City Icons, Super Architects, and the Super-Rich
In the popular imagination architects have long been seen as affluent professionals but that situation has really accelerated in recent years. Today, a small coterie of architects have become personally wealthy, with fortunes to rival members of the transnational global capitalist class (for example, Norman Foster, with a reported net worth of US$240 million). In this sense the profession appears to be increasingly split between a small elite, sometimes called starchitects, who command global attention and have amassed increasingly significant private fortunes, and a mass of salaried professionals, often undercompensated, at the other end of an increasingly wide pay gap.
This shift drove our decision to collaborate on a research project exploring the impact on cities generated by the immense wealth of a relatively small elite of urban design professionals. The project was inspired by our personal research interests in iconic architecture, and the relationship between the global super-rich and daily life in cities. Our contention was that the emergence of not simply famous but also personally wealthy architects, members of the super-rich in their own right, has impacted the look, feel, and experiences generated by their projects. In many cities, indeed, new geometries of power between architects and their patrons are reshaping the built environment, with starchitects not only being able to command astronomical fees but to enjoy unprecedented discretion in choosing what they build and for whom.
Figure 1. One Hyde Park apartment complex in London was designed by Richard Rogers’s Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and completed in 2009. It replaced a mid-century office block. Photograph by Rowland Atkinson, 2018.
Many cities contain iconic buildings designed by high-net-worth starchitects, such as Foster, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. While it is not possible to speak of starchitecture as a distinctive or unified style, there are some common features in the kinds of the kinds of megaprojects devised by design professionals with global reputations (and large wallets). These features include significant size and prominent positions within the urban fabric, alongside distinctive quirks that convey a unique sense of authorship or standing. As cities have become sites of financialization, signature projects by starchitects stand out as part of a broader set of transformations in urban space that privilege not simply the starchitects themselves but also a highly mobile, global class of the super-rich, their wealthy enablers (developers, bankers and patrons), and political actors. Thus, an increasingly investment-oriented and socially disinterested global context has seen the emergence of new devices for the valorization, and exploitation, of the physical fabric of cities, including starchitect-led financialized architectural forms, such as mega projects speaking of city triumph, or luxury housing developments designed to be investment commodities for the super-rich.
The immediate catalyst for our investigation has been a series of distinctive projects generated by wealthy architects, on the one hand, and, on the other, our growing awareness of changes cleaving architecture, to a degree never seen before, between everyday quotidian practice and the almost monopolistic actions of a very small cohort of those at the top.
Figure 2. The Museo Soumaya in Mexico City was designed by “fr·ee,” the firm of Fernando Romero, son-in-law of the museum’s billionaire founder, Carlos Slim. It was completed in 2011. Photograph by Rowland Atkinson, 2019.
In some ways the situation recalls the impact of concentrated wealth on industrial cities in the early twentieth century, particularly in North America, when private fortunes were so enormous that signature projects continuously reshaped skylines. Examples like the Woolworth Building in New York City or the Tribune Tower in Chicago were built as a result of an ambition to speak of private fortunes, personal standing, and the capacity to reshape city form in ways that were consonant with the desires of rich individuals. As concentration of wealth fell in the mid-twentieth century, so did capacity and desire to build these kinds of private monuments. Rising again in the 1980s with the neoliberal project, which some have been keen to argue is a class project and which has generated staggeringly large fortunes, these new accumulations of capital are being translated once more into buildings designed to show the standing, influence, and arrival of the bearers.
A critical difference between then and now is the emergence of immensely wealthy individual architects. Their significance appears to be threefold. First, starchitects influence the scale, design, and overall impact of architecture in quite dramatic ways. For example, Renzo Piano’s design for the Shard in London came to fruition despite opposition by citizen and conservation groups, and the local authorities. Second, wealthy architects form a kind of auxiliary group that is co-related to expanding flows of global private investment capital, and the fortunes of other profoundly wealthy individuals. This relationship enables these architects to give form to the dream projects of the new global class of rich that has grown in abundance in recent years. Third, they obscure the role of money, as their dazzling designs shift public attention away from debates about growing material inequalities and changes in the form and geography of cities. Many design professionals are sufficiently rich in their own right to operate with a kind of mystique that helps to consecrate planned projects that might otherwise raise thorny questions. This aura, in turn, facilitates the success of projects designed to attract new rounds of investment capital.
“Many design professionals are sufficiently rich in their own right to operate with a kind of mystique that helps to consecrate planned projects that might otherwise raise questions.”
Figure 3. The Shard (formerly London Bridge Tower), the tallest building in the U.K., rising above London’s historic center, The City. The 72-story skyscraper, which replaced a 24-story one built in the 1970s, was designed by Renzo Piano and completed in 2012. Photograph by Amparo Tarazona-Vento, 2023.
As we discuss in a recent article in the sociology journal City, starchitect is a slippery concept. Yet, we argue, it’s essential to understanding the dramatic changes in the look and form of cities around the world today. Iconic projects like Foster + Partners’ recently approved zero-carbon high-rise office and residential development in Blackfriars Road, London, BIG’s One High Line skyscrapers in New York, or Zaha Hadid Architects’ The Henderson office building in Hong Kong's Central Business District reveal the complex ways in which architecture, ideology, wealth inequalities, and political action produce individually powerful actors with immense agency to transform places. Architecture has always inspired and generated new imaginaries of what city life can be. But the scale and impact of today’s starchitecture delimits human experience within the narrow tramlines of visions that are ultimately tied to the demands of capital, and to the desires — or egos — of capitalists. As the super-rich operate in increasingly coordinated ways it is up to ordinary citizens to recognize, and resist, this new form of domination by the elite.
Citation
Amparo Tarazona-Vento and Rowland Atkinson, “City Icons, Super Architects, and the Super-Rich,” PLATORM, September 23, 2024.
