile architects
whose globally oriented business models and
prominence in public discourse situate them as a
mobile, global elite whose capacity to define transnational
spaces—such as parliament buildings,
airports, galleries, major shopping developments,
and sports stadiums—makes them much in
demand. As suggested earlier, close links to place
Architecture
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making are, in one reading at least, definitive of
architecture’s remit. Certainly how far architecture
is, or is perceived to be, “rooted” in place has been
one of the defining issues for architecture since
its inception, and how meaningfully architect-
designed buildings and spaces connect to local
communities’ visions of place is explored by a
number of urbanists who call for a reforging of
architecture’s relationship to place.
Such calls echo the stance of critical regionalism,
a popular refrain in architectural theory and,
to a lesser extent, in practice in the 1980s and early
1990s. Critical regionalism was a reaction against
the standardizing, “placeless” architecture associated
with the high modernism of the international
style, typified by skyscrapers in major financial
centers. In seeking to defend the distinctive elements
of place against the standardizing elements
of capitalist process, this group of theorists was
crucial to the emergence of vernacular architecture
that sought to rejuvenate the relationship between
the built environment and place through sensitivity
to social and environment context, including for
example a use of local material and styles, topographical
integration of building, and the associated
rejection of technocratic development and the
domination of instrumentalized, profit-driven
design and building technique. The potential of
architecture as a resistant cultural form is an