In Dubai, a luxurious residential building is constructed in the shape of a giant iPod. In Beijing, Herzog and de Meuron are building the "Bird's Nest" stadium. In Cincinnati, Zaha Hadid is paid millions to design a "landmark" building in hopes that she alone will change the fate of an entire region.

"Starchitects" compete in designing increasingly monumental, striking, and extravagant buildings that radically transform the surrounding landscape: Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Norman Foster's "Gherkin," Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Over the past fifty years, a true revolution has taken place in the life of our cities.

Tom Dyckhoff (b. 1971), a British architecture and urbanism critic, narrates its progress and outcomes with expertise, flair, and humor. By exploring urban landscapes from New York to Beijing, from Bilbao to Astana, he demonstrates that we are not merely witnessing the emergence of a new type of building; we are living through a fundamental transformation of how modern spaces function in entrepreneurial cities.