As our celebrated architects sign off, we should resist the urge to replace them
The late Frank Gehry was the ultimate starchitect, but even he knew that designing buildings takes teamwork, writes Matthew Bovingdon-Downe.
As our celebrated architects sign off, we should resist the urge to replace them. Our focus on charismatic or otherwise exceptional people means that we overlook the inherently group-oriented and gregarious nature of architectural practice.
The "starchitect" was a figment of media attention, drummed up to answer our interest in celebrity, and our exaggerated expectations of what might be achieved without the help of other people. It belongs to a deluded, more decadent age. An age of "great men", and "free credit". Of "upward mobility", and the slim possibility of being "self-made".
The myth of pure creative autonomy, and attribution, is something we can't seem to kick
Some 30 years on, wearied by austerity, and wise – occasionally – to hype, we know that if stars appear to twinkle, it is largely owing to the atmospheric fug through which we see them. Architecture has become so distorted by the mechanisms of publicity and preferment that all but a few players go unnoticed, and under-served.
On consideration, the very idea of starchitects seems frankly antisocial. The share of skills and influence in the industry was always more nebulous than reports led us to believe. But for some reason the myth of pure creative autonomy, and attribution, is something we can't seem to kick.
Frank Gehry was one of only a few architects ever to excite any interest outside architecture itself. You didn't have to know much about architecture to enjoy his work.
Like all great art, you could like it for the wrong reasons. But the more you learned, the better you realised he was, and in ways that often complicated that early enjoyment.
Gehry was the architect's starchitect. His early work proves the guarantor of his later credit. We welcome the reminder in Johan Dehlin's superb photographic study of the houses, that he was blessed – long before Bilbao – with an instinct for articulate form.
In a recent essay on these projects in his book Dirty Old River, Tom Emerson locates Gehry's genius in his having enlisted ordinary construction methods to extravagant ends. It is this ability to draw on the skills of other people, to delegate, to give instructions, or – in AI parlance – prompts, that is key to Gehry's great contribution.
Like all great architects, Gehry knew that you can't go it alone
At a slant to the industry standard, he sought always to make his work intelligible, and managed to do so without diminishing its magic. Crucially, he made "Architecture" available to those who build it.
Cutting through the puff and clamour since his death, we see the occasional tribute which tells of a genial, unpretentious person. An architect who, in spite of the persistent efforts of his apologists, dismissed claims of exceptional insight, and repeatedly made public the debt he owed to technology, and those who could wield it for him.
Like all great architects, Gehry knew that you can't go it alone. Buildings are like babies – it takes a village, as they say, to raise them.
The larger part of an architect's time is spent not in the throes of creative inspiration, but coordinating the work of a growing list of consultants. Emails, essentially. We are not, as the humble brag holds, generalists. Properly speaking, we collect specialists – as the lengthening credits on each new project will attest.
There may be avenues in professional life which allow for some measure of self determination. A career in architecture is no longer one of them.
Architectural practice today has more to do with delegation than design. Consequently the press, the public, your competitors, even your colleagues, have such a hand in how things go, that in most cases your work will only be as successful as others want or allow it to be.
The established model of the architect as independent creative genius has had its day
This might sound less than favourable, particularly to those who entertain the common and highly marketable delusion that they can have a decisive influence in their own success. But for those of us who aspire to a more cooperative, less competitive working life, there's encouragement in it: architecture entails company.
The established model of the architect as independent creative genius has had its day. Rather than lament that fact, we should embrace it.
The new architect is among other things, more sociable. They acknowledge the importance of putting together teams of people in diverse ways more capable than they are. More than this, they create the appropriate conditions for those people to flourish, and contribute in a meaningful way to the production of good work.
Such is our weakness for individuals, and so phobic our attitudes to anonymity, that we routinely misallocate the credit for said work. We cleave to the idea of authorship, and overlook the thousand minor contributions made by others. We still believe that the greatest achievements are made by exceptional people, in flight from compromise.
But we should resist this tendency, because the flip side is something more open and equitable. We must keep in our minds the idea of confederacy, or common aim. Of shared purpose. We must get wise to the eminently and ideally collaborative nature of architecture. We must learn to revere projects, not persons.
Matthew Bovingdon-Downe is a designer and writer based in London.
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