Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities
Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities
Paul Knox
School of Public and International Affairs
Virginia Tech
One of the consequences of contemporary globalization has been a transformation of the structural composition of architectural practice. Following an increasingly international clientele, more and more firms have developed a global portfolio of design work. Some of them are transnational corporations in their own right, huge architecture and engineering ('A&E') firms that have grown from what Robert Gutman (1988), in his pioneering study of the sociology of architecture, called 'strong delivery firms,' commercial firms that rarely win awards but build a great deal. Others have grown from what he called 'strong-service firms,' practices that are design-oriented but business-centred. A third group of global practices consists of what Gutman called 'strong-idea firms.' Some of these strong-idea firms are now global brand names within the industry, and a few of them have senior partners whose individual celebrity and marketability has made them rich and famous: they are 'starchitects' (McNeill, 2005).
These celebrity architects and their product – ‘starchitecture’ – must be understood in the context of contemporary processes of globalization and the political economy of globalizing cities (Jencks, 2005). Leslie Sklair (2005) emphasizes the role of various fractions of what he calls the 'transnational capitalist class'. Specifically, these fractions include politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of administrative power and responsibility (who actually decide what gets built where, and how changes to the built environment are regulated) and a consumer-oriented fraction (retailers and media responsible for the marketing and consumption of architecture), as well as distinctive class fractions drawn from architecture and affiliated design professions with an international clientele. These key groups, in turn, operate within complex global networks and sub-networks of businesses, non-
profit organizations, and governments. They also operate within — and contribute to — a globalized consumption-, celebrity- and brand-oriented culture and a neoliberal political economy.
Consumption, Celebrity, and Architecture
Campbell (1987) has written of the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’ and the way that people’s lives have become infused with illusions, daydreams and fantasies about consumer objects. This is the basis of a ‘romantic capitalism’ that blossomed in the 1950s with a post-war economic boom that was boosted by the widespread availability of credit cards and that has evolved into a ‘dream economy’ (Jordan, 2007). Traditional identity groups based on class, ethnicity, and age began to blur as people found themselves increasingly free to construct their identities and lifestyles through their patterns of consumption. Thanks to Fordism, consumers’ dreams could be fulfilled more quickly and more easily. But this led inevitably and dialectically to disenchantment as novelty, exclusivity, distinction, and the romantic appeal of goods were undermined by mass consumption. To counter this tendency, product design and niche marketing, along with the ‘poetics’ of branding, have become central to the enchantment and re-enchantment of things (Frank, 1998). George Ritzer (2005), following Baudrillard, Debord, and others, points to the importance of spectacle, extravaganzas, simulation, theming, and sheer size in contemporary material culture, and argues that they are all key to enchantment and re-enchantment in the consumer world. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, meanwhile, write of the emergence of an ‘experience economy’ where consumer experiences are increasingly the locus of profitability (1999). All this is overlaid by a celebrity culture (Boorstin, 1971; Cashmore, 2006; Da Marshall, 2006; Turner, 2004) that now extends to ‘starchitects’ — as verified in an episode of The Simpsons, where Marge Simpson tells fellow members of the Springfield Cultural Advisory Board that a sure way to win respect is to hire Frank Gehry to design a concert hall along the lines of his Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
The net result is the aestheticization of everyday life, with architecture implicated in
consumption at many levels. The design of the built environment has become intimately involved with many aspects of consumption, especially those involving an explicit design premium, such as fashion and luxury products. Endorsement by association, observes Martin Pawley, ‘is one of the things that architecture does best, and also one of the things that fashion, the industry, needs most – the new car parked outside the manor house, the classical revival office building, the corporate headquarters campus, the view from the castle, the minimalist interior . . . All of them can be borrowed . . . to make or remake a reputation’ (2000: 7). In other words, fashion and architecture use one another, not simply as backdrops or as ecologies for celebrity-laden events, but as guarantees of cultural acceptability and valorization of symbolic capital. The spa designed by Peter Zumthor in Vals, Switzerland, for example, has been used as a backdrop for fashion shoots, music videos, and advertising in order to create a rarefied atmosphere and at the same time to appeal to a certain target group with architectural knowledge. High-end architecture and high-end fashion also have an affinity for one another because both require great precision in fabrication and construction, high levels of finish quality, and carefully controlled lighting. Commodified, the relationship has produced a distinctive luxo-minimalism in interior design, with celebrity architects like Rem Koolhaas and John Pawson furnishing minimalist backgrounds for contemporary fashion brands like Armani, Boss, Jigsaw, Calvin Klein, Mango, Issey Miyake and Prada (Knox, 2010).
In more general terms, the connections between consumption and design, including the marketability of the work of brand-name architects are maintained and reinforced by what Sharon Zukin (2004) has termed the ‘critical infrastructure’ of consumption: consumer guides, the Sunday supplements, lifestyle magazines like Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Living, Metropolis, Metropolitan Home, World of Interiors, Wallpaper*, and large-format coffee-table ‘look books’. The understanding of architecture derived from these books and magazines is decidedly narrow and usually framed around the persona of a particular designer or the visual aesthetics (read: spectacle, luxury) of a particular building or setting. A similar fixation with
aesthetics and personalities is evident in professional magazines, especially the so-called ‘showcase’ or ‘portfolio’ magazines such as Abitare, Communication Arts, Domus, and I.D., all of which are high-gloss productions that use sumptuous photography and printing techniques to show off the latest starchitecture, interior design, furniture design, and product design. The profits of trade magazines and the architectural press, and the livelihood of architecture critics and editors depend, in part, on sustaining the international star system. Celebrity is also propagated through major professional awards like the Pritzker Prize; while the pervasive emphasis on the cult of the individual in architectural education (with its almost unquestioned reverence for big names and emphasis on great exemplars and heroic architecture) also plays to the advantage of contemporary signature architects with a global brand.
Architecture in a Neoliberal Political Economy
Although the collective professional self-image of architects generally emphasizes their independent, socially progressive, environmentally sensitive, and holistic perspectives, the practical reality is that they must operate within a starkly neoliberal political economy in which progressive notions of the public interest and civil society have been eclipsed by the bottom line in corporate and public-private investment. Design solutions have to be commercially attractive; projects have to be hustled, commissions have to be won. Similarly, urban governance has become increasingly concerned with providing a ‘good business climate’ that might attract investment. The increasing entrepreneurialism of urban governance (Harvey, 1989) has made rebuilding, repackaging and rebranding the urban landscape a common priority among large cities. Flagship cultural sites, signature skyscrapers, conference centres, big mixed-use developments, warehouse conversions, waterfront redevelopments, heritage sites and major sports and entertainment complexes have appeared in many cities. Often geared toward consumption rather than production, these settings are designed to provide a new economic infrastructure suited to the needs of a post-industrial economy: business services, entertainment and leisure facilities, and tourist attractions: an ‘ecology of commodified symbolic production
and consumption’ (Scott, 2001: 17). They are, invariably, closely woven into the narratives of city branding. In this context, the would-be iconic buildings of starchitects has become increasingly important as cities compete for world-city status through the promotion of signature buildings and the affect of celebrity and spectacle (Doel and Hubbard, 2002).
The net result is the appearance of what Guy Julier (2005) calls ‘designscapes’: distinctive ensembles of new buildings, cultural amenities, heritage conservation projects, renovated spaces, landscaping, and street furniture with, inevitably, an associated programme of planned events and exhibitions. One of the earliest examples in the United Kingdom was Salford Quays on the Manchester Ship Canal, initially developed in 1982 through public-private partnerships on the site of Salford Docks following the closure of the dockyards. As regeneration proceeded, Salford Quays duly acquired starchitecture: the Imperial War Museum North (designed by Daniel Libeskind) and the Lowry arts complex, designed by James Stirling and Michael Wilford. Graeme Evans (2003) uses the term ‘hard-branding’ to describe the impact of iconic buildings and major events on urban regeneration and place identification.
Starchitecture in World Cities
The ability of an iconic building of to put a city on the global map was demonstrated by Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon in the late 1950s and completed in 1973. Utzon was not a star architect – indeed, he was relatively unknown and the Opera House was his first project outside Denmark and Sweden. But the structure, initially very controversial, is now recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and has become iconic of both Sydney and, indeed, of Australia as a whole. In spite of massive cost overruns in the construction of the building, the return on investment for Australia’s government has been extraordinary. The lesson was not lost on the leadership of Bilbao, Spain. Seeking to turn Bilbao into a flourishing international hub of culture, tourism and advanced business services,
Bilbao City Council embarked on an ambitious revitalization process featuring signature structures by celebrity architects as symbols of modernity and an affect of economic revitalization. The master plan was devised by César Pelli, Diana Balmori and Eugenio Aguinaga and the centerpiece of the redeveloped riverside site is the Guggenheim Museum (promptly pronounced as a ‘miracle’ by the New York Times’ architecture critic Herbert Muschamp), designed by Frank Gehry. Other key elements include a 35-storey office tower (César Pelli) the Euskalduna Juaregia conference centre and concert hall (Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios); the Bilbao International Exhibition Centre (César Azcárate); a new metro system with striking fan-shaped entrances (Norman Foster); a new airport (Santiago Calatrava); a footbridge spanning Nervión River (also Calatrava); and the ‘Gateway’ project, a mixed-use quayside development containing luxury flats, cinemas, and restaurants (Arata Isozaki). The strategy – and in particular Gehry’s museum building – was highly successful in re-branding Bilbao and elevating its perceived status within the global economy. Its success has prompted many other cities to engage starchitects in attempts to replicate what has come to be referred to as the ‘Bilbao effect.’ As Dejan Sudjic observes (2005: 296), ‘Sometimes it seems as if there are just thirty architects in the world. . . Taken together they make up the group that provides the names that come up again and again when another sadly deluded city finds itself labouring under the mistaken impression that it is going to trump the Bilbao Guggenheim with an art gallery that looks like a train crash, or a flying saucer, or a hotel in the form of a twenty-storey high meteorite’. Similarly, the pool of architectural firms that are regularly invited to compete in major architectural competitions is relatively small. Rybczynski (2008) notes that a survey of two architectural journals between 1994 and 2003 turned up 71 invited international competitions, and of the 548 invitations that were issued to 332 firms, 30 percent went to the top 20 firms, and fully 20 percent were to the top 10 firms.
The names that come up again and again include Will Alsop, Mario Botta, Santiago Calatrava, Pierre de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster, Massimiliano Fuksas, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Herzog, Steven Holl, Arata Isozaki,
Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, César Pelli, Dominique Perrault, Renzo Piano, Christian de Portzamparc, Richard Rogers, Robert A. M. Stern, Rafael Viñoly and Peter Zumthor. Most, as Donald McNeill observes (2009), have an identifiable persona and a flair for self-promotion, whether through book authorship, television appearances, or simply personal style: just looking the part. Some, like Mario Botta, Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry, have a recognizable oeuvre or ‘look’, based on striking shapes, surfaces, or concepts. Others, like Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and Herzon & de Meuron, develop their brand through sophisticated technological or aesthetic responses to programmatic requirements (Rybczynski, 2008).
All are involved in shaping the designscapes and skylines of world cities. While their work is in demand in these settings, it is also important for starchitects to have a portfolio of work that extends to a variety of world cities, in order to reinforce their reputation. Based in (or frequent visitors to) world cities, starchitects can also become public intellectuals, involved in discourse on a wide range of topics, contributing to influential cultural ideas and trends, and fueling and reinforcing economic and cultural globalization. The global portfolio of starchitects is heavily weighted toward world cities. Of 165 building and planning projects listed on the web site of Foster + Partners, for example,
Starchitects: the Power of Branding
Celebrity, branding and brand extension is central to the success of starchitects. It is rooted in the profession’s fixation with the cult of personality, something that can be traced back to the role of the Modernist avant-garde and the emergence in the early twentieth century of ‘hero’ designers who saw themselves as pathfinders in the march of Reason that would bring creativity, enlightenment, and a progressive
sensibility to a confused and reactionary world. Their manifestoes and aphorisms reflected a strongly idealistic, utopian, and deterministic attitude, while their individual careers thrived on a radical egocentricity that was often carefully cultivated to enhance their ‘heroic’ image. The most celebrated example is Le Corbusier. A determined self-publicist, even his signature was designed, while his distinctive spectacles were to become a global shorthand for ‘architect.’ His North American rival for celebrity, Frank Lloyd Wright, was, like Le Corbusier, a genius at branding himself as well as a gifted designer. Wright adopted a signature cape and cane outfit as props to his hauteur.
After World War II, the professional ideology within architecture was heavily influenced by an optimistic sci-fi futurism that helped to establish outrageous and spectacular proposals as the hallmark of a new avant-garde. By the late 1970s (after the OPEC cartel’s four-fold increase in the price of crude oil in 1973 and the subsequent recession) optimistic futurism had been displaced by entrepreneurialism, consumerism and the culture of celebrity. From the early 1980s, just as architecture was becoming a global service profession (Knox and Taylor, 2005), an emerging group of architects began to build in radical and spectacular fashion. Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebeskind, for example, gained notoriety in the 1980s for ‘deconstructivist’ buildings that featured non-rectilinear shapes, improbably intersecting volumes, and geometric imbalance. (Their work coincided with interest in the humanities and social sciences in Deconstructivist philosophy, but had no real connection except that the opaque writings of Jacques Derrida were handy in lending an apparent intellectual weight to their projects. A similar parallel can be drawn in relation to postmodern architecture and postmodern theory.) It was a short step from the notoriety derived from such radical approaches to international celebrity status, first in the architectural press, and then, through careful branding, in wider context. Freed from the canon of Modernism, starchitects could produce novel, unique, and sculptural architecture that almost automatically became instantly ‘iconic’ (Jencks,
2005, 2006; Sklair, 2006). In a globalizing economy, with booming real estate markets in world cities, many developers came to see the prestige associated with celebrity architects as key to marshalling public consent for big projects, to putting together the necessary amounts of risk capital, to ensuring the exchange value of their products, and to selling the interior space of the building to prospective commercial tenants (McNeill, 2007).
To maintain celebrity, as Jencks points out, starchitects need to keep the media interested, with a judicious mixture of fame and controversy. They are thus encouraged to take risks, break the rules, upstage competitors and shamelessly grab the spotlight. This is where branding comes in. Leading designers, increasingly, are designing themselves, creating distinctive identities that are amenable to corporate branding and the global consumer economy. Rem Koolhaas is the exemplar, an architect whose celebrity derived initially not from novel built work but from the novel style of his book on New York (1978): breathless, iconoclastic, and atheoretical, filled with fascinating (but often disconnected) facts and striking and unusual images, and studded with catchy new labels ('architectural mutations,' 'utopian fragments') for the established landmarks of New York's built environment. The later success of his built work coincided with an unprecedented amount of branding and self-promotion. Much of this was facilitated through the creation in 1999 of a sister company, AMO, a 'think tank' and research studio for design that allowed Koolhaas to claim intellectual territory and expertise in areas well beyond the boundaries of architecture. In this vein, he has produced a series of publications that have raised his profile. Drawing on the successful affect of Delirious New York, with splashy graphics, grainy photoreportage, an assortment of demographic and economic statistics, and essays that pivot around catchy labels ('Generica', 'Junkspace') and would-be profundities ('World Equals City'), these publications have contributed to his image as both star designer and insightful public intellectual. In October 2008 he was invited to become a member of a European 'Council of the Wise' under the chairmanship of former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez to help 'design' the future European Union in relation to long-term challenges such as
climate change, globalisation, international security, migration, modernizing the European economy and strengthening the European Union's competitiveness. Critics point out that Koolhaas has surfed (rather than challenged) contemporary economic and cultural trends. His forays into the 'dirty realism' of 'Generica', 'Junkspace,' and the wild and unrestrained urbanism of Lagos and the Pearl River Delta (Koolhaas et al, 2001) serve only to mask the structural forces that underpin the visual and social outcomes of global capitalism. His design work, meanwhile, unequivocally embraces the dominant economic and cultural flows of the global consumer economy. But such criticism only provides the controversy to sustain celebrity.
Starchitects' broader celebrity status also allows them to engage in 'brand extension'. This is part of the new interdependence among fashion, retail, and architecture that has been prompted in part by the acquisition of elite couture houses by retail conglomerates, which quickly realized architecture's marketing and branding potential. Celebrity architects have been drawn increasingly into product lines – from kitchenware and table ware to fountain pens and desk accessories – that are central to the 'habitus' of certain class fractions, especially the 'consumerist fraction' of Sklair's 'transnational capitalist class'. Examples include Michael Graves' kitchenware for Target stores; Aldo Rossi's kitchen- and tableware for Alessi, Mario Botta's Caran D'Ache fountain pen (retail: $2,100), Norman Foster's desk accessories for Helit; and Robert A. M. Stern's designs for everything from door levers and bath accessories (for Valli & Valli), to carpets (Bentley Prince Street), carpet tiles (Crossville), fabrics (HBF Textiles, Atelier Martex), furniture (David Edward, HBF), wallcoverings (Innovations), lighting (Baldinger), and jewellery (Acme).
Celebrity has also helped starchitects to rebrand themselves as mega-scale planners (Ockman, 2008). Examples include Frank Gehry's $4 billion project for Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York, and his $1.8 billion 'arts district' around Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Daniel Libeskind's planning projects include a 420,000
square metre, ‘skyline-creating’ waterfront development in Busan, South Korea; a master plan for a 5-kilometre development corridor south of the historic center of Copenhagen, and a huge shopping and entertainment complex on the west side of Bern, Switzerland. Norman Foster has been retained as master planner for the historic center of Duisburg and for the $22 billion project for Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.
Architecture and the World City Brand
Just as starchitects derive some of their standing through the visible presence of their built work in major cities, so the potency of the symbolic capital of world cities is derived in part from their association with starchitects, starchitecture, and the associated nexus of fashion, design, and luxury consumption. Stardom and city branding become mutually self-reinforcing as real estate developers realize that celebrity architects can add value to their projects, world-city leaders compete to acquire the services of the top names to design signature buildings that will keep their city on the map, and the signature buildings of star architects provide the backdrop for fashion shoots, movie scenes, TV commercials, music videos, and satellite news broadcasts.
World cities derive a kind of monopoly rent as a result of the image they acquire from the their ‘front regions’: the financial districts, cultural quarters, design districts, entertainment districts, and ‘semiotic districts’ (Koskinen, 2005) that are the principal settings for starchitecture and for business activities with international connections. Favourable images of these settings, reinforced and amplified by the media (Doel and Hubbard, 2002; Krause and Petro, 2003), help major world cities to become global tastemakers, the ‘valorisation of milieu’ extending to all sorts of products and activities through branding that simply invokes the city’s name (Molotch, 2002; Breward and Gilbert, 2006).
On the other hand, architecture critics like Charles Jencks (2005) point to the serial reproduction of would-be iconic buildings by celebrity architects in world cities,
arguing that it will eventually homogenize the visual identities of cities and attenuate any advantage accruing to their competitiveness. Starchitects themselves, meanwhile, may be faced with the conundrum of how not to upstage their own buildings as they win more commissions in the front regions of major world cities. Nevertheless, as Jencks concedes (2006), starchitects and iconic buildings are here to stay. As Deyan Sudjic points out (2005), the iconic power and cultural authority of architecture has a long history. Starchitecture is not a new genre associated with a stylistic movement or a cultural sensibility but, rather, the most recent iteration of the 'edifice complex' in context of economic and cultural globalization.
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