News from the sunshine state: Frank Gehry and the city of Miami Beach have fallen out. The world-famous architect was signed on to design a $154m concert hall campus for the New World Symphony Orchestra in early 2003. But city commissioners, now $2m over budget, have asked Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra's founder and artistic director (and lifelong friend of the architect), to get Gehry to agree on a fee cut or face being replaced. The costs for an additional sculptural park planned to surround the hall have reportedly spiralled, and a fully fledged spat between the architect and his clients has been thrashed out in the press.  Gehry argued that the $10m the city expected to pay for the park was an unrealistically low sum and that if they wanted a smaller, lesser, park then he wouldn't stop them hiring someone else. "I really find it insulting," Gehry told the Miami Herald before quitting the project. "If they keep messing with me, if I get insulted enough, I'll withdraw completely." Adding fuel to the fire, he said, was the worldwide request issued by the city for an architect to replace him on the park design while he still officially held the job.  So, Gehry is off the project, and the city of Miami Beach is the world's first to mess with an architect who has a knack for raising city profiles sky-high. Gehry, however, is hardly the first architect to become embroiled in the kind of spat that goes down in architectural history books. The ghost of the brilliant Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, must surely haunt Sydney Opera House. This charismatic building, a symbol of Australia since its opening in 1973, was declared a Unesco world heritage site in 2007, ranking it in terms of global and historical significance alongside Stonehenge, Chartres Cathedral and the Great Wall of China. But in the mid-1960s when Utzon was working to build this complex and mesmerising structure, his career was in the hands of Davis Hughes, the New South Wales government minister for public works. Hughes didn't care much for architecture and much less for some intellectual, artistic foreigner with a funny name who probably couldn't tell the difference between Fosters and XXXX bitter. Within a year of being appointed in 1965, Hughes had caused Utzon, who was owed A$100,000 in fees and unable to pay his team, to resign.  The great architect was never to return to Australia, although late in life he submitted designs for new interiors (now in place), which were asked for by the Sydney Opera House Trust a few years before he died in 2008. Even then, the defiant former minister declared: "There's obviously a need to upgrade the place, but why do we need Utzon? Why can't we get a competent Sydney architect?" Strewth.  Christopher Wren, Britain's most famous architect, was treated in an equally cavalier fashion by the Davis Hughes of his era during the construction of St Paul's Cathedral between 1675 and 1711. The conservative church commissioners in charge of the project had wanted a spindly, gothic church tricked up on the cheap, with some token Renaissance frills. Wren managed to turn an early design they approved of into the noble building we see today: gothic in plan, baroque in spirit and crowned with one of the world's finest domes.  During the long years of building, however, Wren was wrongly accused of corruption and his salary was cut in half. He was also stripped of his title of chief surveyor. He did, however, live to see his greatest work completed - St Paul's and Wren's reputation remain evergreen.  Further down the line, John Vanbrugh fell out with his client, the Duchess of Marlborough, over the cost of completing Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. The site was supposed to be a national memorial funded by a grateful nation in honour of the Duke of Marlborough, the feted British general. But, no proper contract was ever drawn up between the crown and Vanbrugh and when payments from the state dried up, the Marlboroughs had to pay their own way. The Duchess curbed what she saw as Vanbrugh's excesses and finally, threw him off the project. He was later seen trying to peer over the mighty walls of Blenheim to get a look at the glorious palace he had designed, when it was finally completed in 1725.  Adolf Loos was another talent thrown off mid-project (albeit temporarily in this case). Loos's Goldman & Salatsch building overlooking Vienna's Michaelerplatz was not considered extravagant enough. In fact, the building – a mix of beautifully realised showrooms, offices and apartments – caused a scandal in decorous Vienna and was likened in the press of the time to "a granary".  Loos fell ill with worry, but while on a break in Italy trying to recover, he read in the papers that an official committee led by professors Koenig and Baumann had been set up to redesign his austere facades. Loos raced back to Vienna where he addressed a public crowd, two thousand strong, in defence of his design. In the event, this pugnacious architect agreed to add bronze window boxes to the front of the building, and so add a little colour where he had wanted only unadulterated white plaster. Today, of course, the Loos building on Michaelerplatz is considered a national treasure. A full list of architectural feuds would keep this website busy for months, but as long as architecture truly matters we will continue to argue about what buildings should look like, how much they should cost and whether or not their architects are extravagant wastrels. In the vast majority of cases, however, we come to revere the works of talented architects caught up in a world of dim politics and personal vainglory that seem, in the light of years, very small beer indeed compared with the fine vintages of Adolf Loos, John Vanbrugh, Christopher Wren, Jørn Utzon, and Frank Gehry.
Jonathan Glancey: As Frank Gehry falls out with Miami planners, Jonathan Glancey looks at other serious architectural rows that threatened buildings such as the Sydney Opera House and St Paul's Cathedral