Witold Rybczynski asks a good question:

Witold Rybczynski asks Why do they award the Pritzker Prize to just one person? (basically the same question I asked here in Look what I built):

The Pritzker Prize promotes the fiction that buildings spring from the imagination of an individual architect—the master builder.

It galls and amuses me too when I read an article which states that "X architect built Y." The architect did no such thing but acted as part of a team, though presumably the team captain.

Comments

[keith]

Great article and even better question. It's one that hits close to home: I worked as a structural engineer designing individual connections on the "starchitect" Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum (I can comfortably say that I personally designed at least half of the connections in the entire building, and maybe more). Even as an entry level engineer, I was cognizant of the fact that the "real" work was being done by the "production architects", the structural engineer of record, my former firm, the steel detailer, and the contractor (Davis Architects, Arup, SCI, Dowco, and Mortenson, respectively). However, the cover of the January 2007 issue of Architecural Record still only reads "Libeskind Lands in Downtown Denver."

[phaedrus]

While hundreds or thousands of people contribute to a buildings ultimate form, in any well built building there is more often than not, a single concept that springs forward from a single mind. Thisis why you can look at at building built by 'starchitects' like van de Roe, Gerhy, Lloyd Wright, Neutra, Libeskind, Alsop, etc and know exactly who was the architect. In most cases the same can't be said for the rest of the team.