Stars, Swatches, and Sweets

Architects tend to refer to themselves as visual people. Though we often employ this as an excuse for our poor writing skills, it also points out our fascination with visual information, our interest in making sense out of visual relation­ ships and our love for making things that are under­ stood largely in visual, as well as visceral, terms. Lately however—perhaps because I have been writing more than designing—I have been thinking about those aspects of our profession that are less visible, such as the economic conditions of production, and how they relate to that which is made highly visible, such as the Star System. I'm referring to the structure of contem­ porary architectural practice and the way in which its discourse elevates certain designers to the status of stars. The stars' works, published in magazines and monographs, are what Pierre Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital" in a global system. As status symbols, the buildings are valued for their ability to portray their patrons as world-class consumers. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona are prime examples of this. The Star System's high visibility aesthetics of consumption appears to be linked to the visual suppression of the conditions of production. This is particularly true today because of the way post-industrial technologies and post-fordist economic practices have widened the gap between production and consumption. Though this gap is most evident in items of mass production, from elec­ tronics to clothing, it may also explain why the Star System has emerged with such force in architecture in recent decades.