Introduction and background Appraising the intrinsic value of art and design objects is a fascinating yet difficult endeavor, due to the high degree of subjectivity involved in assessing the aesthetic quality of the objects. Baumol (1986) argues that art investments are peculiar in that demand and supply levels do not adjust to equilibrium level and thus tend to drift aimlessly because of their inherent lack of use value. While Baumol concludes that art is not an attractive investment, later studies find a distinct albeit volatile growth pattern for art objects over the past fifty years (Goetzmann, 1993; Mei and Moses, 2002). Generally, architecture can be said to occupy a middle position between pure use value and pure aesthetic value. While it manifestly incorporates elements of aesthetics, it also responds to social, economic, and organizational needs such as provision of shelter and workplaces, viability as an investment asset, etc (Rendell, 2006). When acquiring real estate assets designed by signature architects, investors are buying both the rights to future income streams and, what many may perceive to be, a work of art. While equilibrium values for the future income streams are anchored in economic fundamentals such as construction costs, demand, and cost of capital, the work of art has no basis for estimating equilibrium values since it is arguably immersed in a more diverse and complex system of values (Baudrillard,1981). However, a confounding factor is that the artistic dimensions of a real estate asset can affect its equilibrium values since they may influence the willingness to pay (WTP) both of occupiers and of investors. In 1936, in one of the earliest documented examples of an `A-list' architect arguing the commercial benefits of his reputation, an exasper- ated Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out to a client concerned about additional costs that he was providing a ``record of economic as well as creative achievement'' (Wright, 1986, page 154). Wright (1986, page 156) drew the client's attention to fact that the publicity alone generated byhis reputation would have cost the client ``thousands of thousands''. A more contemporary example of the marketing value of signature architects is from the urban regeneration literature. In this area there is growing interest in design-led Designer buildings: estimating the economic value of `signature' architecture Franz Fuerst, Patrick McAllister, Claudia B Murray Henley Business School, School of Real Estate and Planning, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 219, Reading RG6 6UD, England; e-mail: f.fuerst@reading.ac.uk, c.b.murray@reading.ac.uk, p.m.mcallister@reading.ac.uk Received 21 October 2009; in revised form 23 June 2010 Environment and Planning A 2011, volume 43, pages 166 ^ 184 Abstract. This study investigates whether commercial offices designed by `signature architects' in the United States achieve rental premiums compared with commercial offices designed by nonsignature architects. Focusing on buildings designed by winners of the Pritzker Prize and the Gold Medal awarded by the American Institute of Architects, we create a sample of commercial office buildings designed by signature architects, drawing on CoStar's comprehensive national database. We use a combination of hedonic regression model and a logit model to estimate the various price determinants. The results of the hedonic analysis suggest that, compared with buildings in the same submarket, office buildings designed by signature architects have rents that are 5% ^7% higher, and sell for prices 17% higher. The results from the second-stage logit estimation suggest a rental premium of approximately 5% for signature architects in large architectural practices, while the sales-price premium identified in the first stage hedonic regression was not confirmed. doi:10.1068/a43270