A new duty and potential arises for architecture from this communication. Important buildings have matched this responsibility continuously but the rising importance of icons as condensational points and community-building objects extend the iconographic demands.
 
Especially public buildings today have to represent more than their function; they have to accommodate heterogeneous user-profiles. But individual preferences are not able to generate the building. To serve collective desires, buildings have to turn into icons and therefore stand for the heterogeneous, the bigger idea they have to embody.
 
To develop such an icon, architecture is challenged in it’s core competence, providing space and form. It is crucial that this architecture is connected to the specific communication system. The first and most important criteria for an icon is the ”wow”-effect, the first moment when one can only say ”wow”. Such a building is ”cool” or ”fantastic”, triggering memories and associations which cannot be contained in a single phrase. The architecture of icons has to be familiar

and foreign at the same time, providing a very intense experience and communicate what they stand for in an impressive way.
The second criteria enables the adaptation of the building, the use as an icon. The building is a communication offer and the actual spatial praxis turns it into an icon. A building becomes a magnet of meaning and provides a node to a bigger world, in which it is placed.¹ 

For the IUAV, the architectural school in Venice, we decided to propose an architectural icon. As architectural school and representative public building the task was to integrate the needs of students, teachers and the visitors/tourists. Based on the existing block perimeters we have developed a building with two separate volumes, generating intense outdoor spaces around them. These outdoor spaces provide a unique spatial experience, the actual ”wow” effect. The building volume relates to the existing; the outdoor spaces are exceptional and combine something familiar and foreign. Programmed with public functions these outdoor spaces enable individual spatial practices, the voids become a generative and representative space. 

The study for the Schlossplatz Berlin deals with the place which is most extremely contaminated by ideological positions. At a time (1998) when nothing was decided yet, it was predictable that the development would end in the rebuilding of the Prussian Castle and the demolishing of the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), the GDR building for the parliament and public use.

Architecture as a Product 2
designstudio at the UdK    1999

1  Aaron Betsky, The Enigma of the Thig Cho – Icons as Magnets of Meaning, Chronicle Books 1997