It’s time to abandon the buzz-word, which has become a partisan dog-whistle well outside its context in design.
Last week, National Review issued its latest broadside against contemporary architecture. This is a recurring feature for the publication, one that pops up every few weeks under a different alarmist headline, with words like “awful,” “woeful,” “melee,” and “monstrosity.” The theme is reliably the same: Architectural elites are bad for America.
Architecture presents a special conundrum for conservative cultural critics. Just about everything that gets built involves an architect, meaning their work is less elective than the labor of art historians or modern choreographers—or any other profession that conservatives might decry and defund without shedding a tear. Architecture, as a field, cannot be written off so easily.
Important architecture tends to reflect a popular mandate. High design leans liberal, as it were: Museums, libraries, university buildings, performance halls, train stations, government centers, and so on usually serve the public good (often with public funding). So a whole lot of fine architecture is anathema to movement conservatism, programmatically. Not everything: Some of the finest buildings in the world are private projects driven by corporate ambition. And conservatives are invested in who and what gets memorialized and how.
Frank Gehry responds to criticism with a middle finger: http://t.co/P7OVC2cZjf Image via @imartinrodrigo pic.twitter.com/0GDACI6BDr
— Dezeen (@Dezeen) October 24, 2014
This framework helps to explain why conservative critics love to hate the “starchitect.” It’s shorthand, a way of sorting the building arts into two categories—useful architecture that conservatives should approve and wasteful architecture that conservatives should disdain—without doing any of the real and difficult work of judging design.
“The ‘starchitect’ is almost always and everywhere the enemy of the public good,” Kevin D. Williamson writes, “but American public planners . . . have a terrible weakness for celebrity architects and public grandiosity.”
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In Williamson’s framework, Gehry is specifically and maybe exclusively a starchitect for his design of the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. Williamson’s praise for 8 Spruce Street serves as contrast for his condemnation of the Ike Memorial, Gehry’s great disqualifying sin. That project has become a bête noir among conservative cultural critics, despite the fact that the design’s features are rather neoclassical, architecturally speaking—quiet for a Gehry and necessary given the site’s constraints. Conservative, even.
There are a couple of things going on here. One, it was no accident that people on the right came to uniformly distrust Gehry’s design. Richard Driehaus, a classical-architecture enthusiast and Chicago businessman, funded a lobbying campaign to oppose the design, even as Gehry went back to the drawing board time and again to adjust it to suit the concerns of the Eisenhower family. Catesby Leigh, a critic who has condemned Gehry’s memorial in National Review as recently as July, is the founding director of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit group funded in part by Driehaus to oppose the Eisenhower Memorial. The Washington Post’s George Will strafed so broadly with his barrage against Gehry that he also hit poor Frank Lloyd Wright (a “modernist and egotist”). In Congress, the efforts to block spending on the memorial (mostly symbolic at this early stage) have been driven by one committee staffer. That’s enough to say that the design has garnered opposition in Congress, though.
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Expect to hear more about starchitects when work proceeds on the monument for the Adams family (honoring President John Adams, First Lady Abigail Adams, President John Quincy Adams, and the rest of the gang). The true Sturm und Drang will come, though, when the Obama Foundation names an architect for the Obama Presidential Library in South Chicago. It could be Jeanne Gang, it could be Robert A. M. Stern, it could be Richard Meier—hell, it could be Buckminster Fuller or Daniel Burnham or even Thomas Jefferson himself—but no matter which architect gets the nod to design the Obama Presidential Library, this person will be dismissed widely by the right as a starchitect. (The architect will not be an unknown, and the cost for the building will be millions. This is the way of important buildings at a time when construction costs are soaring. The starchitect smear is inevitable.)
This all-too-convenient form of prosecution distorts a debate that society should be having over design. Which architects working in the private sector should we entrust with works in the public realm, and how do we make that decision? Conservative voices are welcome and needed in this conversation. But be wary of a coded term meant to cut the debate short: starchitect.