Starchitects Designing More Than Just Buildings

"With the real estate boom all but over and skittish property developers breaking ground on fewer glitzy projects, architects from London to Los Angeles are finding creative ways to stay in the spotlight and extend their brands. The creative outlets of today’s star designers are departures from the side projects undertaken by notable architects of the past like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, who generally designed furnishings and home interiors when not creating buildings.

Norman Foster, the leading British architect who designed the Hearst Tower in New York, has added yachts to his résumé, recently creating a string of vessels for luxury boating company YachtPlus. Frank Gehry, mastermind of the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is employing materials such as black gold and oxidized silver to expand his already popular line of jewelry for Tiffany. And Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win a Pritzker Prize, has put her name on stainless-steel vases for Italian kitchenware company Alessi."