Calatrava in Athens: The architect as financier and the iconic city

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