Architectural Representation In Architecture

Architectural representation has always been one of the important aspects of architecture. There is no doubt that architecture is a representation of a certain idea, in a matter of fact, according to Plato, the whole world is. Whether this representation is intended or no, idea, message or just pure symbolic image comes out of whatever we call architecture. Representations are the most obvious in iconic buildings, which have significantly marked architectural practice in the last 10 years. When communication through media and images became dominant, architecture has found its way of operating in this new world of images through iconic architecture. The aim of this paper is to analyze modern iconic buildings and their strong connection with

The image has supplanted reality, inducing what Baudrillard has termed a condition of hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs. [1] Guy Debord, in his book “The society of the spectacle”, argued that the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence. As he declared “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. [4] Debord also wrote about the consumption of images. This process has started with television and has increased with the new media and internet

Kevin Lynch identified five elements crucial for building the mental image of a city, and those are: path, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks.[9] As he says, clear mental map of the environment is needed to counter the always looming fear of disorientation and it gives people an important sense of emotional security.[9] Iconic buildings are actually landmarks but not just city landmarks but the ones of a world. They help us create our own “imago mundi” needed for overal orientation and self-positioning ina a global world. As Leslie Sklair concludes architectural icons can have local, national or global significance and recognition, or any mixture of these three. What turns local and national icons into global icons is a mixture of publicity and the peculiar symbolism/aesthetics of iconicity. For him iconicity is simply a matter of publicity, self-promotion by the client or the developer together with the architect and those who produce the