According to the Wall Street Journal, Ian Schrager has fallen out of love with Philippe Starck. After 15 years in which Starck has transformed the look of the modern hotel, hard times have hit the Schrager hotel chain, which stretches from San Francisco to London. New economy types are out of a job, and the bankers who still travel wouldn’t be seen dead in a Starck hotel anymore. ‘In lean times like this, on a business trip, you are not seen as a serious player in a hotel that accentuates the fun and the frivolous,’ says the Journal. As a result, Schrager is having to cut his prices, appeal to more conservative customers and change the look of the hotels. Schrager puts it bluntly: ‘I’m giving access to my hotels to some segments that I haven’t given access to before. People want traditional rooms – I’m learning that’. What they don’t want, Schrager suggests, is the kind of lightweight plastic chairs that Starck designed for the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, so light that they tip over when you hang your jacket over the back. Starck’s famous Paramount is in for a facelift, too. ‘From now on things are going to be more comfortable, and not quite so provocative, and there will be more light’. And it won’t be Starck who is doing the facelift.
The Journal claims that ‘Schrager says he is thinking of ending his partnership with Philippe Starck’. Heaven knows what he would have done if he had actually started building the Astor Place hotel by Koolhaas and Herzog and de Meuron, who were canned last year. These are not, of course, the first designers to have found their services dispensed with abruptly. Koolhaas was shown the door two weeks after the Astor Place project was unveiled to the press. Frank Gehry then had a shot at the tower, but now work has ground to a halt. Meanwhile, Schrager is talking about buying an 800-bedroom casino in Las Vegas and doing it over in Frank Sinatra/Rat Pack style, provided that he can get over the hurdle of his tax-fraud conviction from the Studio 54 days.

The New York Post’s gossip columnist, Neal Travis, reports that after a month-long flirtation, Robert Hughes has finally rejected overtures from Italy to take on the job of director of next year’s Venice Biennale: ‘Life’s too short to waste fooling around with ditherers’. According to the Post, Hughes is complaining that the visual arts biennale is a shambles, and he wonders whether it will happen at all. Meanwhile, Hughes’s film on Goya was shown on British television last week. In one of its more memorable moments, he turned to the camera while standing in front of the naked Maja and confided to his audience that he would personally have preferred a little more pink on the left breast.

Domus contributor Rowan Moore has published a lengthy and sharply observed polemic on Norman Foster in the London monthly Prospect. ‘Foster is popular because he supplies the look of innovation without the pain of actually changing anything. The establishment likes him because he lets it feel daring at minimal emotional expense, he is the purveyor of radical architecture for people who want no such thing’, writes Moore. He goes on to suggest that ‘When the burghers of Cardiff were plotting to oust Zaha Hadid from the job of designing their opera house, they asked Foster to present an alternative scheme – despite Richard Rogers’ pleas that this was unfair on Hadid, Foster sent in designs just the same’. In the New York Times, the launch of the American edition the Harvard Guide to Shopping was the chance for a public acknowledgement that little of the fat volume was actually written by Rem Koolhaas. Daniel Herman, a former post-graduate student of Koolhaas’s responsible for seven of its chapters gets a page to himself in the ‘House and Home’ section of the Times, which he uses to lambaste the reluctance of serious architects to engage with shopping. He suggests that things are changing, however, pointing inevitably to Prada’s new store in New York, while adopting a note of caution. ‘The individual stores may or may not succeed. But they have already succeeded in bringing a level of seriousness to the undertaking of creating shopping space’. As evidence he suggests that ‘For the first time the architecture schools are offering shopping studios, Rem started that at Harvard and other schools have followed. So architecture students are no longer being taught that good architects only do housing and museums. Mr. Gregotti will be horrified. The real legacy may be that after Rem it will be safe for architects who want to be thought of as cool to do designs for shopping’. It’s a moot point, and one that seems to betray a serious memory lapse. What, for example, about Esprit, which hired Ettore Sottsass, Shiro Kuramata, Norman Foster and Antonio Citterio, among others, long before Koolhaas ever managed to find his way into a shopping mall?