The past couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of avant garde architectural projects designed to put specific cities on the cultural map. Celebrity architects have been given free rein to create construction eye-candy that will act as a both tourist magnet and aesthetic ambassador. The big daddy of them all, and probably the inspiration for the many unorthodox buildings that have followed, was Paris’s Centre Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers; often cited, with much justification, as a 20th-century architectural marvel.