Renzo Piano comes from a family of builders in Genoa, and his firm is called Renzo Piano Building Workshop, as if he weren't a superstar architect but just your friendly neighborhood problem solver.

ONLY two years ago, three major Hartford cultural institutions had big plans for renovation and expansion projects involving superstar architects.

With its vivid earth tones and design by the superstar architect, Michael Graves, Clos Pegase is an amalgam of Tuscan, Egyptian and Northern European lines.

And since this is Switzerland, Herzog & de Meuron, the superstar architects from Basel, can't be left out.

Museum staff members frequently say that a backlash is likely to set in among curators who assume that only superstar architects and wealthy patrons will get to call the shots when designs are chosen.

Wright was perhaps the first superstar architect of the West to build in Japan, and one of many Western architects to have gone east to find fame and fortune.

A revival by the Pearl Theater Company succeeds mainly through a fine performance by Dan Daily as Halvard Solness, the superstar architect of the title and one of Ibsen's most complex characters.

Mr. Chiat also had two of Mr. Gehry's fellow superstar architects, Rem Koolhaas and Gaetano Pesce, create, respectively, London and New York offices.

So his partners in the downtown development, he said, expected him to come up with a list of superstar architects to renovate the building.

It has the airy lightness of Dulles International Airport - not surprising, considering that its superstar architect, Cesar Pelli, once worked for Eero Saarinen, the designer of Dulles.