Architectural icon

The Chicago physician Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1945 to design a weekend house in which she could retreat for relaxation, was not impressed by the purism of her Farnsworth House, which cost her a lot of money, and expressed herself to the architect as follows: "I wanted something "meaningful," and all I got was this smooth, superficial sophistry" (in German: Ich wollte etwas „Bedeutungsvolles“ haben, und alles was ich bekam, war diese glatte, oberflächliche Sophisterei.

People LeBlanc writes about: "The architectural tourist is a courageous man who easily plans a whole journey to see a certain building; who looks for half a day to find it; who lingers for hours at the threshold, hoping to enter.

Doch seine Hartnäckigkeit lohnt sich, denn um ein Gebäude voll und ganz zu verstehen, muss man es selbst sehen".

Well-known buildings ensure that individual locations are immediately recognizable: The Eiffel Tower stands for Paris and the Parthenon for Athens.

(in German: Zugleich droht die wachsende Inflation auf dem Catwalk der Architekturbilder zur allgemeinen Verwirrung beizutragen.

As icons of a place or a time, today one rather erects buildings like the opera house in Sydney or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.