New York’s Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, London’s Big Ben – or, rather, the imposing tower that contains that mighty bell – iconic buildings have been an important part of our cityscape ever since the Egyptians built their pyramids.

Unfortunately, save for the odd example like the wonderful Sydney Opera House, the genre went into a long hibernation during the utility years that followed World War Two, during which capitalism merely meant making money.

It was a long lasting era in which, in the quest for an ever more healthy bottom line, function was deemed far more important than form and figures on a balance sheet impressed people more than any status symbol head office. And the trend ran right down the ladder. Palatial banking halls became bars, churches were converted into nightclubs and plastic rubber plants replaced the real thing in the world’s foyers.

Image is, though, highly important in today’s media dominated world and public authorities and big corporations alike are once again understanding the simple fact that people like to be impressed.

Without Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, where would Bilbao be today? Likely a sleepy, business depressed provincial town instead of one of Europe’s most popular short-break destinations and a thriving business centre too.

As it is, within a year of its opening, the Guggenheim had attracted an additional 1.3 million visitors to the city – nearly 90 percent of them from outside the Basque region. The accompanying tourism spend increase was a massive $400m – enough to finance another four Guggenheims if the city were to need them!

Of course, that pace could not be sustained and visitor numbers peaked – but Bilbao and the Guggenheim are inseparably synonymous and a true icon has been born.

As in so many things today, it’s the financial sector that has driven the move back to a corporate passion for iconic buildings. It was no surprise when, in a bid to further establish itself as a major international publication, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper used a montage of familiar landmark buildings from around the world in its ad campaign.

Go to the website, click on any one of those buildings and you will be taken straight to the latest news from the relevant financial centre.

No major city’s skyline has changed more in recent years than that of London, symbolising its seemingly successful bid to supplant New York as the world’s greatest financial sector.

The massive new office blocks that have soared skywards around Canary Wharf might be bland, uninspiring boxes but who can argue that the Gherkin and the currently under-construction Shard are not bold, imaginative buildings that capture the spirit of the twenty-first century?

And such buildings can do their job well, besides looking great. Take Berlin’s Imposing new Hauptbahnhof main railway station, for example – a hugely important transport crossroads that has risen phoenix-like from one of the last patches of rubble remaining from World War Two.

More than 1,100 international, long-distance, regional and local rapid-transit trains call each day at 14 platforms, set on two levels. It’s monumental, huge – yet somehow retains a human dimension that makes it a pleasant place to be, with its shops, bars, cafés and other conveniences. Here form and function for once meet in total harmony. There’s a great sense of occasion to arriving and leaving ­– it puts the romance back into rail travel.

Faded glories can blossom again given a similarly imaginative approach, as has happened at another railway station – historic London St. Pancras, which has been brought back to life as London’s new Eurostar terminus. St. Pancras has long been an icon in its own right, a Victorian marvel that approached dereliction in the ‘Sixties, was saved by the efforts of Sir John Betjeman from being torn down in a major act of corporate vandalism. Now, after a massive refurbishment, this cavernous neo-Gothic building has come back to life and features among other things a magnificent Champagne bar, which within weeks of opening became an icon in itself.

A recent New York exhibition titled ‘On Site: New Architecture in Spain’ showcased just how the momentum generated by the Barcelona Olympics in 1991 has been maintained. It shone a spotlight on 53 major Iberian projects of the past decade that have been finished or are nearing completion.

One of the most wildly inventive projects presented in this fascinating showing, a building worthy of the exuberant spirit of Antoni Gaudi himself, is the Hotel Habitat, designed by a team led by Enric Ruiz-Geli. The stunning façade features a skeleton of 5,000 LED-photovolatic bybrid cells, each embedded with its own clock that tracks sunrises and sunsets. Each cell lights up at night, its colour changing – from red for low to white for massive – to reveal how much energy has been stored up from the sunshine of the day.

But perhaps the most striking example of Spain’s current love affair with the iconic is the newly completed 20-storey glass tower, also in Barcelona, which was designed by Benedetta Tagliabue and the late Enric Miralles as national headquarters for the Gas Natural corporation.

It’s a building which looks totally different depending on whether it is viewed from the city, the coastal ring road or the sea. The most striking feature is a spectacular horizontal jut that appears as if some giant has reached down and bent the building into its unusual shape.

Ecological concerns feature highly in modern architectural design and this remarkable building is clad with 18,000 square metres of solar-clear control glass, supplemented by a low-emission top layer to provide outstanding insulation.

The building, opened with a massive public party in the presence of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, is set imposingly in a brand new square – the Plaza del Gas – right on the site where Spain’s first gasworks was built 150 years ago.

Government needs icons too and while the original EU buildings in Brussels tended to be strictly functional, those which have arisen to house European Parliament sessions in the French city of Strasbourg merit the ‘iconic’ tag.

Set in the sprawling Quartier Européen, which also houses the seven main buildings of the Council of Europe and the seat of the International Institute of Human Rights, the four buildings used by the parliament are reflected in the waters of the Canal du Rhin et Marne.

With its 220,000 sq m of working space and distinctive 60m tower, the Louise Weiss building is a true landmark. Pointing East, the deliberately unfinished tower symbolises the still unfinished task of uniting all Europe’s countries.

A covered footbridge over the River Ill links this imposing edifice with the buildings of the Winston Churchill and Salvador de Madariaga complex, a curvaceous and unashamedly modern 58,400 sq m group of buildings built at a cost of some €81m.

Completed in 1995, the complex – as some might say befits a European institution – has not been without its controversies. There was a massive row over alleged overpayments of rent which eventually led, in 2006, to the EU buying the freehold. Then the presence of asbestos and of legionnaire’s disease led to health concerns.

New builds and controversy often seem to march hand in hand. They are either too conservative and get slammed as being bland, or the conventionalist Prince Charles weighs in and tags them as modern ‘carbuncles’. However, there has been widespread approval of Sir Norman Foster’s City of London building at 30 St. Mary Axe, constructed originally for Swiss Re and now fondly known to one and all as ‘The Gherkin’. It is a landmark Londoners and visitors too have quickly come to regard with affection, placing it alongside such well established icons as Tower Bridge, St. Paul’s, and the Houses of Parliament.

Completed by the Swedish company Skanska in 2004, this 180-metre (590-ft) tall wonder – the second tallest building in the City and sixth-tallest in London as a whole – soars skywards from the site of the old Baltic Exchange building that was damaged beyond repair in 1992 during the IRA bombing campaign.

Under the insistence of the Corporation of London and English Heritage, the original plan had been to reconstruct the old building but the cost was prohibitive and Baltic Exchange sold the land to Trafalgar House, who brought Sir Norman Foster and his then partner Ken Shuttleworth on board, with a brief to produce something beyond the norm. A plan for a 305m (1,000ft) tower was refused planning consent but few would argue that the resultant lower tower is anything but impressive.

Still, Renzo Piano’s London Bridge Shard project is even more spectacular. Replacing a totally unimaginative 24-storey concrete slab from the ‘Seventies, this South Bank landmark-to-be gained full planning permission for 72 storeys and a height of 310-metres (1,016-ft), making it Europe’s tallest building and the first to surpass the 300-metres (984-ft) of the Eiffel Tower.

According to Piano, the design was inspired by the shape of a shard of glass – hence the name. It’s a gracefully slender, tapering design that will be glazed in a way that reflects the changing moods of the sky above. The planned public viewing gallery is expected to attract around two million visitors a year, matching the figure for the nearby London Eye.

It was Frankfurt and not London that was chosen as headquarters for the European Bank – an institution which, as one observer noted, is: “A bank without tradition, presiding over a currency with no history and that is not backed by any state.”

As an official statement from the bank stated when the design project was put out to tender: “Public buildings are conveyors of meaning and this one in particular will symbolise the European Union and its currency, the euro. We expect high-quality designs that will provide Europe with an icon of modern architecture.”

“The question is,” commented Die Zeit architecture critic Hanno Rauterberg at the time, “Just how brave and adventurous does this bank want to be?”

Not surprisingly, maybe, in an organisation where compromise seems to be a given, all the more ambitious proposals were sidelined and the Eurotower has nothing to particularly mark its out from the 17 other Frankfurt buildings that top 100m in height. Indeed, it’s not even the tallest among them, being topped by the Commersbank, a domestic German bank.

Perhaps, in any event, we are now starting to witness a backlash against grandiose iconic designs. Correspondence that winged its way between architecture gurus Deyan Sudjic and Charles Jencks recently and was subsequently published, produced a lively debate.

As Deyan had previously written in The Observer newspaper in a piece about the attention-seeking buildings created by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Will Alsop: “Perhaps like art nouveau, which flourished briefly at the end of the 19th Century, the icon has become ubiquitous just as it is about to vanish,” to which comment Jencks responded: “We have witnessed self-cancelling gestures that not only upstage each other but destroy urban coherence. These structures are often absurdly expensive and maladroit one-liners. The iconic age makes architecture a transitory fashion and architects into celebrity chefs, confectioners who have to whip up ever greater wedding cakes, as did those hacks of Franco and Lenin.”