ABSTRACT
The cultural capital of some so-called starchitects is exploited by and for clients around the globe, who believe that they will benefit from a building that bears a recognisable architectural signature. But cultural value should not be reduced to this single mode of production. Without getting bogged down in too much history, it is worth recalling some of the broadest architectural trends of the twentieth century, as this helps to contextualise and explain the emergence of today’s cultural architect. Architectural cultural production was for much of the twentieth century underwritten by a belief in the disciplinary purity of practice. This peaked in the post-war period and was increasingly challenged from the 1960s onwards. While the land artists deliberately turned their backs on the gallery system to make work outdoors, other artists were expanding art’s response to the gallery system itself, leading to the emergence of alternative art spaces and practices that are known as ‘institutional critique’.
