Architect: Star Cities

Architect Magazine reports on the growing trend of famous architects functioning as planners of large-scale development projects.

Frank Gehry is heavily involved in Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn; Daniel Libeskind is developing a 4.5-million-square-foot waterfront development in Busan, South Korea; Norman Foster is building what has been touted as the world's first zero-waste, carbon-neutral city in Abu Dhabi....

Writer Joan Ockman credits this move away from isolated "object buildings" to Rem Koolhaas, commissioned to design a new city center for Lille, France in the early 1990s, and his realization that "the problem of bigness" required architects to surrender to outside forces - engineers, contractors, and politicians, for example.

This has led to the hiring of more and more "starchitects" to design projects on a much grander scale as architects have (hopefully) relented and have come to accept that their buildings are part of a much wider, functioning world.

That is not to say that a single building cannot have a transformative effect - for example, Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997.

But one can easily go too far, until the desired effect of having iconic, signature buildings dies out from visual overkill.