starchitect

plural starchitects

1. informalA celebrity architect.

   Despite this starchitect presence, Quito is not Manhattan and La Carolina is not Central Park.

   2025 May 31, Edwin Heathcote, “A new angle on Quito”, in FT Weekend (House & Home section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 10

   2 more examples

   Others are timelessly provocative; the stacked tubes of “Museum Design Based on a Cigarette Package” might have been dreamed up by a starchitect.

   2009 May 8, Karen Rosenberg, “A Low-Cost Show Reinflates a Big Bag”, in New York Times

   Gehry is more than an architect—he is a starchitect, a neologism coined to describe the small band of elite international architects whose personal brands transcend their buildings.

   2012, Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, New York: The Penguin Press, page 104