"In the rush to draw a line under the age of the starchitect, we're at risk of losing more than we think"

The starchitect era is coming to an end but, like it or not, architecture still needs powerful individuals, writes Owen Hopkins.

The age of the starchitect is over. At least that's what critics have been saying for over a decade now.

But 2025 perhaps marked the moment when this prognostication finally came true as architecture lost an unprecedented number of its leading figures, among them Frank Gehry, Bob Stern, Terry Farrell, Nicholas Grimshaw, Ricardo Scofidio, Léon Krier and David Childs. Meanwhile, it's now a hard-to-believe 10 years since we lost Zaha Hadid – the starriest starchitect of them all.

Conventionally, the demise of the age of the starchitect is seen as a good thing

The "great die-off'", predicted by the critic and architectural soothsayer Charles Jencks in typically irreverent fashion, has finally come to pass. It was only a matter of time, as the roster of global stars entered their ninth and even 10th decades.

Yet, more broadly, this generational shift reflects the fact that the starchitect phenomenon was the product of a particular time and circumstances – economic, political and cultural.

Conventionally, the demise of the age of the starchitect – if not the starchitects themselves, whose passing has been rightly widely lamented – is seen as a good thing. For many, the media focus on the work of a few white men – as ever, Hadid was the exception who proved the rule – has long distorted views of the architectural profession, sucking up attention and the fundamentally collective and collaborative way it operates. How many lectures does Peter Cook actually need to give?

At the same time, the so-called "iconic" buildings with which the age of starchitects is synonymous, with their seemingly arbitrary sculptural gestures realised using vast amounts of concrete and steel, are now, in the midst of climate breakdown, widely seen as wilfully profligate and wasteful. Even on their own terms, it remains an open question whether "iconic" buildings' contributed more to urban regeneration and economic development – the rationale typically behind their creation – than to burnishing the images of those behind them.

But in the rush to draw a line under the age of the starchitect, we're at risk of losing more than we think. To understand this, it helps if we go back to the beginning.

On one level, the starchitect is nothing new. Celebrity architects always existed: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright certainly fit that bill, both when they were around and now.

The overt creative freedom of the starchitect is vital in maintaining the impression that these attributes define the profession as a whole

But going much further back, what about Gian Lorenzo Bernini? Andrea Palladio? Michelangelo? Leon Battista Alberti? They are all starchitects in all but name, with the celebrity architect as old as architecture itself. Certain architects have always been sought after by clients, and these individuals have often been instrumental in charting new directions and setting new agendas.

The age of the starchitect only properly took hold in the 1990s and, like postmodernism, which overturned modernist conformity with individualism and licentiousness, was shaped not by factors internal to the discipline, but by how architecture was consumed as media. We take it for granted now in the Instagram era, but it was during this moment that the image of the building became as important, in some instances even more so than the building itself – a process that was inaugurated by the ne plus ultra of iconic architecture: Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (pictured top).

Again, as with celebrity architects, famous, even iconic buildings have obviously always existed. But the Guggenheim was arguably the first building conceived and designed to be famous, to become synonymous with its city and to drive economic regeneration. Its success soon saw countless post-industrial cities across the world try to re-create the Bilbao effect by building their own version of the Guggenheim with a celebrated architect to design it, though none with as much success.

The extent of the role played by iconic architecture itself in catalysing economic regeneration, as opposed to simple investment, may remain contested. But what is clear is that it established an architectural culture that, for a time at least, privileged the sculptural, the signature, the one-of-a-kind and the spectacular, with a charismatic celebrity architect's name attached. It's a culture that endures in the media and public perception of architecture, even if architectural discourse has long since moved on.

But the role of the starchitect runs far deeper than PR. To invoke a little bit of critical theory, starchitects can be seen as having a supplemental relationship with the profession in its late capitalist incarnation. That is to say, the overt creative freedom and agency of the starchitect is vital in maintaining the impression that these attributes define the profession as a whole, even if, as we know, neoliberalism has diminished them greatly.

While the demise of the starchitect may expose this fiction, the risk is it would lead to the unravelling of the entire profession, consigning it not just to irrelevance, but perhaps even to oblivion. Far better, then, not just to accept starchitects' presence, but to embrace it in ways that can help the profession as a whole.

Playing the game does not mean giving in to the cult of the creative genius

Even as they stand, starchitects do have a significant positive influence and role to play in advancing architecture's agendas. For all their sucking up of media attention, without them architecture would be almost entirely ignored by the media and the public.

And their enviable platforms can be deployed not simply for their own purposes, but to advocate for architecture itself, for better, more generous buildings and more inclusive built environments. Richard Rogers, for example, used his position and clout to talk directly to politicians, and in the process set the agenda for UK planning policy for a generation. Farrell was another, using his platform to go further, advocating not for architects and planners, but for the vital voices of local communities both in his native UK and in the cities he helped reshape in the Far East.

Of course, it is dangerous for the profession to rely on the whims of individuals. Many starchitects have done themselves and the profession no credit by being drawn to dubious clients and regimes prepared to build their ever-more outlandish creations.

And it is not without irony that the culture of iconic architecture has actually led to a kind of homogenisation, with countless cities now possessing formally very different but categorically identical iconic buildings. Architecture's globalisation was ultimately the flipside of postmodernism's released individualism.

Starchitect culture is a reality of the media world in which architecture operates, which it has little hope in changing. But playing the game does not mean giving in to the cult of the creative genius and celebrity.

If a new generation rises to the top who represent the communities architecture claims to serve, and who speak and advocate for practices and outlooks that reflect the collaborative processes, that will yield a more equitable and sustainable built environment. The age of starchitects may be over, but the role we need them to play remains as important as ever.

Owen Hopkins is an architecture writer, historian and curator. He is the director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University. Previously he was senior curator at Sir John Soane's Museum and architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was also part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. He is the author of eight books, including Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain (2017) and Postmodern Architecture: Less is a Bore (2020).

The photo is by Mathieu Gauzy via Unsplash.

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