From left: Frank Gehry, Bruce Ratner and 8 Spruce Street

Ever notice that many of the most successful skyscraper architects are short in stature? Slate’s Witold Rybczynski rattles off several examples of starchitects who always seem to be shorter than the developers they’re posing next to: I.M. Pei, Robert A.M. Stern, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster. Daniel Libeskind, he said, is 5 feet 4 inches. In the 1920s, designers Raymond Hood, of 30 Rock, Ely Jacques Kahn, of 2 Park Avenue, and Ralph Walker, of 1 Wall Street, were apparently often referred to as the “Three Little Napoleons of Architecture.” As Rybcynski puts it, “it’s hard not to see a psychological compulsion at work when short people design tall…buildings.” [Slate] [more]

From left: Frank Gehry and Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner

Frank Gehry is fired up about a lot of things these days, the least of which being the semantics his fame inspires. “I don’t know who invented that f*cking word ‘starchitect,’” Gehry told the Independent. “I am not a ‘starchitect,’ I am an architect.” He was not nearly so cantankerous on the subject of his ousting from the Atlantic Yards development, however, a move made by developer Bruce Ratner that riled community members. The problem, according to Gehry, came “down to a set of opposing interests that blocked the project.”

From the June issue: Robert A.M. Stern is dean of the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Conn., and founder of Robert A.M. Stern Architects. The firm designed 15 Central Park West, the limestone condominium where total sales topped $2 billion, making it the most successful apartment building in the world. Stern spoke to The Real Deal about his feelings about the term “starchitect,” not being confused with Brad Pitt and traveling to Vienna this summer. [more]

This past week, Mexican starchitect Enrique Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos announced that he had designed no fewer than four new projects for New York City.

That is surely interesting and would be even more exciting were it not for the fact that Norten’s noble and elaborate plans for buildings in the Big Apple have a strange, meandering way of coming up empty and then fizzling out.

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