Although some find it unpleasant and others find it flippant, the term ‘starchitect’ is theoretically useful for the sociology of architecture. It connects the world of the architect with the world of celebrity, and it connects architecture as an esoteric aesthetic practice with architecture as an industry in the public eye. Over the last few years, the term has become well established in the mass media and in trade publications, and it is also, slowly, starting to be taken seriously by scholars in and around architecture (e.g., McNeill 2009, Ponzini and Nastasi 2011; Knox 2012; Gravari-Barbas and Renard-Delautre 2015). The quest for fame, of course, is not new. Leon Battista Alberti, universal man, prodigious self-promoter of the early renaissance, and still an architectural notable, wrote an allegorical play on fame in the 1440s, recently reprinted (Alberti 1987). Neither Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) nor Le Corbusier (1887–1965, Corb) shunned publicity; both were what we would now call celebrities. Their rivalry is well documented, mostly in arguments around different conceptions of modernism—they never met. Noting that Wright called the Villa Savoye, one of Corb’s most celebrated buildings, ‘a box on stilts’, the cultural historian Nicholas Cox Weber, in his life of Corb, comments: ‘Today, it is an icon of twentieth-century design and has spawned countless imitations all over the world’ (2008: 288; see also Etlin 1994). Wright and Corb died around the time capitalist globalization was beginning to establish itself as a truly global system, and their own lives contained significant measures of socially produced iconicity. Although these terms were not used about them during their lifetimes, they can be considered proto-global and proto-iconic architects, by which I mean that the terms ‘global’ and ‘iconic’ are fruitfully employed today about them and their surviving architectural works. So, before considering the starchitects of our time, it is instructive first of all to delve briefly into the careers of these two most iconic architects of the first half of the 20th century. Wright and Corb both enjoy institutional legacies and continue to have plenty of enthusiasts.
John Ruskin e as pedras de Veneza