Peter Cook: architect, teacher, critic and traveller, Peter Cook joins as a regular diarist.

Icons require talent

Hurrah for the icon, the iconic, the iconographic. These words--loved, hated, feared, derided--seem to be on everyone's lips just now. How many worried archihacks there must be, recoiling from the international trade that their former clients broker with the assumed masters of the icon. Responding to the declared aim of cities, street corners, even wine bars to become somehow 'iconic'. Provoking the sour rejoinder from the school of the deliberately restrained that it will lead to a silly, gimmicky, valueless architecture. New and curious alliances create a loop: one end with flowing digital architecture, intellectually distancing itself from the architecture of the nooky, the particular, or the expressive. At the other end the forms and mannerisms of the digital stuff that we saw at the last Venice Biennale interlocked into the currently favoured iconography: so Asymptote morph into Reiser into Himmelblau into Zaha into UN Studio and so on. Less talented operators run after them with undulations that cannot quite keep up with it all, introducing a pinnacle or two just when more undulations would be appropriate, or nibbling away the pure forms in order to get a bit of interest.

Mother of reinventions

My timing was lucky; out at Copenhagen airport and over the giant bridge to Sweden and to Malmo, a city threatened with anonymity as it becomes a preferred suburb of Copenhagen, a city over the water that has been desperate to re-announce itself. It has done so by persuading Santiago Calatrava to make a tower of housing and offices that is higher than anything else in northern Europe. With a twisted torso and Calatravan twisted corset that sticks out from the bodice, it celebrated the completion with a launch to end all launches. Invited to arrive at 5pm, I (and 2200 other lucky spectators) was plied with continuous Spanish bubbly for seven hours. In the first hour came the exhibition and the smiling hostesses. In the second hour what seemed to be the entire Swedish athletics team. In the third hour, popular singers. In the fourth hour, opera. A full 90-strong symphony orchestra. Fireworks. Calatrava himself was brought on for three minutes somewhere along the fourth hour. The rest of the time he was to be found in a quiet corner with his wife and another friend delighted to talk about life, engineering and their new apartment in New York. (I hope that someone took them for a meal.) It really did feel as if the launch could have been for the new model of a car, a telecom service or a dating agency. Malmo has its icon. Thank you. Now what next? The building doesn't say anything much about housing or work conditions. It doesn't say much about cities or water or technology or material either: it is just plonked there next to a general-purpose exhibition hall at the end of a dusty road. And by the way, none of the 2200 of us was actually allowed to go into it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Comfort factor

What a contrast, two days later in Copenhagen itself, when Zaha Hadid arrived to the opening of her extension of the Ordrupgaard Museum.

A small, noble house hidden in the woods, an exquisite collection of Gauguins and beside it a confidently folded sweep of concrete, with Zaha herself emerging in a coat of uncharacteristic green, claiming that it 'went with the greenery'. Many congratulations, many close friends of the architect, herself tanned and relaxed and encouraging gossipy conversation all around her. Nearly everybody there enjoyed touching the concrete, stroking the benches or skipping on and off the ramps. A steady set of curves, an assured and simple plan, a classy shade of dark grey concrete--everyone happy. Yet on reflection it came a little too close to a July revisit to the Vitra Fire Station (now itself a museum). Reminding one of Zaha's virtuoso wit and zing, so that the Danish building did seem a bit ... well ... Danish, in that comfy, streaky-bacon kind of way. Sensible, cautious, relaxed. Iconic perhaps--as a designer label trophy must be.

Summer salute

So the summer remains as a perfect excuse to detour and introduce the new generation to old friends like Darmstadt's Mathildenhohe, which resonates still across the near-century of its existence. Its combination of wistful elegance, strange corners of Jugendstijl, of invention and an ultimate, timeless field of original architecture. Say nothing, hold up your hand, let the taxi driver take you straight to the five-fingered tower (I've tried it, it works). That's iconic.