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Some have called it "starchitecture." Now it goes by the smoother marketing handle of "iconic architecture." Like an aesthetic flu shot, some think this just the boost our town now needs to get out of its architectural sick bed. Not me.

Simple recourse to brand name designers and their mock-sculptural, often ill-functioning buildings is the refuge of fools and Torontonians - those who need to purchase validated reputations in the same way some of us select designer shirts. Starchitects create icons for the media's eyes when critical standards fail, public debate wanes, and when insecurities need to be soothed with the thick salve of credentialism. In an over-mediated world, it is easier to buy a reputation than earn one.

Why invent anew or think it out wholesale - say the starchitects and their middlebrow marketers to potential clients like the Vancouver Art Gallery - when you can buy a proven pretty package retail? Neurotic burgs like Seattle, Denver and Toronto give their flashest arts and academic building commissions to any Euro with a monograph or monocle, while more self-assured cities like Portland, Montreal and Vancouver try to create their own design heroes, not import them.

Until now, anyway.

Vancouver's residential real estate market has proven remarkably resistant to the starchitect phenomenon. Yale architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern did one modestly-received PoMo residential tower in West Vancouver, then got sent packing back east when he tried to foist a New England fishing village on South East False Creek.

The jury is still out whether the investment in Sir Norman Foster's global reputation (and related design fees) has paid back in sales at the Jameson Tower, now rising downtown. One thing is certain, Vancouver got to be the beta test site for the first high rise residential tower ever produced by Foster, one of the world's most respected design firms. (Since cutting his design teeth on Jameson, Foster has completed condo tower proposals for New York and elsewhere.) Only the finished building will prove to me whether this starchitect's Vancouver test run produced architecture better than had a similarly well-endowed commission been flipped to Vancouver's Peter Busby, James Cheng, Peter Cardew or Patricia Patkau.

A strange debate about the value of architectural icons has erupted in the unlikeliest of Vancouver locales - the treed hill above Cambie and 29th Avenue. Here, architect Richard Henriquez and lawyer John Horton proposed a hilltop commercial observation tower, a place to pay for the fine view that used to be available to all, before Queen Elizabeth Park's trees pushed up high enough to block the urban panorama. In public meetings leading up to a Vancouver Parks Board decision on January 28, their scheme was repeatedly described as "Jetsons' architecture," with nearby resident Gary Richmond having the most colourful description of Henriquez' iconic design: "It's a First World War dreadnaught class battleship redone with Euro-Swiss styling."

Not to be out-done, there was a crunchy granola, free-admission-to-all, alternative observation tower proposal done up in recycled timber. This was promoted by community organizer and sometimes park worker Ned Jacobs, son of urban icon Jane. Demonstrating the iconic role large trees play in Vancouver's pantheon, the dumbest proposition heard by Parks Board was the do-nothing option of no observation tower and no trimming of the existing trees - just the permanent loss of the most enthralling view of our city, available only from here, its highest point. Views can be iconic, too.

After hearing 24 delegations on January 28, the Parks Board rejected both woodsy and Jetsons-y designs, choosing instead to trim some of the view-blocking trees, which a staff arborist described as "plantation style," being set too closely together in the first place. Tree-huggers, I am sure, will soon protect every branch and leaf from the forces of true public benefit.

Never mind the conifer-worshipping or the commissioning of new iconic buildings - just watch what happens when we monkey with one of Vancouver's existing architectural icons. The mounting fuss over a clamshell cover over Robson Square shows how much value citizens place on those quirky three blocks of buildings and parks. This reaction is encouraging proof that some see our downtown as more than a parking lot for politician's pet projects, or an investment zone for condo-buyers with little vested interest.

Some creative ideas for the remaking of Robson Square come from Noel Best, partner at Stantec, Canada's largest architectural and engineering firm. He points out the great popular and critical success of the renewal of Somerset House in London, where his firm has been working on Heathrow's soon-to-open Terminal Five. The hard-surfaced courtyards in the Thames-side former palace have been turned into people-friendly spaces for lounging, eating, playing and performing, and Best tells me, even a wintertime skating rink.

At Somerset House's refurbished square over a few days last summer, I saw lively ranges of food stalls, a hands-on architectural fair for kids, and a concert by pre-rehab Amy Winehouse. Now let's extend this same kind of thinking to the square along Georgia Street outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, and make it a flexible place for gatherings, retractable fountains, seasonal arts and food fairs, and so on. It is even possible to have some cooling coils and a refrigeration plant below the remade park's paving stones - permitting skating out in the open here every mid-winter, not deep in some dark recess below Robson Street. I am sure General Electric/NBC would love their $1.7-donation for improvements moved to this much more prominent site.

With this, some welcome new possibilities emerge on the other side of VAG: for the lower level former skating zone below Robson, have Vancouver's leading landscape architects such as Cornelia Oberlander, Jane Durante or Chris Phillips submit designs in an invited competition to demonstrate how this difficult leftover space could be transformed into lush sunken public gardens. After all, both Victoria's Butchart Gardens and our own Q.E. Park both started out as stark and un-green quarries.

The only real icons in the world of architecture and city-building are ones that are shaped by creative thinking, public debate, and a sense of connection with place. Whether for a tower to crown Queen Elizabeth Park or the right spot to plant our downtown skating rink, let's talk less of icons and more of architectural competitions, public debate, and design reputations that are earned, not boutique-bought.