ABSTRACT
Built almost 20 years after the Guggenheim, Frank Gehry’s business school at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is a lesson in the anti-iconic: it neither looks like a digital model nor exudes the auratic gaze of Bilbao. Gehry defended the wrinkled masonry as a “modernism humanised,” while the east façade is reminiscent of the demolition footage of the 1972 Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, evoking architecture’s tortured relationship with the modern movement and obsessive mourning of its loss. Iconic architecture thus seeks to neutralise its mythical prehistory in buildings such as Bilbao, but it never relinquishes the fantasy of a return to the battlefield.
