iconic

www.thebiblog.net, icon, february 3, 2010

the new york new york hotel & casino in las vegas

at a recent point in the long history of art and architecture, collectively we decided to turn a blind eye to the true meaning of the word icon and to bestow this term instead upon our most provocative and celebrated buildings. in the broadest sense an icon is a facsimile, or representation of something else. a small portrait of a religious being stands in for a real flesh and blood (or ghostly) saint, just as an image of a piece of paper on our digital desktops stands in for a real document coded in binary on our hard drives. what is apparent in both of these examples is that while the source materials are greatly simplified and abstracted they remain recognizable in the copy. by this definition, the guggenheim in bilbao and the jewish museum in berlin, two of the most touted architectural icons of the past ten years, are in actuality two of the least iconic buildings of the last century. they are too original to be confused for copies, hardly recognizable as buildings at all when they were first constructed. at the other end of the spectrum, replicas of buildings such as the reconstructed parthenon in nashville fail as icons because as copies they are too exact. true iconic architecture sits somewhere in between. it is a failed attempt at replication that arrives at something both recognizable and new. this is the architecture of the early colonists that attempted to recreate the grand architecture of europe without the materials or the means. it is the architecture of the new york new york hotel & casino in las vegas, which attempts to stuff the chrysler building and empire state into a hotel envelope. more recently, it is the architecture of dubai, the world replicated in sand off of its shores.