Print Price: $27.50

Format:
Paperback
352 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780190068387

Publication date:
August 2019

Imprint: OUP US

The Icon Project

Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization

Leslie Sklair

In the last quarter century, a new form of iconic architecture has appeared throughout the world's major cities. Typically designed by globe-trotting "starchitects" or by a few large transnational architectural firms, these projects are almost always funded by the private sector in the service of private interests. Whereas in the past monumental architecture often had a strong public component, the urban ziggurats of today are emblems and conduits of capitalist globalization.

In The Icon Project, Leslie Sklair focuses on ways in which capitalist globalization is produced and represented all over the world, especially in globalizing cities. Sklair traces how the iconic buildings of our era-elaborate shopping malls, spectacular museums, and vast urban megaprojects - constitute the triumphal "Icon Project" of contemporary global capitalism, promoting increasing inequality and hyperconsumerism. Two of the most significant strains of iconic architecture - unique icons recognized as works of art, designed by the likes of Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas, and Hadid, as well as successful, derivative icons that copy elements of the starchitects' work - speak to the centrality of hyperconsumerism within contemporary capitalism. Along with explaining how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures, he also shows how corporations increasingly dominate the built environment and promote the trend towards globalizing, consumerist cities. The Icon Project, Sklair argues, is a weapon in the struggle to solidify capitalist hegemony as well as reinforce transnational capitalist control of where we live, what we consume, and how we think.

Readership : Architects; architectural historians; scholars and students in cultural studies, sociology, urban studies, business, media studies; general readers.

Reviews

• "Leslie Sklair has produced an elegantly written, wide-ranging exploration of that over-used and under-examined totem of our times, the icon. The Icon Project deconstructs the seductive image of power that rises from the uneasy depths of transnational capitalism and global consumer culture to symbolize both modern desire and social control-this is a masterful work of political-economic critique and architectural analysis."
  
  --Sharon Zukin, author, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
  
  
• "This book ought to be required reading for my generation. A great tough survey-crucially from outside the architectural world-which manages to show us the huge shiny, lumpen shape of the transnational development Utopia we've come to accept as inevitable. Most of all, it shows just how even the best architects and architecture have become 'enthusiastic partners' in the global project of turning the whole way we treat the world into a form of development opportunity and corporate entertainment. A gripping read, as well as a very, very scary one. There's never been a bigger need for architects to use all their other skills to think about how to design us out of this place."
  
  --Kester Rattenbury, Professor of Architecture, University of Westminster
  
  
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• "Leslie Sklair's sociological perspective on iconic architecture surveys conditions under which it has emerged and the social and political demands to which it responds. This is a deeply informative account and at times a cautionary tale."
  
  --Denise Scott Brown, VSB Architects