The phrase refers to an elite group of architects who have attained the status of idols among their peers, academics and property professionals.

Unusually, names like Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry are also known to the public too, a symptom no doubt of the heightened interest in property that has prevailed in the last decade.

However, the term also has pejorative associations because of a tendency among developers and local authorities to go for the big names over original designs when commissioning large scale projects.

Since the Bilbao council in Spain employed Frank Gehry to design the Guggenheim museum back in the mid-'90s, it seems that every city has to have a landmark building designed by a 'starchitect'.

Dublin is no different with a Santiago Calatrava bridge linking Blackhall Place to Usher's Island and a performing arts centre designed by Daniel Libeskind planned for the city's docklands Mayne, who last year won the Pritzker Prize, labelled as architecture's equivalent to the Nobel, is not happy with the idea and says the starchitect is purely a creation of the media. In fact he says, pointing an accusatory finger, it is my fault and tells me to make sure I write that down.

"The media is obsessed with celebrity and feeds on an endless diet of the sex lives of movie stars. Hollywood knows how to deal with this and can sell the personal lives of its actors to the media but architects are not equipped for it and can be manipulated easily, " he says. "Anyway it is a ridiculous idea to attribute the success of a building or design to an individual because architecture is a collective process."

Such disdain for greater media focus seems to jar with Mayne's own career, which in one sense fits the stereotype of the internationally renowned architect. The recipient of numerous awards, he and his firm Morphosis, which employs over 40 architects and designers, are involved in large scale projects all over America and across the world from Shanghai to Madrid.

But Mayne is not comfortable being regarded as a member of the architectural establishment because he still identifies himself as a '60s radical, one whose approach to architecture was inspired by both political activism of that decade and the place where he has lived and worked for most of his life, California.

Born in Connecticut in the '40s, Mayne moved to the west coast as a child and went to college there, graduating from the University of Southern California in 1968. After working for four years as a planner, he along with other colleagues founded the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture as an alternative to the conventional system of teaching design. In the same year he was part of a group that started Morphosis, an inter-disciplinary practice that Mayne has described as a "counter-culture experiment."

Mayne says that going to college in the '60's was a liberating experience. "When I was in USC, it was clear that architectural modernism was in decline and new ideas were called for. At the same time anti-war movement was taking off as too was the fight for civil rights.

"The desire for change and openness has influenced my work ever since, " he says.

For many years, Mayne was regarded as an outsider in American architecture, partly because of his rebellious background but also due to the eclectic nature of his design.

It is only in recent years that he has started to receive commissions from state and federal institutions in America, with his major breakthrough coming in 1999 with the Pomona Diamond Ranch High School in California, an assemblage of concrete and corrugated metal set along an open-air corridor carved like a canyon into a hilltop.

The citation for the Pritzker Prize did note that elements such as blocky jutting shapes, glass and metal, double skins, shifting degrees of light and curvilinear walls feature on a recurrent basis in his work but it was apparent at the recent lecture he gave in the National Concert Hall that he is distinctly uncomfortable with the notion of having a signature style or remaining loyal to any one theory or aesthetic principle.

Indeed, the talk was peppered with references to modernism . . . Joyce's stream of consciousness getting an honourable mention . . . postmodernism, evolutionary theory, and new technologies. Mayne expressed his dislike of closure or completeness, preferring to see buildings as evolving in time and space.

He also emphasised the need for buildings to 'speak' to the environment and sites in which they were built rather than imposing a pre-formed idea onto a place.

Mayne acknowledges that this aversion to being pinned down to a set style is also a product of a "rootless Californian culture" where reinvention and make-overs are the only constants and is happy to be described as a "polyglot" when it comes to ideas. "My approach to architecture is based on the premise that we as humans experience reality or the world in a fragmentary manner and not as a cohesive whole. Buildings should reflect this, " he says.

While refusing to submit to a particular style however, Mayne's politics remain the same. "I am an activist of the old school and believe the ideas of openness, transparency and expansiveness which feature in the designs are clearly political because they express some of the democratic values our generation fought for in the '60s.

Architecture is about the formation of human behaviour so it is vital to be aware of these issues in the design process."

He is disappointed with the current generation's "passiveness" and believes not enough has been done to oppose the Bush regime. "In the '60s, we were the first generation to stop a war, " he says. "There is nothing like that now."