Starchitecture is not the enemy...

I'm glad this blog to date has provided fertile ground both to challenge planning as a profession as well as to compliment planning when it happens to do something worthy.  In this spirit, I'd like to irritate many of my colleagues out there and definitively say that starchitects are not the problem. 

I wish I could play the role of Stephen Colbert and ridiculously declare the end to this debate, but alas, I do not have the television airtime (or wit) to make this point as effectively as I would like.  This forum will have to do.

It's not that I love all of the designs that emerge from our super-star architects, but the debate is getting tiresome (and in the grand spirit of irony, I am perpetuating the issue with this blog entry).  I've seen an increasing number of articles that continue to lambast starch-designs as out of step with the ways that cities should evolve.  Really? The purveyors of starchitecture touch all of .1% of our built structures yet you would think from the comments of some that these designers are single-handedly molding our cities into a dystopia, destroying all that we have learned about what makes a "good city."  Alright, I went a little bit overboard at the end there, but you get the point.    

To some extent, the debate over contemporary design, particularly the often extravagent designs pushed by starchitects, is understandable.  These projects get a lot of press (certainly more so than a one-story auto strip mall along a city's periphery).  They are often fueled by public dollars.  But haven't large public projects always been extravagant in ways that may not have always been in-step with values at the time?  

If we weren't challenged to think of cities differently over a century ago, there would be no Eiffel Tower or Chicago skyscrapers.  Cities are amazingly resilient systems, to treat them as something delicate seems to be missing the point.   

The issue for me as someone whose business touches both planning and architecture, is that the issue of design is being oversimplified.  I appreciate the thinking and creativity that gets poured into starchitects' designs.  Even if I don't love the end product, the freedom with which they grapple with ideas helps me reflect a bit on my own design approach and how I see cities.  (Their influence is certainly helped by their publicists who turn each project into a stand-alone book filled with pithy diagrams, bold statements and surreal renderings). 

It seems to me that the challenge before us as planners requires as much vision as we can muster.  We need designs that activate and enliven a city, but we also need designs that challenge us and how we experience cities.   Not all new designs are good ones, but let's focus our ire on the projects that have not even made an attempt to better our cities. 

I'm going to ignore all of the press and debate about the next glass-encased monument that finds its way into the media.  I'll just wait for the book and judge for myself.