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This article explores the intersection between Frank Gehry's iconic Hotel Marqués de Riscal (MdR) and the Marques de Riscal winery, investigating their causal relationship with the surge in wine tourism. Using Google Trends data and empirical research, it establishes the influential role of the MdR Hotel in driving positive impacts on the winery and the local economy. Findings highlight: (1) the hotel's symbolic signaling elevates the winery's reputation globally, (2) repositioning efforts lead to increased economic returns and profitability, and (3) the transformational MdR Hotel attracts visitors, generating new economic activity and job opportunities in the Rioja region. Insights into the transformative effects of the iconic MdR Hotel on the winery and the local economy are provided.

Though opera is not a widely popular art form and though the construction of an opera house has few economic incentives the typology is far from dying. The opera house has somehow found its raison d’etre in other ways, mostly through its role as a symbol for a city or the state. To understand the role that the opera house plays in a city this thesis explores the typology and how architecture in the shape of opera houses becomes an expression of power and ideology. This exploration has its base in the debate about building a new opera in Stockholm and aims to better the understanding of what this house could be and bring to the city. In my typological research I focused especially on opera houses and similar buildings constructed with democratic ideas in mind and with the ambition to lower thresholds to make the opera house a more public affair. The connection to the city and its people became central in the understanding of the opera as an open public space and is the focus point of the thesis design part. Avoiding the contemporary trend of creating formalistic buildings meant to be viewed through digital imagery how could the opera house be used to better a place in the city in need of improvement while also making the art form the house encapsules more accessible? Identifying important aspects of earlier attempts with similar ambitions I explore what a new opera in Stockholm could look like through a suggested design for an opera house in Fatbursparken.

Digital Monuments radically explodes "iconic architecture" of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet―yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings. Like holograms, these "digital monuments," which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal―invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality, and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital dream on the ground conceals from the urban spectator the social reality of the buildings and the rigidity of their ideology. In 18 micro-essays, Digital Monuments exposes the stereotypes of iconic architecture while depicting the savagery of the industry, from the Greek and Spanish Crises triggered by financialised iconic development to mass labour-deaths on construction sites in the UAE.

We live in a world built on consumerist values and a spatial rationale of capital accumulation. This modern society has led to architecture thriving through super consumption and super production ultimately leading to the generic. Cities and spaces that were usually rich in variation and texture have now become an architectural melting pot. Architecture has become smooth, simplified and reduced to one, and the touchable city has dissipated. Instead, we are surrounded by an army of high glass robots invading our spaces, obstructing our cities and killing off public space. As spectacular as they are, these structures now function as the dynamic urban milieu favoring the market demands over human needs. The landscapes continuously change at an incredible pace based on new trends, with no time to understand how it really affects the city and its people, and instead it has become a spectacle. A city that peaks through its capitalist attraction is Dubai. The city has been able to bloom from the arid desert and place the whole region on the map, alluring people from all over the world. With its time scale on steroids, the city is designing for international communities that have yet to be assembled, and doing so through hyper bombastic urban ornaments. Relatively new cities like Dubai are met with forces of urbanization which transform them into showcases for architectural pageants, in hopes to be accepted on a global scale. However through this process architecture becomes a prop and the city acts as a stage. We may ask ourselves, what is left when the show is over? These fast paced forces of globalization and urbanization are forming cities and societies that are becoming increasingly fragmented and alienated. This thesis is an exploration into the future of these cities’ physical spaces through a discussion on various themes to understand how we have landed in a homogenous cultural and architectural landscape powered through commerce and a global identity.

(for book) The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design presents an in-depth exploration of criticism and criticality in theory and practice across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design. Professional criticism is a vital part of understanding the cultural significance of designed objects and environments that we engage with on a daily basis, yet there is evidence to show that this practice is changing. This edited volume investigates how practitioners, researchers, educators, and professionals engage with, think about, and value the practice of critique. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries, including the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark this companion provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances. Illustrated with over 60 black and white images and structured into five sections, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design is a comprehensive volume for researchers, educators, and students exploring the changing role of criticism through interdisciplinary perspectives.

V posledních letech směřuje architektonický proces navrhování rozličnějšími cestami, něž tomu bylo doposud. Jeho cíl je ale vždy stejný. S nástupem moderních technologií také vznikají nové formy a architektonické prvky. Jak můžeme definovat skutečnosti, které vstupují do navrhování a vytvářejí hranici mezi kvalitní architekturou a stavěním? Jaké znaky by mohly vymezit současné období?, In the recent years, the process of architectural design has been evolving in a number of different ways, as it has always been the case. The goal, however, remains the same - to design a quality architecture. New forms and architectural elements have also emerged with the advent of modern technologies. What are the defined facts that enter into design and reveal the boundary between high-quality architecture and mere „building“? What signs could define the current period?

The script for global iconic architectural developments is by now as hackneyed as it is untrue: an insolvent government promises the villagers a world class (global) city through a spectacular mega-project that will “world” (urbanise) the town and raise the public’s status to cosmopolitan (urban and global) (Goldman, 2015). Spain’s failed attempt to save its post-industrial town Bilbao through the Abandodoibarra development—that staged Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum, the first iconic building, along the Nervión River in 1997—is an object-lesson in Europe today (Plöger, 2008). To clarify, the iconic does not refer to a disciplinary canon of historical monuments from the past, but to a new capitalist paradigm since the end of the 1990s, where cities have undertaken publicly-funded debt-fueled megaprojects of a spectacular financial, technological, and formal scale heretofore unseen, which has fundamentally transformed the operation of public space and our relationship with the city. Historically, public space in the west has always been fabricated around a central monument which visualised the psychic, political and social wishes of the city. Today, iconic architecture is the dominant mode of contemporary public life, but the wishes of the European city and role of public space are manifestly financial—based on financial emergencies—even if the term ‘financial’ is screened out by the mesmeric distraction of such spectral, prodigal buildings—as I have written about previously (Brott, 2012, 2017)—under the ideology of what I call the iconic architecture industry. The iconic architecture industry in Europe can be defined as a complex machine for the realisation of iconic projects enabled by three key agents: the Eurozone government or city, the creditors and global investment banks, and importantly the industrialists: the architects, technicians, construction, and development firms. While iconic architecture parades as visual stunt—an “avant garde” project of the digita

V posledních letech směřuje architektonický proces navrhování rozličnějšími cestami, něž tomu bylo doposud. Jeho cíl je ale vždy stejný. S nástupem moderních technologií také vznikají nové formy a architektonické prvky. Jak můžeme definovat skutečnosti, které vstupují do navrhování a vytvářejí hranici mezi kvalitní architekturou a stavěním? Jaké znaky by mohly vymezit současné období?, In the recent years, the process of architectural design has been evolving in a number of different ways, as it has always been the case. The goal, however, remains the same - to design a quality architecture. New forms and architectural elements have also emerged with the advent of modern technologies. What are the defined facts that enter into design and reveal the boundary between high-quality architecture and mere „building“? What signs could define the current period?

V posledních letech směřuje architektonický proces navrhování rozličnějšími cestami, něž tomu bylo doposud. Jeho cíl je ale vždy stejný. S nástupem moderních technologií také vznikají nové formy a architektonické prvky. Jak můžeme definovat skutečnosti, které vstupují do navrhování a vytvářejí hranici mezi kvalitní architekturou a stavěním? Jaké znaky by mohly vymezit současné období?, In the recent years, the process of architectural design has been evolving in a number of different ways, as it has always been the case. The goal, however, remains the same - to design a quality architecture. New forms and architectural elements have also emerged with the advent of modern technologies. What are the defined facts that enter into design and reveal the boundary between high-quality architecture and mere „building“? What signs could define the current period?

V posledních letech směřuje architektonický proces navrhování rozličnějšími cestami, něž tomu bylo doposud. Jeho cíl je ale vždy stejný. S nástupem moderních technologií také vznikají nové formy a architektonické prvky. Jak můžeme definovat skutečnosti, které vstupují do navrhování a vytvářejí hranici mezi kvalitní architekturou a stavěním? Jaké znaky by mohly vymezit současné období?, In the recent years, the process of architectural design has been evolving in a number of different ways, as it has always been the case. The goal, however, remains the same - to design a quality architecture. New forms and architectural elements have also emerged with the advent of modern technologies. What are the defined facts that enter into design and reveal the boundary between high-quality architecture and mere „building“? What signs could define the current period?

The cliché about modern architecture being the fairy-tale fulfillment of every fantasy ceases to be a cliché only when it is accompanied by the fairy tale’s moral: that the fulfillment of the wishes rarely engenders goodness in the one doing the wishing (Adorno). Wishing for the right things in architecture and the city is the most difficult art of all: since the grim childhood-tales of the twentieth century we have been weaned from dreams and utopias, the stuff of modernism’s bad conscience. For Adorno writing in 1953, Hollywood cinema was a medium of “regression” based on infantile wish fulfillment manufactured by the industrial repetition (mimesis) of the filmic image that he called a modern “hieroglyphics,” like the archaic language of pictures in Ancient Egypt which guaranteed immortality after death in Egyptian burial rites. Arguably, today the iconic architecture industry is the executor of archaic images of modernity linked to rituals of death, promises of omnipotence and immortality. As I will argue in this symposium, such buildings are not a reflection of external ‘reality,’ but regression to an internal architectural polemic that secretly carries out the rituals of modernism’s death and seeks to make good on the liabilities of architectural history.

Analysis of the Elbphilharmonie project in Hamburg, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, which is currently under construction. My re-design addresses the project's iconic status and cost escalations, and its significance to the people of Hamburg, in an attempt to turn a failed Global Icon into a Local Icon., Follow The Money, Design As Politics, Architecture and The Built Environment

The study explores how creation of iconic architecture can be intentionally facilitated using the toolbox inherent in the competition system. The study defines iconicity as a status a building may gain through intentional process of iconification with participation of the client providing prerequisites, the architect shaping iconic features, the users assigning symbolic values and driving recognition and finally the public acknowledging and celebrating the icon. It is argued that iconicity is never absolute, its span being limited by temporal and social aspects that may expand or contract the span of iconicity, confirming or revoking a building’s status as architectural icon. When employed in the process, competitions provide structure and tools for the first half of iconification work, thus laying the foundation for iconicity. Proficient management of these tools is fundamental for successful iconification. The study contemplates meaning and role of iconic architecture as an inspiring cultural and temporal landmark of the future as it is envisioned today. Attempts are made to construct a framework for further study of iconicity for theorists and provide an iconification toolbox for practitioners. This paper is based on inductive modeling of iconification process based on a case study of Uppsala Concert and Congress Hall (Sweden). Cross---disciplinary theoretical considerations draw on writings of Charles Jencks, Hélène Lipstadt, Magnus Rönn, Pierre Bourdieu, Emile Durkheim and other authors.

Algunos han anunciado, optimistamente temprano, el colapso de la denominada “starchitecture”, la arquitectura global contemporánea que domina los mercados de la mano de una élite de arquitectos de la ciudad global, ahora distribuidores y suministradores de iconografías urbanas que van definiendo a su vez una imagen global: la cara visible del planeta. Decimos optimista, porque no estaría mal presenciar el fin de un entramado que beneficia sólo a los miembros de un selecto club de arquitectos globales, políticos y poderosos. Y temprano, porque parece que a pesar del simbólico incendio del edificio TVCC en Pekín el pasado febrero de 2009 y los estragos causados por la crisis mundial, la arquitectura global y sus huecos productos continúan triunfando.