With the rise of starchitect culture in recent decades, there has been a subsequent rise in the number of museums designed by celebrity architects. (It was believed that if a big name was behind a building, it would attract more attention, and in turn, visitors. Makes sense.) Click through to check out 10 of the most eye-catching modern museums on the planet — including a few that are still currently in progress — and we think you’ll see why it works.

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Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UK rattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, contrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the jump.

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While you might not be racking up the frequent flier miles of George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham character from Up in the Air, odds are that you’re going to be catching a flight somewhere in the coming weeks. And that there will be massive delays. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing: We consider these seven beautiful airport terminals from around the world the kind of places an architecture geek wouldn’t mind getting stuck in — for a few hours at least.

Which aesthetically pleasing hubs did we miss?

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Lord Richard Rogers of Rogers Stirk Harbour +Partners has rebounded from a year of scrapping with Prince Charles to take the prestigious annual RIBA Stirling Prize — it’s like the Booker or the Turner, but for British architects. The firm’s design for Maggie’s Centre, a cancer rehabilitation annex connected to Charing Cross Hospital in central London, was lauded by the jury for its non-clinical nature: “It could be a private house in a Finnish forest instead of a health building.” The award-winning building was actually one of two Rogers designs nominated for the prize and follows the firm’s 2006 win for the Barajas Airport in Madrid. Full photo set, plus bonus video, after the jump. Read More »

1. Twitter trumps the mainstream media in its streaming coverage of the Iranian protests, in which 7 people were killed yesterday. (The service even postponed an important upgrade.) Also, read this. [via Brietbart]

2. After losing an advertiser and on the verge of a 2-year contract renewal, David Letterman apologized to Sarah Palin on his show last night — for reals this time. (video) [via The Live Feed]

3. James Murphy isn’t producing the new Devo album, but he’d like to work with them. So would Justice and Fatboy Slim. [via Pop & Hiss]

4. Next month Taschen will release Norman Mailer’s first posthumously published book, Moonfire. It will cost $1000, and comes with a signed photo of Buzz Aldrin. Twelve copies will also come with a chunk of the moon. [via Publishers Weekly]

5. Architect Richard Rogers, who was fired from the multibillion pound Chelsea Barracks project in London last week, wants an investigation into Prince Charles’ “unconstiutional” involvment. [via The Guardian]

It’s hard to be an architect in the UK, where as far as Prince Charles is concerned, all architecture since 1700 — lumped together as “modern,” a word as uselessly vague in describing architecture as it is in describing art — should never have been built. Good ol’ Carbuncle Charlie announced his position in 1984 in a now infamous speech at Hampton Court. From the 17th-century hall designed by Sir Christopher Wren (of St. Paul’s fame) Prince Charles spat at a proposed addition to the National Gallery, calling it a “monstrous carbuncle.” Since then, he’s called the British Library a secret police academy, the National Theatre a nuclear power station, and pretty much all new development in the city “not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners.” Mumbai slums, he said, “provide a better model for housing a booming urban population in the developing world than western architecture.” Read More »