Everything you need to know about hiring a Starchitect. They will bring you attention. You will bring them riches

MOST PEOPLE TRACE the origin of the celebrity architect to Frank Lloyd Wright, who cut such an imperious figure that clients seldom challenged his claim to know what they wanted better than they did. One exception were the Guggenheim Museum folks in 1959, who reputedly pointed out to Wright that the loading docks he designed for the museum were too small for some of the modern era’s large canvases. Wright’s reply: “Cut the paintings in half.” But the Starchitect era arguably began here in Hong Kong in 1983 when a little-known Iraqi art student presented a conceptual design for Alfred Siu’s The Peak Club so jarring, so strident in its deconstructivism that it would never be built. That project made Zaha Hadid famous, giving rise to an industry of academic architects such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. Their designs often had little to do with actual buildings. Their manifestos were as obscure as they were provocative. But critics adored them – they imparted a high-art mojo to a field that had become as inoffensive and decorative as a Michael Graves teapot. This group – let’s call it the Pritzker Prize Posse – had something else going for it: striking, dramatic, gestural forms. Hadid’s winning plan for The Peak Club, for example, was like parallelograms from space jammed helter-skelter into the mountaintop. Architects became the rock stars of the art world. In a thousand exhibits, critical reviews and design competitions the word was out: a building is supposed to be – first and foremost – a bold, iconic and almost always personal statement.

Capitalism – especially the free-market, media-driven kind – rewards bold statements. And when an iconic statement can make money, it’s a match made in heaven. Frank Gehry’s bracing and now-familiar design for the Guggenheim in Bilbao attracted something like 1.4 million paying customers during the first year alone, and it wasn’t for the art inside (which included, for example, an exhibit of motorcycles). Those tourists spent almost $200 million in Bilbao. Corporate leaders and large public institutions got the message: a vivid design can symbolize your venture, attract attention, impart prestige and drive business your way. Hong Kong has attracted more than its share of high-profile starchitects since then, from Norman Foster (Hong Kong Bank Building), I M Pei (Bank of China) and Cesar Pelli (ifc, Cheung Kong Center). A prominent realtor quoted in the International Herald Tribune put it this way: “Hong Kong people love brand names.”

“Visuals are seductive,” says Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, who has spent the last several years analyzing the role of the celebrity architect. An attention-getting design, he explains, lends itself to marketing, magazine articles, design competitions and all of the ways that make an architect into a starchitect. It’s a lot harder to market what it’s like to actually use a building, the set of attributes architects call the “program.”

“We ask, ‘What about the inside?’ as a way to recapture the primacy of the experiential, situational qualities of a well-designed building” – something Mostafavi feels has gotten lost in all of the hype.

Programming a building takes a great deal of non-glamorous work. The architect and the client have to determine what the space is to be used for, how it is to be used, by whom, and under what circumstances. It’s far easier to serve up a predictable, personal signature design. “Of course that sets up a temptation to be stylistically fixed,” Mostafavi says. “And that can become a real problem.”

A standard-issue design can become a brand, which is what the starchitect has become. Even Zaha Hadid is now coming back, attaching her Pritzker Prize-winning credibility to the Innovation Tower, a 12,000sq m school of design building for Hong Kong Polytechnic University, due to open in 2011. Nobody pretends her high-rise needs a famous design (costing more than HK$400 million) for classrooms and studios. Rather, according to the chairman of the PolyU Council, Innovation Tower has a loftier purpose: to become “a driving force in the development of Hong Kong as a design hub in Asia.”

More brand name projects are on the way. Norman Foster lent his name to the Bel-Air No 8 residences in Pokfulam, the realty company marketing his name as heavily as Nike marketed Michael Jordan’s, with billboards featuring other Foster works such as the Great Court at the British Museum. The result: the Foster cachet added 30 percent to the apartment prices. Working here has become such a carrot to starchitects that Daniel Libeskind -– yes, the same one who said he would not work on any projects in China – accepted a US$100 million commission to design the media center for City University. (He carefully explained that Hong Kong is not really in China.)

There’s also a downside to working with a starchitect. Architects used to undergo lengthy apprenticeships before graduating to complete designs. By the time an architect attained recognition he frequently had 10 or more years of partial or unbuilt projects under his belt – years of meeting with clients, wrestling with project managers, designing and costing out window frames and all of the highly unglamorous tasks that architects used to endure as a matter of course. On the design end, he’s worked through the implications of a wide range of ideas, most of them prompted by the messy encounter between vision, purpose, practicality and – most of all – cost. By the time he gets a splashy commission he has significant amount of practical experience and a backlog of creative, mature ideas ready to be used.

The starchitect often has none or little of this. There are exceptions, such as the extremely prolific Foster who forged his craft the hard way – that is, designing and building buildings – and became famous only as he attracted commissions of a higher and higher profile. But Libeskind’s path to becoming a starchitect is instructive. Holding a postgraduate degree in architecture theory, he quit work as a practicing architect almost immediately after he started and spent a career as an architectural theorist and a professor. He generated a number of designs that were uniformly rejected as unbuildable or “unduly assertive.”

No wonder: design competitions start out with what’s supposed to be the final product of a long, intense collaboration. Meant for the rarified environment of the academy and the critics, they never involve the back-and-forth with the client that produces a building both useful and buildable. But they do attract attention from the critical elite. Libeskind became so famous in this setting that he attained a worldwide notoriety without costing out a single window frame. And fame attracted commissions. By the time he completed his first building he was 52. The next year he scored a major international success, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, in 1998. Commissions flooded in from all over the world – big ones, for high-profile projects. But Libeskind, according to a number of observers, had spent all of his ideas on his first big project and nothing left to say.

An architect’s vision used to be tempered by his feel for materials and construction practices. Eero Saarinen, for example, originally trained as a furniture maker and was famous for his hands-on craftsmanship. The advent of computerized tools for modeling and design kicked away all of the limitations. It was suddenly possible for an architect with limited practical experience and modest drafting skills to turn out quite fantastical shapes, and in massive scale. Gehry’s undulating, almost organic forms with high-tech skins would be impossible otherwise. This is the kind of sculptural presence clients want when they hire a starchitect. Such designs place almost unfathomable demands on the actual nuts and bolts of putting a world-class building together. It’s no surprise that they sometimes don’t hold together.

Consider Gehry’s phantasmagorical Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston. Such a wildly imaginative structure would be inconceivable on a drafting table. Named one of the “hottest” campus buildings in the US, the Stata Center is an exuberant pastiche of shapes, colors, materials and angles, with columns that teeter and windows that bulge. There’s not a right angle or a straight line to be seen. Architecture critic Robert Campbell says “everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That’s the point. The Stata’s appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring and creativity of the research that’s supposed to occur inside it.”

All of this daring, however, comes at a cost. Before long the unusual shapes began to do unusual things. Drains backed up, masonry cracked, mold grew and falling ice blocked the emergency exits. Just last fall MIT sued Gehry and the construction company, Skanska USA Building Inc, for “providing deficient design services and drawings.” The resulting flurry of paperwork depicts a complex web of relationships between architect, builder, contractor and client. Rather than pointing the finger at any one party, the record suggests that this kind of thing may be inevitable in such a complex structure.

Sometimes it’s hard to hide the failures in odd-shaped iconic buildings. Libeskind’s jagged sliver of an addition to the Denver Art Museum has had workmen on the roof struggling to find the leaks ever since it opened. The Walt Disney Concert Hall’s arching, curvy, shiny surfaces became unintentional parabolic mirrors heating up nearby buildings, requiring exacting and expensive refinishing. Far more often, the inevitable problems in construction and fabrication never reach the public eye, but simply jack up the costs. But it’s unfair to criticize the celebrity architect for courting such things when their clients pay heavily for buildings that burst the envelope.

How to build an icon

The rewards of a starchitectdesigned building can be worth the trouble. It can embody a spirit and a set of values that helps any enterprise stand out from the crowd. A few pointers:

Don’t be intimidated.
“I’ve seen many passionate, articulate clients cowed into submission by celebrity architects because they don’t want to seem like hicks,” says Reed Kroloff, former editor of Architecture magazine and one of America’s top few consultants on architect selection. He advises clients to say no to a starchitect when the chemistry isn’t right.

Decide what you want.
Come prepared with information on use patterns, job functions and demographics. And make sure it comes from the mouths of the building’s occupants. “Clients tend to assume that because they pay the bills they know everything that goes on,” Kroloff says. “Sometimes they are the last to learn.”

Hire a local program manager.
Only a handful of celebrity architects – Norman Foster foremost among them – maintain a fully staffed back office with all of the specialized functions needed to shepherd a project to completion. If you’re hiring a celebrity architect to get the iconic design you want, keep a tight handle on the business end of the engagement.

Concentrate on programming.
According to Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, star architects do not necessarily have this expertise. Programming is actually a rarified subspecialty of the field – one you don’t necessarily get around to if you’re jetting around the world.

Be patient with the deliberate pace of collaboration.
Business people here can forget that Hong Kong is one of the fastest-paced places on earth. Outsiders aren’t used to it. Decisions that take days here can take weeks for an overseas firm, especially one with extensive back-office operations.

Be explicit about your budget.
Many starchitects work in the realm of publicly financed projects and are accustomed to significant overruns. The result: a surprising number of projects get cancelled late in the design process or even during construction.

Hold an extra 10 percent in reserve.
Don’t forget that you hired the celebrity architect to do things that have never been done before. The more a building pushes the envelope, the more likely it will require unproven materials or techniques. Mostafavi advises bringing in a cost estimator at the early stages of the project.

Don’t forget the face.
Make it a strict requirement that the starchitect appear at your side on the red carpet at the ribbon cutting. As the flash bulbs pop and your rivals gawk in admiration, you’ll know you made the right choice.