doug – your first instinct was right – it is ugly. But I disagree with you on the appearance of the inside – to me it does look like a set from the Flintstones.

julian – a agree with you – where is the inspiration – it fails to lift the spirit and excite.

SPA, WAM, Lloyd Morrison, Kerry – time to flush these turds into Cook Strait and get serious. Do something serious, do something uplifting, do something beautiful.

“We’re doing a new terminal at the airport.”

“Wow, that’s exciting, just be careful not to do another carbuncle…”

“Car bunker? No, they already did one on the other side. I’m thinking something iconic, something Wellington….”

“Perhaps it should be something to do with flight, reflecting its mystery and beauty – perhaps something mythical, like a phoenix…”

“Phoenix? Yeah, they’re a great team, especially Beckham….”

“Actually not a phoenix – flames, fire, bad connotations. What about rocks, they’re awesome, huge and majestic….”

“Rocks? Huge rocks, great. Got to go.”

“Don’t forget you’re taking the kids trick or treating tonight, honey….”

“OK, be thinking of you, pumpkin….”

The fly through has also had some branding applied. Its no longer “the rock”, its “our rock”

Stirling and Great Pumpkin, some great commentary.

Kerryn, there definitely is a distinction to be made between “iconic” as a landmark/postcard/remarkable building, and “iconic” in the semiotic/metaphorical/mimetic sense. But as shown here, using the latter is seen as an easy way to producing the former.

Well, I went out of my way to see Saarinen’s old TWA terminal at JFK, and I’m glad I had the chance to have a few cocktails in the LAX Theme Building. I doubt whether this will ever been seen as in the same league, and at least they have some glamour and the imagery of the TWA terminal had a relationship to flight (perhaps a little too literally for some), but there’s certainly an argument for making the building that will be many people’s first experience of Wellington much more exciting than the usual bland terminal.

“For my part I want iconic objects to occupy a more lofty position, but I guess if shopping/money/commerce etc etc is a new religion then your description is quite appropriate for our age!”

It’s not just our age: Harrod’s, the Empire State Building and any number of bourses around the world have always been celebrations of commerce. Though I think that you’re not so much talking about iconic commercial buildings as the use of iconic buildings (of whatever purpose) to generate tourist revenue. If you think that increasing tourist numbers is a good idea (and I do, since it helps support a thriving hospitality sector and gives me more choice, as well as at least marginally making us more cosmopolitan), then if having an interesting and attractive built environment will attract more visitors, I say go for it.

I’m still not convinced that this terminal will do any of that, but I’m going to withhold judgement until I see some better renders. The article in today’s Dom says that the colour will be more natural, and that “While the images showed two “rocks”, the design in fact hosts three, with a smaller one tucked behind the larger ones.” So they could have just picked a very unflattering angle, though one would have thought they’d go out of their way to find the best shots.

“Wouldn’t it be better to let a building develop a position in the cultural landscape over time and have the potential to cultivate iconic status more organically?”

With a few exceptions, usually of vernacular buildings that are rare survivors of their type, I doubt there are many iconic buildings that weren’t originally intended to be attention-catching. I somehow doubt that the builders of Chartres Cathedral or the Great Pyramids ever intended them to blend in.

Hordes of people getting off their planes taking photos and then hopping right back on their planes to head to another iconic building / landmark….

Part of the problem is that we (the public) don’t have enough information to judge the building qua building: the flyby and two images only show it from the inside and from the runway side. What does it look like from the road, or from the air? The relationship between the two “rocks” might look considerably different from another angle. Also, the rendering doesn’t show the cladding vary well, if it’s going to be copper. For the first week, it will indeed be bright orange, but shiny rather than the flat finish show; thereafter it will be a deeper, mellower bronze/brown, and in a few years it might take on greeny-blue patches of verdigris, and any “pumpkin patch” metaphors will be long gone.

It’s appropriate to critique the discussion, especially when the promoters are going out of their way to call it iconic and dub it “the rock”. Foster never called 60 St mary Axe “The Gherkin”, and W&M certainly never thought of “The Cake Tin”, but when the clients and designers of a building give it a descriptive name, the processes of design and marketing become intertwined and it’s valid to investigate that state.

“I can’t help but feel the bog-standard use of ‘iconic’ is a stand-in for marketability, publicity, selling the object to the world to put the place in which the object/building stands “on the map” (to use Kerry P’s phrase). If one wants to be really reductive, it all boils to down to attracting visitors and their dollars.”

All true, but what’s wrong with that? It’s a commercial piece of tourism/business infrastructure, not a government building or community centre, so attracting visitors and their dollars is part of its job. I guess I always go back to the semiotic meaning of “iconic”: a visual image that represents and stands for something, so when applied to a building it’s one where its image automatically calls to mind its host city. The Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, Golden Gate Bridge etc all do that for their respective cities, and the London Eye & Gherkin have perhaps taken over from Tower Bridge, Nelson’s Column etc as symbols of London. Wellington makes do with the Beehive, Majestic Centre, bits of public art in Civic Square and perhaps the view up to St Gerards. Oh, and the Bucket Fountain, of course. So if the rocky pumpkins are aiming for “iconic”, they’ll have to be so memorable that they end up on postcards, T-shirts, album covers, TV stories about Wellington and so forth. It remains to be seen whether the best way to do that is via late-90s style blobitecture.