The problematization of ‘star architecture’ in architecture research

ABSTRACT

Despite of the growth of the body of scholarly literature on the topic star architecture, few articles cite publications of architectural research on the topic. The scholarly discussion of star architecture is only marginally influenced by the problematizations specific to the architecture field. This paper presents findings of a systematic quantitative literature review of the topic star architecture. By searching Scopus and Avery databases using relevant keywords, a total of 365 English language articles published between 1997 and 2019 were identified. Following the analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords of these articles as well as the affiliations of authors, we categorized these articles according to their fields of research, types of research and applied research methods. Our findings indicate that the theoretical and methodological foundations of research on star architecture within the field of architecture are weak if compared to all other fields of study. Despite the significant number of articles within the architecture field, more than half of these articles do not receive any citations. Our findings confirm that the voices and perspectives of the architecture field contribute only marginally to the scholarly discussion of star architecture.

KEYWORDS:

• star architecture
• systematic literature review
• bilbao effect
• pritzker

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emil Oldenburg for his support in undertaking the bibliographic coupling analysis. We also would like to thank Georgia Lindsay, Matt Patterson, Diane Arvanitakis and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).