Empty vessels: eye-con architecture

Is your town a bit frayed? No problem: just commission a piece of "iconic" architecture. Is your city perceived as not quite remarkable enough? Ditto. Lord Foster's Peace Pyramid in Kazakhstan is described as "iconic". So, too, is the forthcoming building at Tate Modern by Herzog and de Meuron; not to mention the China Central Television building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, and now approaching completion in Beijing. Three very different architects, three very different architectural icons – but iconic of what? Iconic of the commercial stampede to produce cheap thrills. Too much of the apparent concern about architecture actually reveals a profound lack of interest in any discussion that might suggest that architecture, and our relationship with it, is not only complex but is in a crucially debatable condition.

Architecture in Britain is becoming a culturally reductive retrovirus. If you imagine that you're responding viscerally, intelligently or creatively to buildings and the places they affect, you must face the possibility that your perceptual and critical systems have been burnt out by voracious consumption of architecture. And the most obvious evidence of this is the sugar-rush appetite for architectural icons.

The architectural historian Charles Jencks coined the term eye-con in relation to this proliferation of architecture pumped up to bursting by hype – a sub-species of the hype that first inflated, and then destroyed or maimed several of the world's most iconic financial institutions. Icons are images or likenesses that represent something. Most of today's so-called architectural icons represent only the iconic intentions of their designers, or commissioners. These buildings are iconic, but not actually icons in any potent sense. It doesn't fully exist, or engage. This complexity is not merely an academic luxury; nor is it confined to the Richter-Hampstead-Shires scale of "good value" conversational grist among the chattering classes. Architecture, from Hawksmoor to FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste, an architecture practice), exists in an age where Googlism has replaced Fordism as the paradigm of infinite growth and consumption.

Architecture blurs vaguely and irrelevantly past the window of the 7.40 clattering through East Croydon or Penge or Watford, jumbled with passing advertising hoardings and I'm-on-the-train cellphone monologues. Architecture hovers in the margins of distant wars, cloned celebrity revelations, and the latest mistaken cure for cancer. In its more grandiosely hubristic manifestations, iconic architecture seems indistinguishable from studio-lit tubes of because-you're-worth-it face cream: today's architectural icons are usually bizarre curios, or a manifestation of penile dementia.

Iconic architecture is conceived and marketed as predigested, faintly hallucinatory new realities. Somebody else, somebody designing or commissioning buildings who has little or no interest in the sensual, emotional, physical and philosophical braids of place and ordinary daily life, is one profitable step ahead, setting architectural and urban agendas that turn out to be hollow. When confronted with a building, or group of buildings and spaces, we should occasionally feel like strangers in a strange place – a place that is worth considering because it marks a moment, an engagement of various presences: topography, architectural physique, a beating heart, an eye that momentarily notices more than it usually does, a reimagining.

If we didn't from time to time feel this connection with buildings and places, then we're mere sat-nav existentialists. The surfeit of iconic buildings recalls Daniel Libeskind's fascination with the "presence of absence" in architecture. Supposedly iconic buildings usually suggest the opposite: the absence of presence. And if buildings seem absent, or in some way vacuous, perhaps we're agreeing to be absent and vacuous, too.

Architecture is popularly seen as a "designer" issue – building as box-fresh singularity, critically pre-neutered, strobed with cutaway shots, one-liners, rabidly sincere gazes, and pointlessly jerky hand movements. It's easy to forget that architecture – whether chalet-bung or art gallery – should confirm, ramify and communicate human scale, measurement, materials and places. It should be a prism through which flow spectrums of time and transformation.

You don't have to sit in St Paul's to experience this: it'll hit you, hard, in the tiny mausoleum at Soane's Dulwich Gallery, or in the angular volumes of Lynch Architects' Marsh View cottage in Norfolk. Iconic architecture, the village idiot of the piece, is being absorbed into a sea of ironic thought, manner and deed. "Our wretched architectural icons," to only slightly misquote Albert Camus, "have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the colour of printer's ink."

Iconic architecture now has more to do with Big Brother than with any thoughtful concentrations of rich and variable cultural presence. If we become utterly supplicant to the iconic and architectural bling, then we risk becoming desensitised to less obviously dramatic, but potentially more engaging, humane, and affecting buildings and places. Most architectural icons smooth over contradiction and difference. Are we disdained by urban masterplanners, or developers and their value-adding "name" architects, who are so often replaced by cost-cutting jobsworth designers after planning permission has been gained? What is the architectural and urban planning difference between new and supposedly iconic high-rise clusters in Dubai, Shanghai and Moscow?

The contemporary expression of iconic architecture is rooted in at least two things: impossibility, and arrogance. In the 18th century, Etienne-Louis Boullée's stunning architectural proposals, featuring utterly colossal pyramids and spheres, accentuated the idea of architecture as singular icon. Mies van der Rohe, a seminal figure in Modernism, declared in the 1920s that "building art is the spatially apprehended will of the epoch... the spatial implementation of intellectual decisions."

Today, iconic architecture is essentially the spatial implementation of corporate decisions. Signature architecture has become the boardroom's, and the city authority's, bitch. The phrase "architectural icon" belongs in a vitrine. It's the cultural equivalent of Damien Hirst's shark in a tank: a dead curiosity. Are Koolhaas and Herzog simply producing empty icons – hermetic architectural scripts in glass, steel and stone, rather than buildings that want to express more than design virtuosity? That want, in effect, to have relationships with people, streets and places. The proliferation of supposedly iconic architecture has played a central role in making us strangers in an increasingly strange place.

Perhaps we are losing our awareness of architecture as a resonant cultural force – that vital, earthy, lively agent of activity. Perhaps we must make do with the following, from the highly thought of architect Glen Howells: in describing his recently completed building at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, he said: "We quite like that it's a fuck-off building." Howells' remark represents the tip of a funereal iceberg that is burying the idea of architectural presence, and debate, in a blogtastic knowingness whose roots lie in the stage-managed popularisation of architectural icons. The pursuit and worship of architectural icons is toxic proof that we are maxing out on the minimum thing.