Star architecture projects and their effects: tracing the evidence

Since the inauguration of the Guggenheim-Museum Bilbao in 1997 many studies have examined the impact of star architecture projects. Most of these are individual case studies that focus on single effects, treating star architecture projects as monolithic entities. Furthermore, they fail to explain which precise aspects of these projects generate effects, so it remains unclear how they “work”. We have applied a conceptual impact model to two case studies–the Culture and Convention Centre in Lucerne (KKL) and the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg and divided the projects into four outputs: the building, the function, the offerings of star architecture, and the actor-network, to analyse how these outputs generate socio-cultural, touristic and urban regeneration effects. The paper demonstrates that the different outputs of the projects produce a case-specific set of effects. Despite the differences between the two projects, the paper identifies common patterns of how star architecture projects generate effects.