topos 133 | urban icons

Urban icons shape how cities are seen, remembered, and sold informing skylines, postcards, and collective imagination. They promise identity, orientation, and pride, yet their meanings are rarely innocent. This issue of topos neither celebrates icons as unquestioned achievements nor dismisses them as empty spectacle. Instead, it examines their power. For architects, planners, and urbanists, icons are more than landmarks. They influence investment, tourism, and policy, while often obscuring the social, political, and ecological costs behind their images. Who defines what becomes an icon? What narratives are amplified – and which are erased? Urban Icons explores the double life of symbolic places, from monumental architecture to subtle landscapes that invite memory, play, or quiet reflection. Through global case studies, the issue reveals how icons inspire, standardise, distract, and endure. It asks not what icons do for cities, but what they reveal about the values, contradictions, and futures of urban society.

Topics

• ROM MONUMENTS TO MOMENTS
• THE MIROIR D’EAU IN BORDEAUX
• HAFENCITY HAMBURG
• ROBERTO BURLE MARX AND THE COPACABANA
• CHEONGGYECHEON
• THE PROMENADE DU PAILLON
• "ICONIC STATUSEMERGES OVER TIME"
• THE NARVA HÖFE BY GUSTAV LANGE
• THE GHENT MARKET HALL
• HE RAVINES OF TORONTO
• TEMPELHOFER FELD AS BERLIN’S LIVING STAGE
• CATHERINE MOSBACH’S LOUVRE LENS
• ”I’D RATHER TURN TOTHE LESS PRAISED PLACES”
• TAPIOLA
• THE CENTRO CULTURAL SÃO PAULO
• PARC DE LA VILLETTE
• “ICONS OFFER THE POSSIBILITY TOIDENTIFY WITH THE CITY THROUGH ABUILT FORM“
• MUNICH’S OLYMPIC PARK
• THE ENDURING POWER OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL