Starchitects, the old and the new

Starchitects, what makes a starchitect?
A starchitect is an architect who's fame and genius has transcended them into something akin to an idol for the world of architecture.  

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A while back I did a project for my architecture course that was to analyse a building, many of the buildings that my colleagues were given were famous houses designed by big name architects, (to name a couple there was the experimental house by Alvar Aalto and the Esherick house by Louis Khan). However, I was one of the few who was given a building that very few knew about and it was incredibly hard to research.

The building was called the Asem Pa by David Adjaye who is a phenomenal architect be it decades younger than many of the other architects that were listed in this project (Design: Autopsy).

But alas, this unfortunate event fortunately made me wonder about all the smaller architects, who are geniuses but relatively unknown,  no one sees their names on the papers, no one really knows who they are. Why is that?

The point of this blog isn't for me to say that the old architects aren't important, the old architects are important towards the history and growth of architecture but they're only just the tip of the iceberg, there are plenty of innovative designers who are phenomenal at their craft but we rarely hear about, for example Maya Lin, who won the competition for the design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whilst still an undergraduate, we have architects like her who live today but we don't really hear much about. A new generation of brilliant architects that are overshadowed by the architects of the past.


https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/vietnam-veterans-memorial


Now I'm not saying that we should ignore the great architects of the past but that we should embrace the newer generations of architects as well and learn from them as they are living and breathing amongst us. 

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