Monument Valley - The Failure of the Starchitects

Larry Speck, writing for Archinect, has an article lamenting the poor quality of urban “Starchitects”:

While in Dallas last week, I took a few minutes to walk from my office to the new Arts District where there are buildings by five Pritzker-Prize-winning architects within sight of each other—Nasher Sculpture Center by Renzo Piano, Meyerson Symphony Center by I.M. Pei, Norman Foster’s Winspear Opera House, Wyly Theater by Rem Koolhaas and, nearby, Thom Mayne’s Museum of Nature and Science. All of these buildings are monuments of late 20th century/early 21st century architecture.

Collectively, these buildings make a terrible urban environment. What should be a thriving, enlivening experience is, in fact, really dull. Have the star architects of our era forgotten how to make a city?

It is not surprising to me that a collection of “starchitecture” would be wholly inhospitable to people. The architectural elite focus on one thing - purity of design vision. This is design for design’s sake rather than design for humanity’s sake. The problem, I think, is one of ego. It is difficult for a Pritzker Prize[1] winning architect to willingly subvert the purity of his design for the good of the city. In reality, it is the good of the city that is subverted for the whims of the architect.

The architectural elite, it seems, have no concept of a background building - a building whose primary purpose is to elegantly provide for the needs of its occupants and to be an upstanding “citizen” of the urban environment. The background building contributes to a greater whole rather than demanding individual attention. Background buildings should be a high percentage of every architect’s work yet very little emphasis is placed on what makes an ordinary building great. The pursuit is not for individual glory, for either the building or the architect, but for the glory of the street, the neighborhood, and the city.

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1. What does this say about the value of the Pritzker Prize if a district that has such a collection of buildings by previous winners can create such a dismal environment?  ↩