Value: culture and commerce; Led by Richard MacCormac, the RA Forum set out to unpick architecture's relationship with value, culture and commerce, concluding with a discussion of one manifestation of values within architecture, the icon.

Architecture seems caught in a trap between culture and commerce, or between its ability to express diverse and complex values, and the obligations it carries to create value, as Dickon Robinson puts it. However awkward and frustrating, these relationships define architecture's role and position in society, and one measure of its relevance within culture in general is its ability to deal with the visceral impact of function, budget and political expectation. To paraphrase Hegel, it is through architecture that concerns of this sort are brought into the aesthetic realm, that the rarefied is brought into contact with the real. If, as Jean-Louis Cohen suggests in borrowing Nietzsche's phrase from The Gay Science, that architecture should allow us to 'wander within ourselves', it is to architecture's relationship with culture that we might look for its potential to embody ideas and offer experiences that are not available elsewhere.

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Such concerns run through the entire discipline of architecture, from negotiations with clients and contractors, through the obligations on a profession, to esoteric academic discussions. The RA Forum set out to investigate how they could be better understood, and to begin to establish a basis on which they could be discussed. A central premise was to examine how cultural, economic and social value interact and are contingent upon each other. As Peter de Bolla and Graham Ive showed, the terms and concepts we use in such discussions started to take shape in the eighteenth century, when both culture and economics became some recognisable ancestor of their present form. As these two discourses emerged, the notion of social value also evolved, and the interrelationships developed all sorts of inversions and indirect linkages. Richard Sennett identified three instances of relatively small financial investment leading to enormous social benefits.

Another concern that arose from this was the extent to which one definition of value might dominate the others. Richard MacCormac's experience will be familiar to most architects. The old division between what can and what cannot be objectively measured often leads to the supposedly quantifiable economic value overriding all other considerations, especially those which relate to feeling and emotion. It takes a rare client to overcome such practices. But even here there might be some respite. As Ive argued, even Adam Smith, often considered the founder of 'utilitarian' economics and progenitors of the narrowly proscriptive definition of value, buries in his concept of 'luxury' the idea that 'wandering in ourselves' might have its place alongside the pursuit of wealth.

But could social or cultural value become dominant in the way economic value can? Though the issue of 'icon' buildings is hotly and all too often superficially debated, it certainly suggests the existence of a rarefied system of values which at the very least constitutes a particular relationship between cultural, social and economic worth. Charles Jencks makes a cogent case for the continued existence and production of iconic architecture, but it presumes a differently balanced relationship rather than the dominance of one definition over the others. To test this proposition further we have to go back to two nineteenth-century concepts, the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art], and the French sociologist Emile Durkheim's definition of the 'total social fact', which Jean-Louis Cohen outlines and places among a series of fundamental concepts that might help to structure further discussion.

In Richard Wagner's formulation, the Gesamtkunstwerk, which was naturally only achieved not just in his own music dramas, but when they were presented in his own Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 'art value' rises to exclude all other values. Among the more important of his many sources was Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that aesthetic contemplation was the only way to negate the inevitable suffering caused by the blind impulsion of the will--though Schopenhauer was sceptical about opera. Wagner, never one to lack self confidence, countered that a feast of architecture (the theatre), painting (set design), music and poetry (libretto), could not only overcome the limitations of individual arts, but their totality could also transcend the miseries of everyday life. In a world where Nietzsche--another influence on Wagner--was about to declare the death of God, the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk had enormous resonance, not least because it elevated art to the place of a surrogate religion. The Viennese Secession learnt that lesson well, but the most complete post-Wagnerian realisation of the Gesamtkunstwerk was in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes where dance joined music and set design in one of the defining initiatives of twentieth-century cultural activity.

Whether Diaghilev's audiences were really experiencing 'culture' and nothing else is of course highly questionable, though similar beliefs were not uncommon early in the twentieth century: Theo van Doesburg argued that in effect 'architecture' would disappear, subsumed within the aestheticisation of all aspects of life. In establishing an intense relationship between supposedly spiritual ideas and the self, the Gesamtkunstwerk does share something with the icon in its traditional sense as an object to aid religious devotion. But they differ in their means. An icon, such as those painted by Andrei Rublev, is a discrete object in a single medium, and the relationship it creates is purely bilateral. It shuts out extraneous factors, but does not attempt to deny that they exist. The Gesamtkunstwerk not only seeks to exclude anything which is not to do with culture, it also externalises the relationship between self and spiritual revelation, and to some extent makes it collective by implying complicity among the audience. Whether or not that simply reveals how increasing complexity of society made some form of objectifying framework necessary to communicate 'spiritual' ideas, this does suggest one reason why iconic architecture is so problematic.

In the colloquial sense an icon building is shorn from its physical and to some extent its social or functional context. These have become the socially accepted means of 'objectifying' and assessing 'design quality', or of measuring 'cultural value' as opposed to economic value. Yet if the term means anything, icon buildings carry the highest levels of cultural value--even to the extent of endorsing expenditure which eludes economic justification. So if the concept of iconic architecture is to give any help in resolving the trap in which architecture is caught, we will have to first understand how the discourses around culture and economics emerged, and then seek to overhaul the means by which we discuss them.

PETER DE BOLLA

Where and when did culture, in the sense of the social consumption and production of artworks, begin? I suggest the first public exhibition of contemporary paintings by British artists, held by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce on the Strand in March/April 1760 as a starting point. Of course this statement immediately appears absurd. If so how can we understand fifteenth-century Florence or sixteenth-century Mantua? What of Rembrandt's Amsterdam? Michelangelo's Rome? For reasons I shall attempt to explain, there is some sense to the proposition that Rembrandt or Michelangelo worked in what we might call the pre-cultural era. Because, for there to be something like culture--in the sense I have given it--five preconditions are necessary. They are: Institutions; Market; Public; Preservation of artefacts; The aesthetic.

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All five need to be present for something identifiable as culture to emerge. When this happened for the first time, we find the soldering of commerce with art, politeness with aesthetic sensibility, value with taste. In essence the commodification of a realm of human activity which, according to a version of its sustaining conceptual framework, is without value in the economic sense. So artworks begin to take on the aura of talismanic objects of prestige and power which have value on their own account. None of this was possible before the mid eighteenth century. Some history helps to explain why.

At the opening of the eighteenth century in Britain there were two patent theatre companies, 18 organs in London parish churches, it was illegal to import paintings, and the number of printing presses was limited to 20 by law. But, by the mid-century the institutions, markets and practices we associate with cultural production were firmly established. It is not fanciful to claim that literature, as we know it, was born out of these institutions, markets and practices. Consider that throughout the previous century most artistic practice had been confined to the vagaries of patronage. In 1660 there were no concert series, public exhibitions of paintings or other works of visual art, precious little theatre, no daily newspapers, weekly journals or reviews; no critics, theatrical or operatic impresarios, no picture dealers, no professional authors, artists, musicians and therefore no public, in the modern sense of the term. There was, in the sense I have outlined, no culture.

A century later, in 1760, London had four daily newspapers and six tri-weeklies. An unprecedented rise in periodical publication accompanied this expansion of newsprint. Books began to run off the presses in unheard of numbers. By 1734 The Gentleman's Magazine had a circulation of 9000 per month which had risen to 15 000 by 1744. This, in turn, fuelled an entire production industry--typesetters, printers, engravers, binders, leather toolers, booksellers, print makers and sellers--to service this new domain of culture. Over the course of the century it has been estimated that more than 150 million books were fed into the market.

A similar story can be told about painting. By the mid-century the market for paintings had been firmly established. Over 100 000 pictures were sold through the newly established auction houses and began to form the core of the first non-royal collections. Many of them--substantial collections of paintings, sculpture and other artefacts--were being displayed in semi-public purpose-built spaces, at Kedleston, Holkham, Chiswick, Bowood, Houghton. Artists from all over Europe flooded into England to compete in the booming market in painting--mostly portraits--and to display their products at the yearly exhibitions.

Music tells a similar story. By the late eigtheenth century, it was possible to attend the opera or a subscription concert at one of London's several concert halls on every night of the week. In the theatre things were less spectacular owing to the legal position: the number of playhouses and companies was restricted by the system of royal patents and licences which operated throughout the century. But even so there was a similar trend: new theatres were built during the reigns of Anne and George I and existing ones were expanded; by the 1790s Drury Lane's capacity was over 3600, while Covent Garden could comfortably accommodate more than 2500 theatregoers. The popularity of the theatre in Georgian London was so significant that by the 1760s we believe there to have been over 12 000 theatregoers a week attending playhouses.

And all of this began to happen under the rubric of a new theory designed to sort out what the value of such activity might be, the aesthetic. It was an Irishman, Francis Hutcheson, who wrote the first substantial theoretical work on the topic of taste, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725. Taste, according to Hutcheson, was an 'internal sense', by which he meant an innate power to respond with pleasure when the external senses perceive certain properties in objects. His theory was intended to counter previous theories of beauty which understood the source of that pleasure as lying within the object. Hutcheson, in contrast, says that beauty names 'an idea rais'd in us', which is to say it denotes an object in the private consciousness of a person. So beauty is subjective.

Writers after Hutcheson worried over whether or not the 'internal sense' was, as it were, equally available to all people or rather whether it was a special quality--perhaps like perfect pitch--which only some people were fortunate enough to have. Furthermore, some writers noted that there was a social aspect to the sensation of deriving pleasure from objects of beauty and this led them to conclude that via the association of ideas, it was possible to appreciate objects of beauty even if one's own antennae, so to speak, were poorly developed. So the 'man of taste' became synonymous with someone who displayed the right taste in music, books, paintings and so forth. The institutions where this display took place began to acquire their own buildings. So it comes about that a public sphere in which taste can be made visible, expressed, adopted is joined to the formulation of a conceptual apparatus which designates some commodities--artworks--as having value in and for themselves.

But who has the right to this new domain of culture? Can a footman listen to music with the same ears as a lawyer? Can a servant look upon painting with the same eyes as his lord? This question--over who has rights to this domain of culture--was raised with consistent and alarming frequency at precisely the moment when culture came into being. Could it really be that all one needs in order to look upon a painting by Reynolds is a common optical mechanism? How educated must one's eyes be to appreciate not the efforts of the mechanic but the exquisite production of the genius? Is the public really to comprise all who engage in the social and political entities of state or, rather, is it restricted to those in the know? In the mid-eighteenth century this argument was settled in a way that is familiar to us: to keep out the riff raff from public exhibitions of paintings, for example, the simple expedient of charging for admission was adopted, and when this did not completely succeed, rules--such as the disqualification of 'liveried servants' from the exhibition room or pleasure garden--were instituted. Right at the moment when culture appears, it gets inextricably interwoven with questions of economic value.

GRAHAM IVE

When Arnold Toynbee spoke of a 'bitter argument between economists and human beings' he was drawing on an intellectual tradition that goes back to Coleridge and Ruskin, and still influences how non-economists think of economists. It is a tradition that associates political economy with a 'dismal' and 'de-moralised' conception of value, utilitarianism, and it links the names of economists with Mr Panopticon Bentham, Mr Workhouse Chadwick, and Dickens' Mr Gradgrind. This charge is false, but the bad news is that the situation is actually worse. 'Utility' embarrasses modern economists. In contrast to the founders of classical economics, they have nothing to say about aesthetic value, because they measure value itself in a circular trap. According to the concept of individual revealed preferences, value is what someone is prepared to pay, but the level someone is prepared to pay is determined by ... value. Not surprisingly, when pushed to 'value' something that has no market price, economists of today have trouble: they cannot completely escape the concept of utility, but having abandoned it as an intellectual resource they can only refer to it in a coded language. In this world of mirrors value is portrayed as 'cost saved', leading to the characterisation of architectural value being the capacity to save 'whole life' cost and the ability to measure the cost of changes to a design, but not their value.

So resurrecting the concept of utility might help to escape this trap. Indeed Adam Smith, often thought of as the originator of the tradition Coleridge and Ruskin so disliked, did see utility in broader terms than they allowed. Through Smith's lens utility can favour artistic activity, in part because it breaks the circle of measuring value by bringing in external judgment. Even so, utility on its own is not enough.

For Smith, 'utility' is the capacity of something to satisfy an appetite. When that desire is for something basic like food or shelter--which Smith classified as 'necessities'--it is relatively easy to satiate. Efficiency and economy are the guiding principles, and maximising the benefits from limited or scarce resources is properly a task for rational calculation. Once an appetite is satiated utility diminishes, leading to the concept of 'marginal utility', where gains in utility reduce, cost increases and the question is how to judge how much is worth spending on what. This moves to Smith's second general classification--'luxuries', and his formulation of luxury shows a value beyond utility.

He argued that providence, which he called 'the invisible hand', would so arrange society along the lines of the free market with security of property rights, that even self-interested actions would give rise to development and progress. Illusory goals and dubious instincts may drive behaviour, and even when individuals deceive themselves that luxury will bring happiness, they are acting for the common good. Their deception is socially provident, because it makes those people work hard, save, take risks and invent. Material and cultural progress is the result. Pursuit of luxury, however despicable at the level of the individual, benefits society in general. We do not share Smith's faith in the completely providential nature of our social arrangements, and we are only too aware of the dark side of our own instincts, and we might question his confidence that accumulating private wealth will always preserve or increase the sum of social value. But we can share his perception of the danger of entrusting anyone else with deciding what is in our interest; and with entrusting anyone at all (including ourselves) in deciding what is in the social interest, and of social value. Applying ideas of utility and efficiency outside the realm of necessity--whether we call that 'outside' luxury, or social life, or freedom--becomes complicated. When considering 'luxury', Smith gave more weight to the appearance of utility, than to the measurable increment of functionality achieved in the object, design, or whatever. This touches on aesthetic judgment, and in this sense he opposed his great predecessor in Scottish intellectual life, David Hume. His key example, a deliberate criticism of Hume, is of a watch, which is beautiful because, with nothing unnecessary to the purpose, it achieves an extraordinary level of accuracy. This is valuable even though its user has no use or need of such accuracy. It is valuable because its maker has shown exceptional skill; and because its buyer has shown exceptional sense of what it is 'appropriate' for a rich person to spend money upon; and he knows this is indeed appropriate because others will commend him for it ('approve' his action) and, even if a particular 'spectator' doesn't, his conscience, the 'ideal spectator', will reassure him.

Smith applied the same thinking to architecture. He assumed that when the self-interested 'man of fortune' (always male) commissioned architecture, he did so as a patron, concerned thereby to earn social approval and show his virtue and taste. He did not conceive of an architecture of productive expenditure--that is, that the rich would spend on architecture with a view to thereby becoming still richer: it was to show virtue.

Smith, one of the founders of conservative and capitalist economics, found value in 'unproductive' expenditure, or certainly expenditure which went beyond utility. Architecture is particularly susceptible to this line of reasoning. Even if his solution to the problem of aesthetic value works in the absence of dissonance or dissent, and assumes a homogenous rather than a heterogencous society, it still describes how a convergent consensus can emerge around the value of aesthetic production, and the relative 'virtue'--or 'worth'--of artist and patron. He also sets out how economic resources can be directed to such ends and does this without even a gesture towards the trite, contemporary concept of 'market value'. We may not sympathise with every aspect of Smith, but he does help us to see beyond the limitations of contemporary economic thinking as it is applied to architecture.

RICHARD MACCORMAC

Architecture lies in an uncomfortable position between two areas of understanding. On one side stand reason and ways of evaluating and measuring objectively, that come from the Enlightenment and the rise of science, commerce and industrialisation. On the other are cultural values like subjectivity, humanism and aesthetics.

Architectural education suggests that architecture is part of a great cultural venture. But, although the commercial world occasionally builds architectural icons, most developers want to maximise the profitability of their buildings and may see aesthetic issues as conflicting with this priority. As a student I was advised, perhaps facetiously, 'Whatever you do, don't use the word beauty with an English client; you'll get fired'. In response, British architecture produced the 'High-Tech' movement, a wonderful architecture that managed to elide this duality by raising rational construction to an aesthetic proposition, but at the price of a deliberately limited field of reference.

Another approach is to accept that architecture exists in relation to this unstable duality between these two sets of criteria.

The side of reason has a powerful philosophical background in the belief that knowledge, science and technology determine human destiny. It is embedded in the origins of modern architecture. The guiding ideas of the Bauhaus, including form following function and the need to make the building process more efficient, have a counterpart in its contemporary logical positivist circle in Vienna (although when Ludwig Wittgenstein spent years designing a house for his sister, his attempt to find entirely rational connections between architecture and philosophy ultimately failed).

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What of the cultural side and its criteria? The tendency in modern societies, such as ours, is to find values that can be quantified reassuring. But when we seek to make everything accountable in this way, subjective values like aesthetics and beauty appear unmanageable and dangerous--precisely because they cannot be quantified.

Clients are often interested in these values, and if they are to be developed it is essential for clients to have direct contact with their architect. But--especially in those complex buildings where there is a split between the end users and the project managers--it is difficult to have that vital contact. A process called 'value engineering' often intervenes and imposes measures of financial value over everything else. The constitution of the BBC project ensures that the cultural and quantifiable are reconciled. In our design for the senior common room at St John's College, Oxford, we had a very strong, confident relationship of mutual exchange with the college fellows. Our discussions identified how valuable the medieval garden is to the college, so we deliberately created an interplay between the garden and the room where the college's governing body meets--to reflect this relationship in the design. Various devices--the edge of the floor, the deep balustrade, the glass wall and external shutters--each define the limits of the room in different ways, and the garden might seem to penetrate into it between any of them. The shutters make these possibilities explicit. In the morning they are closed to protect the room from the sun; as the sun moves they open outwards to become fins, which (in the sort of trick that Frank Lloyd Wright understood well) seem to draw you from the room into the garden. Yet despite the close relationship between inside and outside, the room barely touches the garden; it is cantilevered over it, suggesting that the relationship is intangible rather than physical. This relationship and the effects of the design would be very hard to quantify.

The idea of architecture as an art that can be beautiful has preoccupied me for over twenty years. But creating that kind of architecture is only possible for a client who really understands the aspiration. Otherwise the construction industry is like the NHS, full of managers who are disengaged from the final product, and just manage risk through the process. Rudimentary measurement prevails over qualitative value.

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However, it seems that this position is now being subverted by verifiable economic trends. As Labour peer Lord Evans, Chairman of Faber & Faber, suggested in a New Statesman lecture in 2001, the creative industries--including art, architecture, design, music, broadcasting and film--now employ more people than all the traditional industries of shipbuilding, steel, car manufacturing and textiles put together. Politicians and accountants may find this hard to measure because the output is intangible, but it constitutes 6-7 per cent of GDP--12 per cent in London--and it is growing at 16 per cent annually. This affirms that culture is integral to our economy, as well as our society: it adds value rather than cost.

DICKON ROBINSON

Of all the different concepts of value that punching the word 'value' into Google reveals, the property development and housebuilding industries use a specific one in their financial appraisals. At their simplest they input the cost of land, construction and interest on money borrowed to establish cost; value is the proceeds they anticipate on sale or completion. The difference between the two figures is profit. What is interesting is the role the market plays in determining the value of a scheme. This is established not by what it has cost to create in terms of labour, energy and material resources, but by the scarcity or ready availability of comparable offers, and by the public appetite for it. While the market is a good guide to how much you might get for a project which is already well provided in the market, it is a poor indicator of the likely appetite for a new product, and therefore the value it might realise. Since this compounds risk, commercial property developers and housebuilders are reluctant to experiment with new products or tinker with established ones. Their concept of value restricts innovation.

Most areas have an established range of properties and uses which, coupled with public and corporate demand, determine land value. Where land values are low, developers struggle to justify building anything other than an inexpensive product as there is no evidence of demand for anything else. This simple equation is what makes urban regeneration so difficult without public subsidy. To change the perception of an area you have to provide a product that appeals to people seeking something better than what is already there. As financial appraisals do not justify such action, this means creating rather than following a market. Every successful public subsidy seems to be mirrored by examples of failure. The Holy Grail is to find ways of creating a superior offer without increasing costs, so that no public subsidy is necessary, or in the case of social housing, no more than the normal subsidy. This is the magic which design can weave. Great architecture integrates functionality and fitness for purpose with a wealth of other values. The role of the architect is to mediate between cost, value and values. Here the difference between value and values is crucial. If value is all too frequently a monetary sum, values are driven by culture. It is a 'value judgment' to claim that evaluation of worth can only be calculated by intellectual assessment rather than measured as a financial sum. Values are multifarious, from pleasure in craftsmanship, to exploitation of colour, a sense of tactility in materials, and to surprise and fun.

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So what is the art of generating value through creating new markets? In housing, it has generally been done most successfully by changing and enhancing public perception of a neighbourhood by inserting interesting and ambitious architecture. Buildings are the largest things in our environment and their impact is hard to avoid. Loading new buildings with values underlines and enhances their impact. This is the difference between mundane building and architecture: between boring and bland, and exciting and challenging; between indifferent and beautiful.

We all know the tensions that arise when architects, as a result of their training, seek to reflect cultural values in their designs, but cannot demonstrate the financial value of increased costs. Social housing is an interesting area to observe them, both because significant decisions are taken by clients on behalf of their tenants, and because there is little government or public appetite to endorse generous budgets for strata at the bottom of society. At the Peabody Trust I have tried to find ways of incorporating values into otherwise economic buildings which would add to the quality of life for residents and enhance neighbourhoods, and from time to time create new markets for which there previously appeared to be no demand. Several examples of Peabody estates in London over almost 150 years reflect a wide range of cultural, environmental and aesthetic values. In the 1860s, Henry Derbyshire designed the first estate in a mild Neo-Classical aesthetic which has been compared to that of clubs like the Garrick. This was an attempt to suggest respectability, an effect emphasised by a large, rusticated entrance arch. Occupants and visitors would have found the materials, brick, timber and slate, familiar. But the design also reveals public health objectives, visible through clerestory windows behind which were communal baths, laundry and drying rooms, and in the spacious courtyards where children could play safely in fresh air. Environmental and social values are at work here.

Seventy or so years later came Victor Wilkins' Cleverly Estate, Based on Christopher Wren's Hampton Court Palace, it was conceived as a 'People's Palace', combining the familiar with the aspirational. It is the most extreme example of values by association, and shows no sense of the imminence of the Modern Movement. For that you have to go to Berthold Lubetkin's Priory Green of the late 1940s. Its huge scale, wide spacings and delight in abstract facade patterns reflect the ideals of a society based on equality. Its values, unlike Cleverly, could not be conveyed by association as they barely existed: they had to be expressed through manipulation of function and rhetoric. Its scale and patterns subjugate any individual territory and individual flats are not articulated but are merely part of a larger composition. State provision, utility, a faith in modernity and therefore the future are its values. By the early 1990s, the car determined the use of space and layout of homes. The ideal of shared communal space disappeared; instead every household had an opportunity to exercise individual choice in their front garden and parking area. Tibbalds Munro's Victoria Place in West Silvertown Urban Village made place-making the overriding objective. It was identified as a major pedestrian entrance to the development with the potential to articulate the wider environment. Its curved form and high quality materials represent the values it brings to its context.

CZWG's flamboyant West Ferry Studios derived from the hypothesis that local businesses were more likely to flourish in a local landmark, while at Murray Grove by Cartwright Pickard, the aim was to investigate volumetric off-site construction. Its engineered quality brings a relaxing and reassuring simplicity. Houses at Bill Dunster's BedZed, designed to incorporate as many sustainable features as possible and to create an image for sustainable architecture, achieved premium sales prices over local alternatives, confirming the emergence of a new market in sustainable homes. Finally, the two very different winners of a competition to find new approaches to low-cost home ownership, Ash Sakula's Boxley Street scheme and Niall McLaughlin's Evelyn Road show how an architecture which is rich in values can create value. What links the subtle and flamboyant is a sense of beauty, the fantastic secret which architects can share with the public.

JEAN-LOUIS COHEN

Representing buildings as icons immediately triggers questions about the peculiarities of the art of architecture. Such questions reveal not only architecture's internal processes, but also the place of the discipline in culture and cities. Understanding iconicity simply as imageability, as we often do now, questions the entire chain of social constructs in which architecture is located. The following introduces some concepts which might help to do that. Buildings are more than the hollow, inhabitable sculptures that contemporary conditions can seem to make them, but there is a constituency for 'icons'. Ten years ago Peter Eisenman referred to one of his Japanese clients asking for 'cover' when commissioning a design. Did he mean 'shelter' as the main function? Certainly not: he was looking forward to be published on the cover of a magazine ...

Total social facts

The French Sociologist Emile Durkheim introduced the concept of 'social facts' in his Regles de la methode sociologique in 1895 and his colleague and follower Marcel Mauss developed it. Social facts are not only facts that take place inside society, but constitute a group of facts where The ways of acting, thinking and feeling appear to have the remarkable property of existing outside individual consciousness. Not only are these types of behaviour or thought external to the individual, but they are also imbued with a commanding and coercive power'.

Being 'external to the individual', social facts become total when they condense complex and manifold levels of relationships, just as large buildings such as skyscrapers do. Certain buildings, then, might be associated with the concept of the 'total social fact'. Of course, buildings are unquestionably social products, embodying the values of the societies that build them, but each one is also shaped by individual consciousness, or a series of individual consciousnesses. Rather than trivialise this notion by applying it to particular designs, my perception is that specific types, repetitive situations, groups of architectural products can be seen as total social facts.

In this respect, the skyscraper as a type (vertical cities), as opposed to a particular specimen, seems to be total social fact, defined by the developers' codes and ethos ('forms follows finance' as rightly said by skyscraper historian Carol Willis), by technical and legal rules, as well as by design decisions. In its relationship with the city, the skyscraper can also be seen at the intersection of the syntagmatic axis (city form) and with the paradigmatic axis (building concept and shape). The latter escapes to some extent the coercion of the social fact, but not the former. Skyscrapers happen where the networks of mass transit allow for them.

Marx's theory of value

Buildings are carriers of civic, cultural and religious values, so Marx's theory of value does not cover all aspects of value in architecture, but as a former Bolshevik (albeit a softened one), I find it intriguing. Marx contrasted the Gebrauchswert or use value of products to their Umtauschswert or exchange value, and this differentiation has been a most useful one in the understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism. In the case of the skyscraper, is the iconic value part of the use value of a building performing physical functions and also functioning as an urban marker? Or is it part of the exchange value? The example of buildings sold as commodities (Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center) and keeping their name (their brand) after a change of ownership indicates that function is not the only determinant.

Alois Riegl's values

In Der moderne Denkmalkultus [the Modern Cult of the Monument], published in 1903 when preservation policies were being established in the late Habsburg Empire, the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl assigns a wide range of meaning to the monuments, voluntary or unvoluntary (gewollt or ungewollt). Of course he mentions Gebrauchswert. But the theorist who invented the term of Kunstwollen [will to form] also posits Kunstwert [art value] as a fundamental aspect of the monument. Riegl differentiates the elementary Kunstwert, based on the search for the new, from the relative Kunstwert 'defined in tune with the modern Kunstwollen'.

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Riegl's definition of value is related to a broad concept of history and memory. He suggests the categories of Erinnerungswert, related particular memories; Alterswert comes from the historic resonance of the built fabric, and historischer Wert depends on the historical events that took place in the building. But value is not limited to the issues of historicity or preservation. Riegl acknowledges the Entwicklungswert, or cumulative value that old buildings keep; the Neuheitswert or novelty value and the Gegenwartswert, writing that 'most monuments answer to expectations of the senses or of the mind that new and modern creations could as well fulfil'.

Bataille's 'expense'

In their views of value, Marx and Riegl assume that products or monuments are governed by a principle of utility. This fundamental view can help to understand the process of valuation or devaluation in architecture. In The Accursed Share (1949), Georges Bataille interprets modern society as being under the pressure of production, and richness is for him associated with waste. He underlines the notion of gift, of waste without counterpart related with upper bourgeois consumption or combustion or riches, and parallels it with the destruction of wealth involved in wars. The extravagance of civic or private projects surrounding us could, without indulging in a populist attitude, also be related to this 'accursed share' of excessive expenses.

Nietzschean conclusion?

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most popular authors to contribute to the emergence of modernity, and avidly read by most architects in the first third of the twentieth century. Reading Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra in 1907, young Le Corbusier identified with the figure most hated by 'people of good', the one who 'blasts their tables of values, the breaker, the criminal', in other terms 'the creator'. Architecture should thus be understood not only as the making of values, but also as the destructor of values.

Yet, at the same time, and rather than looking at iconic building, architecture's products should also allow us, as Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, to 'wander in ourselves'. They should become 'constructions and promenades expressing, in their whole, how sublime meditation and remoteness from the world are'. I have the suspicion 'iconic' buildings are not exactly leaving space for this pursuit.

CHARLES JENCKS

Although no one asked for the genre, and it is not loved by all, the new iconic building will not go away. Four causes, both good and bad, run too deep: celebrity culture now dominates the arts; people value personal freedom and artistic expression more than collective, traditional symbols; religious and social beliefs have become weak so opening architecture to strong idiosyncratic expression--'anything can be an icon today, even a bicycle shed'--and clients, mayors and politicians of all persuasions are demanding the wow factor. Their public--when an iconic building occasionally rises to the challenge--even enjoys the new genre.

Furthermore, as long as we build expressions of faith--and even in the marketplace there is some faith--they will be shot down by others of counter-faith. Just as Roman coins and buildings were erased and transformed as Christian icons, so too our successors will have a job of re-writing history as they re-mint our images. But this recycling and reinterpretation of images runs the the risk of creating malapropisms, such as the Think Team's proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center. Their Twin Towers were lampooned as 'skeletons in the sky', precisely the wrong memories to evoke. No wonder many architects dislike the iconic building: who wants to be dismissed by a journalistic one-liner, or an errant metaphor? Architects might be on the verge of a new iconophobia. But as long as the Fashion-Celebrity Syndrome dominates global culture, the profession needs to take a more complex position than the familiar, easy critique that stems from a diatribe against the corruption of the present taste. This goes back to Vitruvius. He mounts his attack in a chapter on wall-decoration in his On Architecture, and from it later critiques derive. Vitruvius was concerned with illogical structure and the day's expressionism, such as stucco monsters, unnatural elements and chimera. He faults the way this style has undermined the good taste of the Greeks: 'On these lines the new fashions compel bad judges to condemn good craftsmanship for dullness'. He concludes on the corrupting influence, 'when people view these falsehoods, they approve rather than condemn'.

That Vitruvius' opinions were repeated for 2000 years is no reason to dismiss them. More compelling grounds for critiquing his critique lie in the failure of professional censorship to have any effect on society. This is especially true today in a global culture of competitive capitalism. Bad enough that such censorship fails to prepare architects mentally for the competitive stakes, but worst of all, it fails to train them how to create better iconic buildings. That's the real question, and one I seek to answer in The Iconic Building--the Power of Enigma. One way is to design multiple metaphors, enigmatic signs that pull in more than the one-liner; another is to tie these signs to function, tradition and context.

Graham Morrison's argument that 'landmark buildings [are] ruining our cities' is partly true, but, characteristically, that cliche is not very helpful. He points out that three iconic landmarks--the Sydney Opera, the Pompidou Centre and the new Scottish Parliament--initially met with disapproval, and then fails to deal with an important aspect of the initial revulsion. It is, as Will Alsop and Frank Gehry understand, that the iconic building must carry a negative charge that challenges contemporary taste--or else it will not become iconic, as the Eiffel Tower and many examples have shown over the last 150 years. Morrison continues 'there is little evidence to suggest that architecture in the form of a single gesture can really [boost a city's economy]. Without easy Jet, it is far from certain that the small economic gains in Bilbao would be measurable at all.' Market researchers, however, did find that the city had an extra 1.3 million visitors the first year it was finished, 1.1 million the second, and that 87 per cent were foreign to the area. They directly increased the tourist spending by over $400 million in two years, so in effect paying for four New Guggenheims! Many cities heard about these figures and fell over each other to grab a New Bilbao Effect.

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The unpleasant truth of the Fashion-Celebrity Syndrome is that it spurns deference. People do not honour the same gods, and very few go to church. Most people are suspicious of hierarchies. Values are put at the mercy of the marketplace and power. The confusion of public symbolism stems from the conflicts inherent in global culture and the uncertainty behind this symbolism is at the heart of the iconic controversy. If one could face the deeper issue of a contemporary iconography, then the problem of the iconic building would be solved, but there are very good historical reasons why architects, as do artists, shy away from this question. Architects are inheritors of a Modernist tradition that sublimates iconography to technique and abstraction, process and function, programme and ideology. They do not follow the older traditions and ask about the choice of subject matter, questions like 'what should a building mean?', 'in what style should it be?', 'what associations should it have, what iconography should it adopt?' These deeper existential questions, and freedoms, were subsumed within the dominant discourses of Modernism.

Architects like Rogers, Foster, Isozaki, Meier, Gehry, Eisenman, Koolhaas, Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Libeskind, and Calatrava dominate the global media because they produce amazing, sometimes outstanding and often interesting landmarks that defer not to the old gods but to themselves. However, after studying about 70 iconic buildings in some detail, and despite their heterodox imagery, I do see a new shared convention. It is the enigmatic sign, the common trace behind the many puzzling and emergent shapes. What these strange forms often share is a reference to nature, the patterns of the cosmos, the forces of material production both artificial and living. This may be only one set of signifiers among many that the iconic building underwrites, but it is typical of our time, as unmistakable a trace as the Christian cross was an icon of a former period. Not every architect will subscribe to either the green agenda or cosmogenesis, but if you scratch an iconic building hard enough it bleeds the enigmatic patterns underlying nature, and celebrates them.

Edited by Jeremy Melvin.

RELATED ARTICLE: ACCIDENTAL VALUE

Value, argued Richard Sennett, can accrue from relatively small investment and interventions if they are carefully targeted at particular social issues. In 1864, as part of his modernisation of Paris, Georges-Eugene Haussmann introduced the pissoir. The effect was an entire remaking of the nature of the street. Suddenly women did not have to see men urinating in public. That created a range of new possibilities for street life, including street cafes. For relatively little outlay and physically discreet insertions, this innovation hugely magnified value.

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A second more recent example of tiny investment generating huge benefit is an 'adopt a tree' policy in Chicago. It costs only $130 to plant a tree, but in this case a local person takes responsibility for 'ownership' of each tree. The consequence of this is to change perceptions of the relationship between those individuals, their physical environment and the wider community, with a massive effect on the crime rate and other indicators of social failure.

Third, the 734 playgrounds which Aldo van Eyck introduced into Amsterdam, often with such simple and cheap devices as paint, sand and low cost furniture, inculcated children with what Henri Lefebvre called a 'right to the city'. Again that policy created enormous social value for very modest economic investment. Why are so many architects oblivious to such possibilities? Three points help explain. Architects tend to think on a grand scale and in broad brush terms. But people don't inhabit the 'whole design', they perceive fragments of a totality. Second, people inhabit spaces theatrically, experiencing the city as a stage set. They use their environment as a means to display themselves to each other. Finally, controlling the environment occurs through minutiae. The challenge is to avoid hubris in design, and to find ways of linking the 'accidental' value such as these examples show, to larger social consequences.