Let’s redirect our discussions from architects' egos to freeing architecture from bad design.
Starchitecture is not the real problem. Bad buildings are. Excessive egos and a lack of collaboration on all levels of the design process, from making the design to working with clients, consultants and experts, and extra-commission stakeholders (neighbors, communities, governments) is a problem, but not nearly as much as the real problem: a risk-adverse, NIMBY culture that also refuses to invest in social quality, share resources, and, what is ultimately the most important, build for its own hopes and fears.
Yale architecture professor and theoretician Peggy Deamer has done the discipline a great disservice by once again raising the false problem of certain architects’ inflated egos in an editorial published in The New York Times. By blaming the likes of Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA; Frank Gehry, FAIA; and Daniel Libeskind, AIA; she has done exactly what she claims to want to avoid: make a few architects and their statements—taken in isolation—the problem, rather than focusing on the larger issue of how many bad—by which I mean wasteful, socially, and environmentally isolated and isolating, and just plain ugly—buildings are being constructed.
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But the true evil is perpetrated, as several commenters to Deamer’s screed have noted, by the anonymous firms that truly dominate the field, and whose equally faceless buildings are dumb uses of resources that dumb down our cities and the building’s occupants both.
By the way, we have always had starchitects. Palladio was one. So were Michelangelo, Henri Labrouste,Edwin Lutyens, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Robert Venturi, FAIA, to name just a random historical sampling. Were they the problem?