ABSTRACT
Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and ipso facto an extension of ideological capital, as he wrote in 1944 in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The term iconic, even in its posture as quasi-critique, reproduces this fundamental deception and thus remains uneasy and problematic. In the digital age of mediatic simulation since 1997, and the appearance of buildings such as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, iconic architecture loosely refers to the cult of architectural image in the globalized culture industry. The lesson of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment-the violent operation of Enlightenment values in modern culture-jumps to life in the workings of the iconic architecture industry. Contemporary architecture's image of a technocratic supra-rationality illustrates the reversal of Enlightenment to myth in such resurfacing of modernity in the cultural dominant.
