As part of Verge Hack Week, Verge'has invited great minds from around Vox Media to contribute their thoughts on the future of everything — from food to fashion to the written word. In this installment, Verge welcome Curbed senior editor Amy Schellenbaum.

Architecture is largely a discipline that sits on stilts, away from the floodlands of the people that use it in everyday life. These supports, which keep the art and science of building design (and, to some extent, the appreciation of buildings themselves) accessible primarily to card-carrying intellectuals, were erected, consciously or otherwise, in the last forty years by a team of masterful thinkers and artists (starchitects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid) and journalists who are quick to glamorize the field (like, say, by using terms like "starchitects").