ABSTRACT
Death and violence forever haunt the architectural image under the realities of late capital. Through a more detailed analysis of the presentation of Hadid’s Qatar stadium, this chapter considers further how the architect makes bad ideology visual by authoring the architectural image that visualises the mass exchange of life and death in the digital surface. Death also paradoxically resurfaces in the image by resurrecting the false wishes of modernity: the promise of eternal life for the transnational capitalist class. Iconic buildings thus function as contemporary totems. They ward off death precisely by vanishing real deaths in the iconic image that simulates eternal life.
