ABSTRACT
In this essay, Leslie Sklair, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, analyzes the impact of globalized architectural practices on our cities. The 1990s and 2000s marked the emergence of “starchitects”—a small group of elite architects very much sought after by both private and public clients to design signature buildings. Starchitects and their designs can have tremendous branding effect in marketing properties. One well-known example is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry in the late 1990s, which has helped revitalize the city and which continues to draw millions of tourists annually. These well-connected, highly mobile elite architects may be small in number, but they have delivered a significant number of high-profile buildings around the world. Drawing upon his previous work on the transnational capitalist class, Sklair examines the four fractions of the transnational class in architectural practice: the corporate, the state, the professional, and the consumerist. He describes how the four groups interact with one another and how the built environment is increasingly shaped by the rise of the global architectural design network of prestigious architects, firms, and globalizing local patrons.
