Building an Icon: Architecture from Project to Product

Presenting the proceedings of the session “Building an Icon: Architecture from Project to Product”, organized for the 35th CIHA International Congress and entirely devoted to architecture, this article contributes to the Congress’s overarching theme—exploring the dynamics of transformation in artistic production—by focusing on the intrinsic relationship between the two poles of an architectural object’s life cycle: the material and procedural mechanisms of its making, and its unpredictable afterlife in the domain of images. Ultimately, it proposes non-teleological, post-formalist approaches to architectural history as a means of understanding the metamorphic stages of architecture’s coming-into-being, particularly when these transcend chronological or geographical boundaries.