Whatever Happened to the Architect Groupies? : In the ‘80s, a group of designers had their 15 minutes of fame, making the profession a form of pop culture. But ‘starchitects’ are no more. They’ve fallen back into ‘decent obscurity.’

In the history of American architecture, probably only Frank Lloyd Wright, who died in 1959, and New York socialite architect Stanford White ever really penetrated the wide public consciousness. And White was famous less for his abilities as a designer than for having been shot to death in 1906 by the husband of his 16-year-old mistress.

Then, in the go-go 1980s, a funny thing happened to American architects: They became media stars. More precisely, a select group of designers--dubbed “starchitects”--became familiar to the sophisticated, trend-following public.

Arata Isozaki, designer of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1986, dressed in a dazzlingly fashionable striped shirt by Issey Miyake. In 1989, the sly / demure visage of I.M. Pei, architect of the Louvre Pyramid and the Creative Artists Agency building in Beverly Hills, peered out from the pages of Vanity Fair, which crowned him “the most famous architect in the world.” As they became trademark names, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves--who a decade earlier was an obscure Princeton academic--and others were commissioned to design everything from watches and teapots to bed linens and birdhouses.

But the audience that follows entertainment trends is notoriously fickle, and architecture is far too slow and cumbersome a commodity to come up with new fashions every season. Now, deep into the ‘90s, it has become evident that American architects have lost their media luster.

In the Age of Celebrity, oddly enough, architects have faded into the background. Within the profession, some are worried that this will lead to dull design but it is mostly taken with studied humility. At the same time, the development shines an interesting light on aesthetic and other values in our time.

“We were famous for 15 minutes, as Andy Warhol promised,” Michael Rotondi, dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), said ruefully. “Now we’ve returned to the decent obscurity we deserve.”

Gehry ascribes the sudden burst of media interest to two factors. “One reason was the hunger of a profession absolutely starved for public attention. The other was the rise of the variety of styles thrown together under the heading of Postmodernism, which made architecture more fun.”

Gehry cites Philip Johnson’s landmark 1984 AT & T building in Manhattan as the watershed in architecture’s newfound trendiness. Johnson, a pillar of the Modernist establishment and a brilliant self-promoter, shocked the purists by capping the AT & T tower with an eccentric cap shaped like the top of a Chippendale sideboard.

“Architecture became sexy in the mid-1980s because it was suddenly controversial,” said Richard Meier, designer of the majestic, $700-million Getty Center nearing completion in Brentwood. “Its sexiness was part of a wider cultural phenomenon that included in its forward rush painting, sculpture and such things as performance art. For better or worse, architecture, like the other arts, became a form of entertainment, a branch of show biz.”

Today, though, the editors of the glossies are much less interested in commissioning profiles of leading designers or in following architectural trends. Graves, Gehry and Meier might still be interviewed by such high-end talk shows as PBS’ “Charlie Rose,” but it’s several years since Vanity Fair or People have profiled a prominent architect.

“Once architects were co-opted by the glossies, they became subject to the short attention span that governs the life of all trends,” said Kendell Cronstrom, features editor of Elle Decor. “Today the fascination’s moved on to new idols, to techies like Bill Gates.” Cronstrom says the lack of interest Vanity Fair showed in Larry Gagosian’s new gallery in Beverly Hills, designed by Meier, was a prime example of architecture’s current low celebrity status. “A few years ago VF would’ve been all over the Gagosian opening.”

Interestingly, American designers are still celebrated abroad. Gehry reports being mobbed by a crowd of fans on a recent visit to Milan, and in Japan, American avant-garde architects are still given star treatment. “Designs by certain architects hold a certain cachet,” Graves said. “Something like baseball, which the Japanese also love.”

At home, however, the designer’s moment in the spotlight has passed. “For architects, the cult of personality raging in the ‘80s is now way down,” declared public relations consultant Chris Northrup, who has promoted the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects for several years. “It’s significant that a number of magazines dealing with design have gone out of circulation in the last few years, including Angeles and Designer’s West locally, and H.G. nationally.”

Judy Skalsky, a Los Angeles media consultant, said the rise and fall of the starchitect syndrome is mostly due to the fluctuation in the number of dollars available for promotion.

“In the mid-1980s, high-style furniture manufacturers such as Steelcase and lighting firms such as Artemide discovered that name designers were marketable commodities. They spent a lot of money promoting these designers through advertising in magazines and through the kind of symposiums mounted at the annual ‘Westweek’ spectaculars held at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. During the recession this flow of funds dried up,” she said.

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SCI-Arc’s Rotondi sees a significant shift in the focus of architecture since the waning of its public glamour. In the past few years students and faculty at SCI-Arc have broadened their focus to include much more of a social agenda, he said.

“To some extent it’s due to the decline in the economy and the consequent changes in attitude in this less greedy and affluent decade. Students and practicing professionals are more obsessed with sheer economic survival. At the same time, they now have more of a conscience about urban and environmental issues. They see that we’re running out of land, that we can’t keep on sprawling over the horizon, that the quality of the air we breathe has to be improved, especially here in Southern California.”

Commercial development slowed to a crawl in the recession, causing many architects and their students to shift their attention to more socially conscious areas, like public education and affordable housing. Large firms such as downtown’s A.C. Martin & Associates, whose offices were once humming with commissions to design office high-rises, have had to drastically reduce their staffs. At the same time, they have begun to compete for the modest public projects, such as police stations and schools, they largely ignored in the ‘80s.

Today, the cachet of being a starchitect is far less likely to win a designer a commission. “As far as architecture’s status goes, we’re in the trough,” Meier said. “Today, even if there is an article about me somewhere, it doesn’t mean the phone rings, as it used to. There just isn’t the same cultural interest in architects, and that’s disheartening. It means we have far less opportunity to experiment.”

Another example of the previous power of architectural stardom and its fading is downtown’s stalled Disney Hall project. In 1988, when Gehry won the limited competition, it was widely believed that his rising international celebrity had clinched his triumph. “We couldn’t continue to deny a local hero the chance to create a major public building in his hometown,” MOCA Director Richard Koshalek, a member of the selection jury, declared at the time. “Gehry’s fame is L.A.’s fame.”

Today, seven years later, Gehry’s fame seems to count for little in attracting the estimated $100 million-plus needed to build his potential masterpiece. The Disney family made a generous gift of the first $100 million seven years ago, but now the cost increases common in such complex projects have more or less doubled the price tag. Gehry says he’s still hopeful the extra funds will be found, but some observers are skeptical.

For some designers, stardom brought confidence. Others, like Gehry, claim it was an embarrassment. “It’s nice the world was interested in architecture--but I’m no rock star,” he said. “Sometimes the celebrity thing made me cringe.”

A totally negative view of the fame syndrome is expressed by Robert Twombly, a professor at City College of New York, in his new book, “Power and Style” (Hill & Wang). Twombly argues that the previous popularity of brand-name architects was due to the vulgarization of architecture into a commodity sold as a status symbol, like designer jeans. Highly visible architects such as Johnson and Pei “were willing collaborators in the commodification process, and with good reason,” Twombly writes. “The mass marketing of things architectural, as opposed to architecture itself, became a handsome source of supplemental income in the 1980s.”

Yet few architects become rich through designing buildings alone. Personal extravagance is rare among architects, even among those who were hot properties on the glamour circuit. Unlike their depiction in popular movies such as “Indecent Proposal,” architects’ offices are seldom grandiose or even particularly sleek. Gehry works out of a converted warehouse in Santa Monica, and Meier’s offices in New York and Westwood are symphonies of severe simplicity.

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The era of starchitecture had some prominent casualties beyond merely frayed egos. Boston-based the Architects Collaborative, founded by a team led by Modernist master Walter Gropius in 1945 and once one of the biggest practices in the country, closed in April. It was a tradition of TAC, which designed the national headquarters of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C., to stress teamwork over individual stardom. “We were too low key and diffident in a time of rampant egos,” said one former principal.

For a few, celebrity led to disaster: The career of gifted Canadian architect Arthur Erickson is a prime example. Based in Vancouver in the 1960s and ‘70s, Erickson gained a growing respect as a talented Modernist designer and in 1986 was awarded the AIA’s prestigious gold medal for his lifetime achievement.

The then-60-year-old architect was profiled in the New Yorker and gained high-profile commissions in Washington and the Middle East. Carried away on a bubble of fame and ambition, he opened offices in Toronto and Los Angeles and designed the California Plaza Towers on Bunker Hill and the San Diego Convention Center. At the height of his glory, Erickson drove a $200,000 Maserati, was invited to party on William F. Buckley Jr.’s yacht and established lavish homes in Malibu, Bel-Air and New York’s Fire Island. He also helped run his firm into bankruptcy.

Today, Erickson has reverted to the modest lifestyle he favored before he became glamorous. His Los Angeles and Toronto offices are closed, and he has been reduced to the status of consultant to his former practice in Vancouver.

“I feel a twinge of guilt about the haphazard, nondirected course my life has taken,” Erickson, in a recent interview, confessed.