Starchitect

Starchitect is a portmanteau used to describe architects whose celebrity and critical acclaim have transformed them into stars of the architecture world and may even have given them some degree of fame among the general public.

For instance, architect-developer John Portman found that building skyscraper hotels with vast atriums—which he did in various U.S. cities during the 1980s—was more profitable than maximizing floor area.

[4] But a high-tech strand of modernism persisted in parallel with a formally retrogressive post-modernism; one that often championed "progress" by celebrating, if not exposing, structure and systems engineering.

Such technological virtuosity can be discovered during this time in the work of Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, and Richard Rogers, the latter two having designed the controversial Pompidou Centre (1977) in Paris, which opened to international acclaim.

Arguably the most notable practitioner along these lines, at least in the 1970s, is the now internationally renowned architect Frank Gehry, whose house in Santa Monica, California bears these characteristics.

With the popular and critical success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry, in which a rundown area of a city in economic decline brought in huge financial growth and prestige, the media started to talk about the so-called 'Bilbao effect';[5] a star architect designing a blue-chip, prestige building was thought to make all the difference in producing a landmark for the city.

The origin of the phrase "wow factor architecture" is uncertain, but has been used extensively in business management in both the UK and United States to promote avant-gardist buildings within urban regeneration since the late 1990s.

[citation needed] Such publicity also made it into the popular press: in the post-war era Time magazine occasionally featured architects on its front cover – for instance, in addition to Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

For instance, the manufacturing company Vitra is well known for the works of notable architects that make up its premises in Weil am Rhein, Germany; including Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, SANAA, Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, and Frank Gehry; as is the fashion house Prada for commissioning Rem Koolhaas to design their flagship stores in New York and Los Angeles.

However, throughout history the greatest prestige has come with the design of public buildings – opera houses, libraries, townhalls, and especially museums, often referred to as the "new cathedrals" of our times.

However, researchers at Clarkson University have used the method of Google hits to 'measure' the degree of celebrity status: "to establish a precise mathematical definition of fame, both in the sciences and the world at large".