Great Designers, Bad Buildings?
Architectural critic John King finds 'starchitects' to be great designers, but troubling to cities.
"Like many professions, architecture has its superstars -- big names who bound from one worldly hot spot to the next. They joust in competitions and confound expectations, time after dazzling time.
One of them is Rem Koolhaas, who stopped by San Francisco last week for a lecture filled with cynical wit and visual flash. He also stirred my doubts about the entire global game -- where the stars often seem to work harder at one-upping their rivals than at creating buildings that will improve our cities and lives.
'Architecture has to become more extravagant, more exceptional, more unique to play its assumed role as icon,' said Koolhaas, 62, black-clad and droll. 'I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to present an intellectual discourse or be a salesman. The line between is very thin.'"
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The Starchitect's New Clothes
This is the first mainstream critic that I heard stating the most obvious fact about our celebrity architects:
"the stars often seem to work harder at one-upping their rivals than at creating buildings that will improve our cities and lives."
Maybe he will eventually realize that these emperors have no clothes, that they are on roughly the same level as a teenager who dies his hair purple just to be different.
Charles Siegel