ABSTRACT
To the spectator, the iconic building’s reality converges on a virtual image that hovers in space, its presence felt only in the infinitude of choice that flickers in its plastic surface and whose magic, in Marxian terms, is its simultaneously “sensual” (present) and “hypersensual” (transcendent) quality. Recalling Adorno’s rebuke of the iconicity of the filmic image, this chapter argues that iconic architecture is too close to virtual reality and therefore an extension of ideological capital, establishing the theoretical platform developed in the following chapters.
