Biographies

 

 

 

Alvar Aalto

(Kuortane, 1898 – Helsinki, 1976)

The Finnish architect Aalto represents a stream of Scandinavian humanism that continues to moderate the more technocratic urges of modernism, proposing an architecture that is technically and aesthetically progressive while remaining closely concerned with the real psycho-physiological needs of people. Aalto’s undogmatic approach is summed up in his remark: “Nature, not the machine, is the most important model for architecture.” Even before he attended a CIAM meeting in Frankfurt in 1929, Aalto’s work had begun to reflect more advanced European ideas, and his Turun Sanomat newspaper plant in Turku (1927-28) is clearly informed by Le Corbusier’s theories. The sunny and optimistic Paimio Sanatorium devoted equal attention to the technical and health-giving aspects of the building, while his Municipal Library in Viipuri attracted international acclaim both for its humane practicality (optimal reading conditions were ensured by the installation of light-diffusing conical skylights) and lyrical expression (the undulating wood ceiling of the auditorium, which was ostensibly justified by acoustic considerations). Aalto’s approach was taken abroad in his Finnish Pavilions for the World’s Fairs of 1937 (Paris) and 1939 (New York). After the war his favoured material was warm red brick, as in his Baker House dormitory for MIT (1947-48) and the Town Hall in Säynätsalo (1949-52). Aalto erected many large public buildings in Helsinki through the 1950s and 1960s, though his Church at Vuoksenniska, Imatra stands as an expressionistic highlight of his later period. Aalto was equally a pioneer in the design and production of bent plywood furniture, which are characteristic of his preference to use warm, natural materials to mitigate the coldness of a more doctrinaire functionalism.

 

Robert Adam

(Kirkcaldy, 1728 – London, 1792)

Robert Adam was a British architect. Born in 1728, he certainly studied at the University of Edinburgh before spending three years in Italy studying Roman architecture. In 1757 he visited the ruins of Diocletian’s Palace at Spalato in Dalmatia with the French architect C.L. Clérisseau and published the results in 1764 in The Ruins of the Palace of Diocletian.

In 1762 he was appointed sole architect to the King and the Board of Works where he stayed for six years. In 1768 he entered Parliament as member of the county of Kinross. The same year he and his three brothers leased the ground fronting the Thames and proceeded to erect the ambitious block of buildings called the Adelphi which is imperishably associated with their name.

As an architect, he was strongly under Italian influence, and his style and aims were exotic rather than native. He was able to mould and adapt classical models as to create a new manner of the highest charm and distinction.

In his view, the architect was intimately concerned with the furniture and the decoration of a building, as well as with its form and construction. In his furniture, he made lavish use of his favourite decorative motives: wreaths and paterae, the honeysuckle, and the fan ornament which he used so constantly. Thus his country houses like Kedleston House or Kenwood House are unique products of English art.

 

Leon Battista Alberti

(Genoa, 1404 – Rome, 1472)

Leon Battista Alberti was one of the outstanding personalities of the Renaissance. He employed the principles of mathematical perspective and developed a polished theory of art. Alberti came from an important Florentine family who had, however, been banned from the town in 1387. When his family returned to Florence in 1429, Alberti, under the influence of Brunelleschi, Masaccio and Donatello, dedicated himself to the studies of architecture and art. Alberti quickly became the protégé of the Rucellai Family, for whom he created two of his most significant pieces of art in Florence, the Palazzo Rucellai in the Via della Vigna (today the home of the Alinari Museum), and the elegant small Temple Santo Sepolcro (1467) in the Rucellai-Chapel near San Pancrazio (where the Marino Marini Museum is today). But the major part of his work as an architect was to take place in Rome: Alberti restored Santo Stefano Rotondo and Santa Maria Maggiore in Rimini, and built the unfinished Tempio Malatestiano (1450), the first building which he tried to build according to his architectonic principles. Until this time, Alberti’s experience as an architect had been of rather theoretical nature. Finally, towards the end of his career, he worked in Mantua, where he anticipated the typical religious architecture of the counterreformation with the churches San Sebastiano (1460) and Sant’Andrea. The façade of Santa Maria Novella is regarded as his most important work, as it unifies the already existing elements and the parts he added into a clear realisation of his new principles. Alberti was educated in the Latin and Greek languages, but never had a formal training as an architect. His architectonic ideas were therefore the result of his own studies and research. His two most important papers on architecture are De Pictura (1435), in which he emphatically supports the significance of painting as a foundation for architecture, as well as his theoretical masterpiece De Re Aedificatoria (1450). De Re Aedificatoria is divided into ten books, such as the ten books on architecture by Vitruvius. But unlike Vitruvius, Alberti told architects how buildings should be constructed, rather than focusing on how they had been built to date. De Re Aedificatoria claimed its importance as the classical treatise on architecture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

 

Tadao Ando

(Osaka, 1941 – )

While at first sight the often austere architecture of Ando might seem to embody a rigidly minimalistic approach, he in fact embraces much of the aesthetics of traditional Japanese buildings. Ando has an unusual background: he is self-taught as an architect, with no professional training or apprenticeship. Most of his early buildings are small houses in concrete which seek to reconcile the principles of modernism (abstraction, simple geometries, contemporary materials) with the specific sensibilities of Japanese architecture—restraint, privacy, respect for the nature of materials, connection to the natural world. The Koshino house in Ashiya (1979-84) consists of two parallel rectangular boxes, one private and one for entertaining, which are partly sunk into the earth; light enters through narrow slits in the walls and ceiling, with large windows in the living room facing the garden court. By withholding most sensory input, Ando directs our attention to the changing effects of light. His Rokko housing complex in Kobe, with later additions) is a cubic composition set into a hillside to catch the view. Through the 1980s Ando produced a remarkable series of religious buildings whose elemental articulation creates a monastic focus on spiritual rather than material realities: these include the Chapel on Mount Rokko in Kobe (1985-86) and the Church of the Light in Ibaraki (1987-89); the latter consists of a simply furnished concrete box with glazed slits forming a cross of light behind the altar. Among his many museums and corporate buildings in Japan and elsewhere, the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art in Texas (2002) is outstanding for its lyrical deployment of water. Though Ando’s work is undeniably demanding, it possesses an unshakeable integrity, referencing basic architectural dualities of inside/outside, solid/void and darkness/light while proposing a balance of the man-made and the natural.

 

Luis Barragán

(Guadalajara, 1902 – Mexico City, 1988)

The simple but evocative buildings of the Mexican architect Barragán exemplify what is sometimes termed a ‘critical regionalism,’ in that he attempted to negotiate between international modernism and local traditions of place. Born in Guadalajara, Barragán was trained as an engineer and largely self-taught in architecture. Particularly inspired by the example of Le Corbusier, around 1940 his interests in contemporary landscape gardening and sculpture contributed to the formation of a distinctly personal aesthetic. Working for wealthy patrons in and around Mexico City, Barragán created a series of houses, stark, geometric volumes which recall not so much the industrial aesthetics of European modernism, but the plain, vernacular forms of traditional Mexican building. He placed particular emphasis on the primacy of the adobe wall, roughly textured and painted in bright, contrasting colours. Barragán was equally innovative in landscaping, and the extraordinary combination of buildings and outdoor space in such commissions as the El Pedregal district exhibit his love for the Alhambra. In 1947 Barragán built a remarkable house for himself in the Tacubaya district, using a peasant vernacular as the starting point for an exquisitely considered minimalism. Like all his houses, it proposes a refuge from the outside world, an austere but serene enclosure for meditation. Barragán later took on the planning and urban design of the Las Arboledas residential district (1957-61). As highlighted by carefully staged photography, Barragán’s work also has oneiric and surrealist elements, most notable in his poetic use of bodies of water in the horse stables of the San Cristobal estate near Mexico City (1967-68). Barragán’s modernism ultimately rejected the impersonality of the machine in favour of emotion, imagination and a nuanced regionalism.

 

Peter Behrens

(Hamburg, 1868 – Berlin, 1940)

Behrens provides a crucial link between the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement and the 20th-century machine aesthetic, and in the latter capacity he served as an important mentor to Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, all of whom passed through his Berlin office. Behrens began his career as a painter, graphic artist, book binder and furniture designer. His first large building was his own house in the artists’ colony at Darmstadt (1901), for which he designed every detail, down to the furniture, towels and decorative items. His move to a more industrial expression came in 1907 with his appointment as official architect and house designer for the huge AEG Company in Berlin, which produced all kinds of industrial and electric products from light bulbs to armaments. Behrens created an entire branded image for the company, taking charge of everything from logos and letterhead to the architectural design of entire factories. His industrial structures for AEG were among the first to break from historical tradition to embrace—and even monumentalise—a new appreciation of industrial materials and techniques; the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin nevertheless still betrays a lingering debt to Classicism in its heavy (and non-structural) quoins articulated as rounded corner piers, as well as the massy polygonal pediment. For his more formal commissions, notably the Germany Embassy in St. Petersburg (1911-12), Behrens made use of a geometrically simplified Classicism to impressive if austere effect. After the war Behrens embraced the current fashion for Expressionist design, as in his fanciful and appropriately polychromatic I.G. Farben offices in Höchst (1920-24). His most notable building outside Germany is the remarkable house in Northampton known as ‘New Ways’ (1926), which introduced international modernism to England.

 

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

(Naples, 1598 – Rome, 1680)

Bernini was a master in the creation of magnificent spaces with a skilled eye for perspectival effects. This is displayed primarily in the square in front of St Peter’s with its surrounding columned halls, or the Scala Regia of the Vatican. After Maderno’s death, Bernini completed the façade and front hall and created the famous bronze baldachin over the high altar for the inside.

The speed of the change of mind, in which the admiration for the antique waned, is illustrated by the fact that the contemporaries of this tabernacle placed it as the high point of an independent artistic style. Bernini is also to be praised for the Palazzo Barberini with its masterful staircase, and for several smaller churches. The importance of the piazza design of this period can be seen by the positioning of the two small cupola churches Santa Maria di Monte Santo and Santa Maria dei Miracoli at the north entrance of the Corso that were designed by Carlo Rainaldi and executed by Bernini and his student Carlo Fontana. It was they who helped bring the Piazza del Popolo to its completion.

Bernini was most skilled in decorative sculpture and here, with his Triton fountain on the Piazza Barberini and the main fountain on the Piazza Navona, he created an imperishable memorial. With this fountain and the gods it features, Bernini reached back into Antiquity, which was already the fundamentals in the three main works of his youth, Aeneas and Anchises, the stone-throwing David and Apollo and Daphne in the Villa Borghese in Rome which he created as a 17-year-old.

 

Mario Botta

(Mendrisio, 1943 – )

The dramatic mountain landscapes of Ticino, the southernmost canton of Switzerland, have been formative to the work of Botta, who is famous for a tough-minded regionalism that works more with the specifics of site and topography than with sentimental notions of the past. Characterised by simple, large-scale geometries, Botta’s architecture is formally ordered and most often symmetrical, lending his buildings an unusual gravitas and monumentality, whatever their size. Born in Ticino, Botta studied architecture in Venice under Carlo Scarpa. During this time he worked briefly with Le Corbusier (1965) and Louis Kahn (1969), whose example suggested to Botta that the given conditions of a project can be crystallised in a specific and quasi-inevitable formal composition. Botta’s first major commission was the school at Morbio Inferiore (1972-77), a late-Brutalist series of concrete units arranged in an emphatically linear manner. He then began a series of single-family domestic buildings in exposed concrete and brick: the house at Riva San Vitale (1971-73) is a blocky tower set on an incline and accessed by a metal catwalk, thus serving as a territorial marker between mountain and lake. The house at Ligornetto (1975-76) is a striped rectangular block with rectilinear cutouts sheltering windows, while the Casa Rotonda at Stabio (1980-82) is a three-storey cylinder sliced vertically on the north-south axis to allow carefully controlled views. Though Botta’s idiosyncratic and repetitive geometrical strategies mean that he is sometimes pegged as a formalist, his motivation in fact comes from the idea of ‘building the site,’ in which works of architecture are positioned as emphatic markers in the landscape in order to allow their inhabitants a clear existential grounding, orientation and relationship to the natural world. By their insistent formality, his buildings further seem to propose a mode of organisation for any future construction on the site. Botta’s larger and later works include the Cathedral of Évry, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cymbalista Synagogue and Jewish Heritage Centre in Tel Aviv, Israel (1996-98).

 

Donato Bramante

(Monte Asdrualdo, 1444 – Rome, 1514)

Donato Bramante was born in Monte Asdruald (now Fermignano) near Urbino in 1444. We have little knowledge of his early training. He seems to have spent the largest part of his early career studying painting under Mantegna and Piero della Francesca.

We hear about him for the first time in 1477, when he was working on frescoes in the Palazzo del Podesta in Bergamo. Afterwards he settled down in Milan in the 1480s. Although he created some buildings at this time (Santa Maria Presso, San Satiro, Santa Maria della Grazie, the cloisters of Sant’ Ambrogio), his paintings, especially his use of the trompe l’œil technique and the rigorous monumentality of his figures in solemn compositions, had a great influence on the Lombardic school. Bramante then moved from Milan to Rome in 1499, where he gained the favour of the future Pope Julius II. Here, Bramante began his exceptional new interpretation of classical antiquity. In November 503, Julius commissioned Bramante to renovate the Vatican. At first, Bramante dedicated himself to the basic new design of the Vatican palaces at the Belvedere. He worked on the new building of St Peter’s from 1506 on, which was later continued by Michelangelo. Within a few years, Bramante had risen to the position the most important architect at the papal court. His historical significance lies not so much in his actual buildings, of which only a small part has been preserved, but rather that he constituted an important inspiration and a great influence with regard to later architects. Bramante died in 1514, a year later than his patron Pope Julius II.

 

Marcel Breuer

(Pécs, 1902 – New York, 1981)

Born in Hungary, Breuer studied briefly in Vienna before enrolling as one of the earliest students at the Weimar Bauhaus. Rapidly absorbing Gropius’s lessons of functionalism and elementarism, Breuer was soon given charge of instruction in the Bauhaus’s furniture department where he produced some of the modern movement’s most iconic chair designs in bent tubular steel. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1926, Breuer was commissioned to produce all the furniture for Gropius’s new buildings. Though meeting with only minor success as an architect in Berlin, Breuer produced many innovative competition designs for large-scale projects and designed the famous Doldertal flats for the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in Zurich (1935-36). He then moved on to London to establish a partnership with F.R.S. Yorke, and later followed Gropius to Massachusetts. Here Breuer and his former teacher formed an architectural partnership and served as mentors to a rising generation of younger American architects (notably Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Ieoh Ming Pei) at Harvard. Breuer’s American output consisted mainly of smaller houses, many of innovative character, until he was selected (with Nervi and Zehrfuss) to build UNESCO’s new Paris headquarters in 1953. This launched a series of more prominent buildings, including St. John’s Abbey and College in Minnesota, the IBM Research Centre at La Gaude, France (1960-69) and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Not much given to theorising, Breuer’s clear-thinking approach to modern architecture nevertheless validated the play of contrasts, as often manifested in his use of textured rubble and concrete surfaces played off against smoothly planar or transparent walls. His later buildings in reinforced concrete became increasingly heavy and sculptural, contributing decisively to the rise of the Brutalist aesthetic of the 1960s and 70s.

 

Filippo Brunelleschi

(Florence, 1377-1446)

Brunelleschi is regarded as the father of Renaissance architecture and one of the most famous Italian architects. Although he never worked as a painter, Brunelleschi was a pioneer in the art of perspective. In addition, he developed processes to transport building material to its required location, and constructed a self-supporting wall for domes.

Filippo Brunelleschi began his career as an apprentice to a goldsmith. He passed his examination six years after his apprenticeship and was accepted into the goldsmiths’ guild as a master. He started his architectural career by renovating town houses and other buildings. He belonged to those artists who in 1401/02 were defeated in the competition for the new doors of the baptistery for Florence Cathedral (his two panels from the competition are in the Bargello) by another great goldsmith and sculptor, Lorenzo Ghiberti. This disappointment apparently made Brunelleschi give up sculpture and turn to architecture. Brunelleschi dedicated himself to architectural studies in Rome and developed the exceptional abilities which enabled him to build one of the most important buildings of Renaissance architecture in Italy – the unfinished Gothic Cathedral in Florence (1420-36). This became one of the first examples for architectonic functionality and exhibits architectonic reliefs, circular windows and a wonderfully proportioned dome. In other buildings, such as the Church of San Lorenzo built by the Medici, and the orphanage Ospedale degli Innocenti, Brunelleschi employed a severe and geometrical style, inspired by the art of ancient Rome. Later Brunelleschi turned away from this linear, geometrical approach towards a more rhythmical style, more characterised by sculpture, especially in the unfinished Church Santa Maria degli Angeli (the building work started in 1434), the Basilica of Santo Spirito and the Cappelli di Pazzi (started approximately 1441). This style embodied the first step towards the Baroque style. Filippo Brunelleschi died at the age of sixty-nine and was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Florence.

 

Michelangelo Buonarroti

(Caprese, 1475 – Rome, 1564)

Michelangelo, master of the Italian Renaissance, was born near the Tuscan city of Arezzo in 1475. He served an apprenticeship with a painter and enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Medici family early in his career. Already an established sculptor due to the popularity of his relief work and his iconic statue of David, Michelangelo famously accepted a papal commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome when he was in his early 30s. While he is most remembered for sculpture and painting, his architectural accomplishments rival those of the greatest architects of the Renaissance in terms of aesthetic and structural sophistication. Many buildings now considered iconic symbols of Florence and Rome are examples of his craftsmanship.

The tomb of Pope Julius II at the church of San Pietro in Vicoli was an early commission for Michelangelo. Begun in 1505, the project was repeatedly delayed and reduced in splendour due to lack of funds, but finally completed in 1545. It remains a striking example of the artist’s powerful use of sculpture in architecture. He designed the New Sacristy and Medici Chapel for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence; numerous members of the famous family are buried in its crypt. The Palazzo dei Conservatori on Rome’s Capitoline Hill was in disrepair when Michelangelo designed its new façade: its massive Corinthian columns and flat roof are among the artist’s architectural signatures. He is also responsible for the masterful remodelling of the palaces that surround the Piazza del Campidoglio, which he arranged ingeniously to compensate for the irregularities of the landscape. The bright grandeur of the Laurentian Library in Florence, which Michelangelo designed in 1530, demonstrates the artist’s Mannerist insistence on balance and idealised proportions.

Perhaps Michelangelo’s most recognisable monument is the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, designed in 1547. Refining and elaborating on the designs of then-deceased master builders Donato Bramante and Giuliano da Sangallo, Michelangelo devised an egg-shaped dome with an inner and outer shell, mounted on four enormous piers. The dome rises to a height of 136.6 metres, making it the tallest dome in the world.

Michelangelo died at the age of 89 on 18 February 1564 in Rome, before the completion of the cupola of St. Peter’s. His remains were subsequently transported to Florence in his native Tuscany, and he was entombed in the Basilica of Santa Croce.

 

Le Corbusier

(La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1887 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1965)

Of Swiss origin but a French citizen by choice, Le Corbusier (real name: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) remains the single most influential European architect of the 20th century. His fame rests in part on his relatively small built oeuvre, but equally on his many polemical books and articles. His massively influential Vers une Architecture (1923) proposed a new design mindset modelled on the rational calculations of the engineer: Le Corbusier urged architects to look at the products of industry — airplanes, automobiles, ocean liners and industrial buildings — for inspiration. In terms of domestic architecture, he famously postulated that the house should be seen as a “machine for living in.” At the same time, Le Corbusier’s texts betray an essentially mystical idealism based on the idea that the purity of Platonic solids and careful control of proportions can produce an aesthetic impact that verges on the spiritual. His early houses in and around Paris, pure white externally though animated by isolated walls of pure colour inside, made great innovations in the shaping of space, light and circulation, and remain the epitome of early modernist design; of these, the Villa Savoye is the most famous. After the Second World War, Le Corbusier’s production took on a radically different cast, now espousing complex curves, rougher surfaces and a generally sculptural approach. This is best represented by his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, whose dramatically battered walls, irregular fenestration and organic forms were conceived as a subjective response to the mountainous locale and the spiritual demands of the commission. Le Corbusier’s most imitated building is certainly his Unité d’Habitation at Marseille, a huge housing block of crudely molded concrete that attempted to give its inhabitants the feeling of sailing in a self-sufficient vessel through a sea of greenery. Though often critiqued for hubris and reductive thinking, Le Corbusier’s creative and intellectual approach to design continues to inspire many architects today.

 

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach

(Graz, 1656 – Vienna, 1723)

The son of a sculptor, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was born in Graz in 1656. At the age of 11, he left home to serve as an apprentice in Rome, where he studied architecture in the studio of Carlo Fontana. There, he met Gian Lorenzo Bernini and enthusiastically discovered the works of Borromini and Guarini.

He quickly gained a reputation as a gifted architect, which earned him commissions from Austrian aristocracy and also caught the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I and the Church. Solicited everywhere, he divided his time between Vienna, Salzburg and Prague, before permanently settling in Vienna in 1686. He was ennobled by the Emperor Leopold, who appointed him Royal Engineer and added the aristocratic “von Erlach” to his name.

His most famous achievement is possibly the Schönbrunn Palace. This magnificent palace, just outside of Vienna, claims to be “Austria’s Versailles.”

Fischer von Erlach built several Viennese structures, including the Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Count Batthyány’s palace, and the Karlskirche, dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo.

Fischer von Erlach is considered one of the creators of the late German Baroque style. He knew how to combine elements from different architectural periods, synthesising Baroque and early classical techniques to develop his own style.

 

Hassan Fathy

(Alexandria, 1900 – Cairo, 1989)

A pioneer in the field of socially and climatically sensitive architecture, the Alexandria-born Fathy deliberately eschewed many of the technical and material innovations of mainstream modernism in favour of reviving traditional methods of construction, notably that of adobe or mud brick. Trained as an architect in Cairo, Fathy began to explore the possibilities of this technique in 1937. From 1946-53 he was employed by the Egyptian government’s Department of Antiquities to supervise the construction of the village of New Gourna, near Luxor, which was to provide a new home for a colony of resettled tomb robbers. Fathy taught the inhabitants to construct their own dwellings, yet despite attracting much press attention the experiment was not particularly successful. Fathy then designed a series of schools for the Egyptian Ministry of Education, and later went on to work in Greece, Iraq, Pakistan and several countries in Africa. He returned permanently to Cairo in 1963 and was for many years the Head of the Architecture faculty at the University of Cairo. Fathy also investigated the layout, aesthetics and climatic functioning of traditional Arab houses, particularly their passive cooling through the use of thick walls, courtyards and rooftop ventilation. Fathy’s example demonstrates that architecture need not be overtly innovative or glamorous to fulfill the most pressing social needs, which continue to include the provision of much-needed housing and well-functioning architecture for underprivileged populations. Fathy’s book Architecture for the Poor (1973) gave international prominence to his search for an economical, energy-frugal and socially appropriate architecture for indigenous populations on rural sites, and appears increasingly relevant in the present day.

 

Norman Foster

(Manchester, 1935 – )

One of the most high-profile and prolific of contemporary architects, Foster is unashamedly excited about new technology, though he is equally sensitive to such issues as form, light, context, human use and ecological footprint. Though he is often termed a High-Tech architect, Foster justifiably claims that he is interested only in using appropriate technology to create the most efficient, comfortable and inspiring surrounding for his clients. Born in Manchester, Foster studied architecture at Yale. He then formed the short-lived Team 4 with Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, and his first wife Wendy Foster; like Rogers, Foster began with the idea of creating neutral space envelopes, though his buildings rapidly presented a sleeker appearance than those of his former partner. His breakthrough project was the Willis Faber & Dumas Headquarters in Ipswich, which re-imagines the typical office building as a low, spreading envelope of amoeboid plan; its walls of sheer plate glass passively reflect the urban surroundings by day and reveal the interiors by night. The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia is a vast hangar-like shed using deep trusses to create a completely free interior. The gridded cladding of its outer envelope allows standardised elements to be replaced at will. Foster’s more high-profile Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong, rumoured to be the most expensive building per square metre ever constructed, makes use of an exposed steel structure inspired by bridge engineering. Five vertical zones, each visibly suspended from a ‘coat-hanger’ truss, were conceptualised as vertically-stacked villages. Foster continues to take charge of many of the largest and most technically advanced architectural commissions of our time, all inevitably privileging energy efficiency and user-friendliness: the long list includes the Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt, Stansted Airport (opened 1991), Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong, 30 St. Mary Axe in London, London City Hall, Wembley Stadium in London (2002-07), the Hearst Tower in New York City (2006) and Beijing Capital International Airport (2007).

 

Richard Buckminster Fuller

(Milton, 1895 – Los Angeles, 1983)

Often seen as more of a visionary engineer and tinkerer in the mode of Edison than as a professional architect, Fuller’s fully engaged approach to technology was to provide a key ingredient in the formation of the so-called ‘High-Tech’ architects of the 1970s. Having little success with formal education at Harvard and elsewhere, Fuller worked in a variety of industrial occupations before attracting critical interest with his proposal for a radically new kind of dwelling, known as the ‘Dymaxion House’ (1927). To be built of aluminum and glass, the house would be suspended by cables from a central mast, which would also contain essential services. Fuller’s goal was to create a prototype for mass-production along the line of cars or airplanes, but he met with little practical success. Now focused more fully on structural studies, Fuller made his next major contribution with the invention of the Geodesic Dome, a system that allows a maximum volume of space to be covered with a minimum amount of materials. The first experiments with this structure were carried out in the late 1940s during his residency at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Though dramatically put into material form in the American Pavilion at Expo ‘67 in Montreal, the geodesic system proved to be of typologically minimal value, used largely for industrial, exhibition and scientific buildings as well as greenhouses and conservatories. During the 1960s and 70s, however, Fuller maintained a reputation as a charismatic lecturer, social visionary and prophetic futurist, and his do-it-yourself domes enjoyed great popularity among students and hippies. Fuller’s later writings, which deal with the largest existential questions of the future of human life on what he called ‘Spaceship Earth,’ are at once opaque, poetic and increasingly relevant.

 

Antoni Gaudí

(Riudoms, 1852 – Barcelona, 1926)

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was born in the Spanish province of Tarragone, at Mas de la Caldera, his family’s home in the town of Riudoms, in June of 1852. In 1870, he entered the architecture school in Barcelona, where he settled.

As a young architect, Gaudí was inspired by Viollet-le-Duc’s neo-Gothic work, but quickly separated himself from this rather rigid style and developed greater originality and fantasy. Henceforth placing himself within the Art Nouveau movement, Gaudí unified architecture and furniture and would originate Art Nouveau’s Spanish variant known as Modernista. Work on Barcelona’s Sagrada Família began in 1882, when Joseph M. Bocabella purchased the land to build a temple dedicated to the Holy Family. When disputes with the architect in charge of construction erupted, the commission was entrusted to Gaudí, who modified the original project and would continue throughout his life to make it ever more ambitious. In 1883, Gaudí was charged with building the Casa Vicens. A private commission from the industrialist and ceramist Manuel Vicens Montaner, this project already presaged Gaudí’s style, highlighting the Oriental, Baroque, and Art Nouveau influences in his materials, trompe l’œil effects and arabesques. Two years later, the architect collaborated with textile manufacturer Eusebio Güell, for whom he built a palace and gardens. Afterwards, the wealthy industrialist would continue to support and finance Gaudí. Gaudí continued to undertake various private and public architectural commissions up until the early twentieth century. In 1900, he started work on a commission from Güell for a city garden on a hillside in Barcelona, the present-day Güell Park. The industrialist’s original pharaonic plan called for residences, studios, a chapel, and park – in other words, a small village within the Catalan capital. When it came to making the project a reality, skyrocketing costs only allowed for two houses and the park to be built. The project nevertheless allowed Gaudí to give free reign to his creativity and to his originality, which meant respecting the landscape’s natural form.

A worthy representative of Art Nouveau, Gaudí is undoubtedly among those artists who made the most radical break with the past. His work, now under the protection of the UNESCO international heritage program, was greatly criticised during his time. Contemporaries dubbed the Casa Milà that Gaudí designed in 1905 La Pedrera (the Quarry), due to its overly organic appearance that seemed devoid of any rational architectural principle. The enveloping organic architecture of this man, who was then considered too eccentric to be an architect, was thought to be devouring the soul of beautiful Barcelona – the same Barcelona as today, whose soul everyone believes is the work of Antoni Gaudí.

 

Frank Gehry

(Toronto, 1929 – )

Gehry’s conception of architecture as a form of creative play meant that he was for many years known as a California eccentric, but in his late career he has been able to bring his unrestrained and exuberant approach to a variety of large-scale commissions in many countries, even to the extent that he now seems to have become a quasi-official foreign representative for American maverick individualism. In fact, Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada, though his family soon moved to California. He studied architecture at UCLA and Harvard before starting his own practise in Los Angeles in 1962. Gehry took some time to find his own expression, which was increasingly informed by a dialogue with contemporary artists: his strategies came to include collage, sculptural form, Surrealism and Pop irony. His own house in Santa Monica (with later alterations and additions), a violent series of trangressions on an ordinary 1920s bungalow, seemed to break all the rules: layering ‘cheapskate’ materials — stud framing, corrugated sheet metal, chain-link fencing, plywood — and remaining in an apparent state of suspended construction, it served as the prototype for a series of off-beat residences of similar character. From the later 1980s Gehry’s works became more fully sculptural, characterised by flowing, undulating and colliding forms. Among his more prominent commissions in this later mode are the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, American Center in Paris, (1994), the Dancing House in Prague, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the DG Bank Building in Berlin (2000), the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Stata Center at MIT (2004), and the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago (2004). Gehry’s complex and unconventional structures have only been made practicable with the introduction of computer modeling, which has now opened up an almost unlimited scope for formal play in contemporary architectural design.

 

James Gibbs

(Aberdeen, 1682 – London, 1754)

James Gibbs was a British architect. Born in Scotland, he studied in Rome with the architect Carlo Fontana before moving to London in 1708. There he was noticed by Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, who helped him to become joint surveyor in 1713, with Nicholas Hawksmoor, for the new churches to be built under the Act for Fifty New Churches. Gibbs’s first church was St. Mary-Le-Strand. His daring and innovative masterpiece, St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, London, became the most influential church in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century. James Gibbs was under the influence of the Italian Baroque but also inspired by the works of British architects like Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Architectural historian John Summerson even describes his work as the fulfillment of Wren’s architectural ideas, which were not fully developed in his own buildings. It should be noted that Gibbs was a Roman Catholic and a Tory, and was therefore not part of the Palladian movement which was prevalent in English architecture of the period. In 1728, he published A Book of Architecture, which included his building designs, which became a reference.

James Gibbs is also known for the Cambridge University Senate House (1722-1730), the nave of All Saint’s, Derby (now Derby Cathedral, 1725) and the cylindrical Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

 

Michael Graves

(Indianapolis, 1934 – )

One of the leading architects of the Postmodern school of the 1970s and 1980s, Graves’s stated goal has been to reintroduce a sense of ‘figuration’ (as opposed to modernist abstraction) into contemporary architecture; thus he has posited that such elements as a window, a column or a ceiling must ‘read,’ semiotically, as culturally recognisable entities rather than purely geometric inventions of no historical pedigree. Graves was born in Indianapolis and educated at the University of Cincinnati and at Harvard. In 1960 he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, allowing extended study in Italy. His early buildings self-consciously featured a pastiche of Corbusian references, but his interest in Classicism soon asserted itself in the unbuilt project for the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge between North Dakota and Minnesota (1977-78), which made playful use of keystone and arch motifs. His Portland Public Services Building in Oregon served as an early test case to see if ornamentation and historicism had really returned to contemporary architecture: though deploying few literal historical quotations, Graves turned each façade of the boxy tower into a colourful, decorative pattern, again playing with the forms of columns and giant keystones. These experiments were carried forward in the more grandiloquent Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky (1985), while the remarkably over-the-top Dolphin and Swan Hotels at Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida (1988-90) apotheosised Graves’ frank embrace of colourful ornamentation: two huge luxury hotels connected by a bridge across a crescent-shaped lake, the complex has been described as “entertainment architecture.” His later buildings, such as the Central Library of Denver, Colorado (1995-96) and his museums, cultural institutions and government buildings in Washington, D.C., have served to recoup some of the critical standing that his more exuberant creations had at one time threatened.

 

Eileen Gray

(Enniscorthy, 1878 – Paris, 1976)

Along with furniture designer Charlotte Perriand, Gray is an all-too-rare instance of a woman who played an important role in early modern design. Born to an aristocratic Irish family, Gray studied art at the Slade School in London and later at the Académie Julian in Paris. Having mastered the labour-intensive craft of Japanese lacquering from the master Seizo Sugawara in London, she launched a successful career as a furniture designer. After the First World War, Gray’s exquisitely handcrafted screens and other items of luxury interior décor in a fashionable Classical-Art Deco mode were marketed to a select clientele through her store in Paris, which she called Jean Désert. From the 1920s her approach took on the more industrial character of the Bauhaus school, as epitomised by her famous ‘Bibendum’ armchair, its tubular curves of padded leather recalling the famous Michelin mascot. Her most important architectural commission was the now-derelict house known as E-1027 near Roquebrune on the Côte d’Azur, designed for and in collaboration with the architectural publisher Jean Badovici. Influenced by the theories of Le Corbusier and in the forefront of modernist aesthetics, E.1027 was remarkable for the care that Gray devoted to items of practical use, such as tables, built-in closets and storage areas. In her later life Gray became more reclusive and her work and career remained largely forgotten until recent years. Before her death at the age of 98, however, she was able to appreciate the adulation of a new generation of design enthusiasts and feminist scholars who again revealed her originality to public notice. Gray’s furniture designs remain modern classics.

 

Walter Gropius

(Berlin, 1883 – Boston, 1969)

Perhaps more influential as an educator and a polemicist than as a practising architect, Gropius played a crucial role in promulgating international modernism throughout Europe and North America. After an apprenticeship with Peter Behrens from 1907-10, Gropius formed a partnership with Adolf Meyer and built the Fagus factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. This manifested all the ingredients of the new architecture, including an exposed structure, use of industrial materials, extensively glazed curtain walls, and a stripped-down aesthetic of pure rectilinear geometry. Convinced that the 20th century would belong to the masses, Gropius’s concerns were also economic and social, for he hoped to provide healthier working and living conditions for the laboring classes. After service in the war, Gropius was put in charge of a new school of art and design which he called the Bauhaus. Later housed at Dessau in Gropius’s custom-designed buildings, the Bauhaus had an influence far beyond its relatively small number of students and brief period of operation. Starting from an allegiance to Arts and Crafts principles, the Bauhaus moved to promulgate a simplified machine aesthetic that was seen to be compatible with industrial mass production. At the same time, this made use of the vocabulary of elemental geometry pioneered by abstract artists, many of whom were teachers at the school. In the 1930s, Gropius practised in England and then in the United States, where he was to take up the influential position of the director of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Here, an entire generation of American architects would come to absorb Bauhaus doctrines. Gropius was later active with his architectural firm TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative), which put into practise his ostensible preference for communal or team-based design work over individualistic self-expression.

 

Zaha Hadid

(Baghdad, 1950 – )

Probably the most prominent woman architect now working in the world, Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq. As a child she was inspired by the beauty of ancient Sumerian cities and the reed villages of the marshes of southern Iraq. After her studies at London’s Architectural Association, she worked for Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture, where she became a partner in 1977. Establishing her own practise in London in 1980, Hadid produced a largely theoretical and unbuilt body of work while teaching at the AA and elsewhere. The densely layered and explosively fragmented nature of her designs led to her being identified with Deconstructivism. And since many of these appeared to be largely conceptual or experimental in nature, she was able to build very little before the mid-1990s, despite winning several international competitions; her well-publicised projects for the Peak Club, Hong Kong (1982) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994) are among these unbuilt projects. Hadid’s first realised building to attract international attention was the small but agressively angular Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany. More recent works include the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (1998), the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, and the Bridge Pavilion for Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain, which spans the river Ebro. Hadid will also build the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics. Her desire to invest architecture with dramatic qualities of light, form and colour inevitably produces visually striking results. She also works as an abstract sculptor. In 2004 Hadid was the first female recipient of the Pritzker Prize.

 

Victor Horta

(Gand, 1861 – Brussels, 1947)

In 1878, he made his first trip to Paris for the Universal Exposition and completed a period of training with the architect and decorator Jules Debuysson. In 1880, fate led him back to Belgium right after his father died.

Married the next year, he moved to Brussels and enrolled in the Académie Royale. During this period he commenced training under Alphonse Balat, the official architect of Leopold II.

In 1884, Horta submitted a plan for Parliament that earned him the first place in the Godecharle architecture competition. The next year he built three houses in Gand. In 1887, his plan for the Museum of Natural History won the triennial alumni competition launched by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

In 1889, Horta returned to Paris to attend the new Universal Exposition. Upon his return to Belgium, his wife gave birth to a daughter Simone, and in 1892 he was hired to teach at the Faculté Polytechnique of the Université Libre of Brussels where he was appointed professor in 1899. The next year, Horta designed a private residence for the physicist-chemist Emile Tassel. Today, Tassel House remains a key Art Nouveau monument. Set on a deep and narrow lot, the structure’s principle element is a central staircase covered by a frosted lantern. Bathed in light, and supported by thin cast-iron columns sprouting botanical arabesques that are continued in the paintings and mosaics that cover the walls and floors, the staircase is the townhouse’s principal architectural feature. Horta’s nod to architecture marked the beginning of a lengthy series of commissions that continued until the first decade of the twentieth century, among which the majority were for townhouses, mainly in the Belgian capital. The following private residences are among Horta’s most famous: Tassel, Solvay, Van Ettvelde, Aubecq (1899) and Max Hallet (1902). In 1898 Horta also completed a house and studio for his own use on the rue Américaine. Victor Horta lent his talent to public projects as well. In 1895, he built the Maison du Peuple for the Belgian Socialist Party, largely with Solvay’s financing. He also worked on department stores: the Brussels department store chain called A l’Innovation (1900), the Anspach stores (1903), Magasins Waucquez (1906) and Magasins Wolfers (1909). In 1912, Horta was entrusted with the reorganisation of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Brussels. The next year he agreed to serve as the institution’s director for three years. At the end of his term directing the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Horta was forced to exile himself to the United States until 1919.

Upon his return, he sold his premises on the rue Américaine and started working on plans for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1925, Horta completed the Pavillon d’honneur for the first International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts in Paris and became the Principal of the Fine Arts class at the Académie Royale de Belgique.

Horta was elevated to the title of Baron in 1932. Five years later, he submitted his final project: the Gare Centrale de Bruxelles (Brussels Central Train Station). Fortunately, he died without having to witness the destruction of his works, such as the Magasins Anspach and the Maison du Peuple, which were demolished in 1965-1966. In 1969, his house and studio on the rue Américaine were turned into the Musée Horta, in the end serving to consecrate his work as an artist.

 

Thomas Jefferson

(Shadwell, 1743 – Monticello, 1826)

Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States. Born in 1743, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1767. He began his public service as a justice of the peace and parish vestryman; he was chosen a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 and entered the Continental Congress in 1775. He is famous for being one of the writers of the Declaration of Independence from 1776. Between 1784 and 1789 Jefferson visited France and served as Minister there. After returning from France he became secretary of state under George Washington and then Vice President before being elected as a President in 1800. Jefferson was one of the greatest political managers his country has known, and he was President of the United States until 1809. His importance as a maker of modern America can scarcely be overstated, for the ideas he advocated became the very foundations of American republicanism. His administration ended the possibility of the development of Federalism in the direction of class government; and the party he formed fixed the democratic future of the nation.

Jefferson was not only a politician but also an architect. He designed his house in Monticello which was very modern for the time with automatic doors and the first swivel chair. After he retired from his political career, he devoted his last years to the establishment of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. He planned the buildings, gathered its faculty and shaped its organisations. He died on the 4th of July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence.

 

Philip Johnson

(Cleveland, 1906 – New Canaan, 2005)

Sometimes called the dean of American architects, the long-lived Johnson played a pivotal role in introducing modern architecture to America. His reputation is nevertheless ambiguous, for while he commanded respect for his behind-the-scenes influence, few of Johnson’s buildings are seen as unequivocal masterpieces and both his personal life and professional philosophy proved controversial. Drawing on an extensive knowledge of architectural history, particularly Neoclassicism, Johnson’s approach was essentially aesthetic and artistic rather than intellectual, and he repeatedly disavowed having any firm convictions. A child of Midwestern privilege, Johnson studied history and philosophy at Harvard before taking an interest in architecture. In 1932, in collaboration with the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he mounted an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art on recent modern buildings, later published in book form as The International Style. In his 30s Johnson went to study architectural design under Gropius and Breuer at Harvard. Soon afterwards he erected his most widely admired building, his own Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut: an elegantly detailed glass box on a low plinth, its minimal aesthetics are those of Mies van der Rohe. Johnson’s work in the 1960s became increasingly free, eclectic, decorative and even hedonistic, establishing itself as part of a ‘New Formalism.’ His New York State Theater at Lincoln Theater at Lincoln Centre (1960-64), which recalls Classical motifs, is a typical example. Working with John Burgee from 1967, Johnson designed many large-scale corporate buildings, notably the conventionally modernist Pennzoil Place, Houston (1970-76) as well as the groundbreakingly historicising AT&T Building, New York City, whose stone cladding, broken pediment and monumental entrance lobby launched American Postmodernism. Always in the forefront of the latest trends, Johnson spent his last years experimenting with Deconstructivism and computer modeling. As this brief list indicates, Johnson’s ever-changing approach confirms his frank admission that his only fundamental belief was relativism.

 

Inigo Jones

(Smithfield, 1573-1652)

Inigo Jones, English architect of Spanish origin, was the first to introduce Renaissance architecture to Great Britain.

Born into a modest family (his father was a master tailor), it was through his numerous trips to Italy, particularly Venice, that Jones was introduced to art. Upon his return to England, he was accepted into the court of King Charles I, where he became renowned not only for his architectural talents, but also as a painter, engineer, geometrician, stenographer, and playwright. Founder of mask theatre at the court, Jones was also named Geometrician to the King and General Steward to the Buildings of the Crown. It was in this position that he was charged in 1612 with the responsibility of scouring Italian museums and private anthologies in order to put together a collection of the most remarkable drawings inspired by Antiquity.

Jones’s best-known works – Covent Garden, the Queen’s House in Greenwich, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall – are strongly inspired by Italian architecture. Jones cultivated the appreciation of uncluttered, sober and solid construction. Using the Italian architect Andrea Palladio as a reference, he attached great importance to mathematical proportions, and established the model of the cubic building as an architectural principle. His designs for Covent Garden, including the church, square, and surrounding streets, are considered the first work of London urbanism.

 

Filippo Juvarra

(Messine, 1678 – Madrid, 1736)

Filippo Juvarra is considered one of the representative artists of early Rococo, who marked the period with his elegant and sophisticated creations.

Born in Messina in 1685 into a family of goldsmiths, he learned the family business before joining the studio of Carlo Fontana in Rome. There, he studied antique architecture, as well as the works of Michelangelo, Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona. His efforts were crowned with success, and Juvarra came away with several awards, including that of the Academy in 1705.

In 1724, he was summoned to Lisbon, where he elaborated on the plans of the Sé Patriarchal Cathedral. Upon his return to Italy, he found himself entrusted with the dome of the Basilica di Sant’Andrea in Mantua and the design of the cathedral cupola in Como, as well as the façade of the Santa Cristina church in Turin.

In Turin, he specialised in religious architecture and earned the affection of Victor Amadeus II, the prince of Piedmont, who commissioned Juvarra’s two most beautiful creations: the Basilica of Superga, a round, sepulchral church topped with a dome that is considered a masterpiece of Baroque art, and the royal hunting pavilion of Stupinigi, which Juvarra transformed into a true palace.

In 1735, the King of Spain asked him to draw the plans for the new Royal Palace of Madrid. Unfortunately, this order, like so many others, never came to fruition: his designs were so ambitious that his financial partners were often intimidated by the elevated cost of the construction.

 

Louis Kahn

(Kuressaare, 1901 – Manhattan, 1974)

Sometimes categorised as a Brutalist, Kahn certainly favoured the bold, large-scale forms in brick and concrete characteristic of that vaguely-defined approach, but his work was informed largely by an idiosyncratic personal philosophy and by historical tradition. Possessing great personal charisma, Kahn remains something of a cult figure among architects, though his often austere buildings seem to hold less appeal for the general public. Kahn was born in Estonia, but his family soon settled in Philadelphia. After a traditional fine arts education at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked for the City Planning Commission. It was only in the early 1950s that he was able to synthesise his love of ancient buildings with more progressive approaches. In searching for an architecture that could communicate on the deepest levels, Kahn began by rethinking the practise first from principles, positing elemental categories of structure, form, space, light and order. His early extension to the Yale University Art Gallery was an elegantly Miesian brick and glass box, though the Richards Medical Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, assembled from prefabricated concrete parts, is deliberately complex and varied: he here famously proposed a separation of “served” and “servant” areas, articulating the latter (including circulation and mechanical systems) as towers. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, conceived as a poetic retreat for research and meditation, has a formal, axial plan: its two wings frame a dramatic view of the Pacific. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is a series of parallel concrete vaults of unique light-diffusing configuration, though the interiors are less compartmentalised than this might suggest. Finally, Kahn’s monumental government complex at Dhaka, Bangladesh deployed his stark geometries on the grandest possible scale. Kahn can be seen to have reinvigorated modern architecture by using Classical or Beaux-Arts strategies to reinfuse drama and meaning into abstract geometry and by reintroducing a mythic element at a time when sterile functionalism or social determinism seemed to have the upper hand.

 

Rem Koolhaas

(Rotterdam, 1944 – )

The forcefully progressive architecture of the Rotterdam-born Koolhaas actively embraces aspects of contemporary capitalism, consumerism and globalisation – notably dehumanisation, chaos, placelessness and unprecedented scale – that many find disturbing. Both cynical and realistic, Koolhaas celebrates the speed and disorder of modern urban life. Though clearly allied to earlier modernism, he has effectively questioned older dogmas concerning functionalism and rigid adherence to a pre-established program. Koolhaas studied film in Amsterdam and architecture at London’s AA and at Cornell before forming the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in 1975. A pure theoretician for much of his early career, Koolhaas published his first manifesto, Delirious New York, in 1978. This carefully researched but passionate study of the phenomenon of ‘Manhattanism’ launched his career-long interest in the notion of ‘bigness,’ which he realised could be exploited as an aesthetic option rather than simply tolerated as a necessary evil of an overcrowded planet. His early fantasy projects for New York skyscrapers were imaginative and colourful, reflecting a further interest in Russian Constructivism. Among Koolhaas’s first realised projects were the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague and the Rotterdam Kunsthal (1992-93). His influential and monumentally large book SMLXL (1995, with Bruce Mau and Hans Werleman) is a dense collage of imagery, essays, diaries, fiction, and coverage of OMA projects; its overall message was to reinforce the extent to which architecture must now move with the speed of modern transportation, electronic media, and changing fashion; his later books have been written in collaboration with his Harvard students. Koolhaas’s recent designs, including the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (2004), Seattle Public Library and the CCTV Headquarters, Beijing (2004), all betray his characteristically angled and faceted geometries, embodying a resolutely unsentimental attempt to meet the intimidating challenges of contemporary society with creative enthusiasm.

 

Louis Le Vau

(Paris, 1612-1670)

Louis Le Vau was one of the founders of French classicism (the “Louis XIV” style), which he managed to blend elegantly with the Baroque style.

The son of a master mason, he began his career amongst a wealthy, private clientele, for whom he constructed numerous private mansions and castles. During his apprenticeship, Le Vau was so bold as to exercise great creative freedom: leaving behind his academic education, he adopted a very personal style. His specialities were panelled ceilings, alcove rooms and rooms inspired by Italian architecture, all of which garnered him so much aclaim that he was appointed First Architect to the King by Louis XIV in 1654.

Between 1656 and 1661, he built his most famous monument, the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte, which was commissioned by the Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet. Constructed in a grandiose style, the château was built according to the designs of Mansard and Le Nôtre. (See commentary.)

Taken under the wing of Louis XIV, Le Vau participated in the transformation of Paris into the magnificent, radiant capital of the King’s dreams. In addition to the expansion of the castle at Versailles, he helped to embellish the Château de Vincennes, the Tuileries Palace, the Louvre, and the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. He also designed the College of the Four Nations, now the principal seat of the Institut de France, at the request of Cardinal Mazarin. This structure demonstrates the skilful combination of Baroque and Classic styles, the two disciplines loved by the architect, and also shows the particular influence of Bernini’s work.

 

Daniel Libeskind

(Lódź, 1946 – )

The spectacularly angled forms of American architect Libeskind, who at one point was classed as a Deconstructivist, were for many years seen as so speculative and expressionistic as to be unbuildable; in recent years they have nevertheless achieved material form in several cities. Of Polish ancestry, Libeskind is the son of Jewish holocaust survivors and grew up in New York City. He studied architecture at the Cooper Union and later at Essex University, England. After very brief stints with Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman, Libeskind embarked on an international career characterised largely by teaching and theorising. His first realised building, finished in 1998 when he was 52 years old, was the Felix Nussbaum art museum in Osnabrück, Germany. His breakthrough commission, however, was the well-regarded Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 1999. Its violently angular and scored geometries, derived through a process of conceptual mapping, provides an appropriately unsettling container for anguished memories. It is now Germany’s most visited museum. In 2003 Libeskind won the competition for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. His entry, entitled ‘Memory Foundations,’ proposed a series of tall, crystalline forms flanking a central ‘Freedom Tower’ of unprecedented height; this will no longer be built as designed, however. Libeskind has since erected Jewish museums in several other cities, as well as the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester (1997-2002) and an extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2002-07); his famous design for a spiral extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was cancelled due to lack of funding. Libeskind’s studio is two blocks north of the World Trade Center site.

 

Adolf Loos

(Brno, 1870 – Vienna, 1933)

Austrian architect and writer Adolf Loos was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1870. After finishing his studies in architecture in Dresden, he spent three years in the U.S. There, Loos discovered the creations of American architect Louis Sullivan, leader of the Chicago School, an architectural movement that profoundly influenced him.

He settled in Vienna in 1896, where he began to work for the architect Carl Mayreder before establishing himself independently in 1897. In 1920, he was named the Chief Architect of the Housing Department of Vienna. At the same time, he pursued his theoretical research, which he revealed in the form of several essays; the most famous of these, “Ornament and Crime” (1908), was published by Le Corbusier in his periodical, Esprit Nouveau.

Adolf Loos is known for his opposition to the Viennese Secession movement and his virulent criticism of ornamental construction as envisioned by supporters of Art Nouveau. An independent herald of change, he continued the thought movement launched by Otto Wagner and advocated a style based on refinement and function.

Loos conceived several houses and villas in Vienna, but also in Paris, notably the residence of Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Some of his most famous works are the Goldman and Salatsch store building, also called the “Looshaus” (1912), the Steiner House, one of his most radical constructions in reinforced concrete, and the Villa Moller. The purity of his style made Adolf Loos a pioneer of modern architecture. He had a direct influence on later artists and on the architecture of the 20th century.

 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

(Glasgow, 1868 – London, 1928)

Producing his greatest works in a few short years around the turn of the century, Mackintosh stands at the intersection of older Arts and Crafts traditions and the search for a uniquely modern style that was associated with the Art Nouveau movement. Mackintosh’s formal creations are unmistakably his own, characterised by long, elegant vertical lines terminating in floral or vegetative motifs. Drawing inspiration from Art Nouveau designs published in The Studio magazine, Mackintosh began his career largely as a graphic and furniture designer in conjunction with his friend J.H. McNair and the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald (the latter of which he later married). While working as a draughtsman for the firm of Honeyman & Keppie, Mackintosh won the competition for a new building for the Glasgow School of Art, where he had earlier studied. The result was a unique hybrid of Art Nouveau, Scottish castle motifs and an artistic use of wrought iron. The large and asymmetrically disposed studio windows, influenced by factory architecture, would later be seen as forerunners of the machine aesthetic of the 1920s. Much of Mackintosh’s mature work is notable for its characteristically aestheticised mode of interior decoration: his domestic and commercial interiors were generally white and airy, with lacquered furniture and selected points of exquisite floral decoration. He designed a chain of tearooms in Glasgow, whose visual purity was intended to mirror their intended goal of providing a healthier alternative to alcoholic drinking establishments. Mackintosh’s two major houses, both near Glasgow, were Windyhill (1899-1901) and Hill House. Already known in Vienna, he achieved further international prominence when his designs for ‘the house of an artistic connoisseur’ were published as part of a competition organised by a German magazine in 1901. (These were finally realised in Glasgow in 1996.) His last years were spent painting stylised landscapes and still lifes. In the later 20th century, Mackintosh’s work was rediscovered, and his buildings are major tourist attractions in Glasgow and its vicinity.

 

Richard Meier

(Newark, 1934 – )

Among late-modern architects, Meier is perhaps the pre-eminent flagbearer for the expressive potential of abstract, sculptural form. Almost invariably employing white as his sole colour, Meier’s intricate buildings evince a purity that may seem detached from mundane realities. But while his formal language is often so abstract as to seem self-referential, Meier’s deployment of elements is nevertheless governed by a rigorous conceptual plotting of the interplay of form, structure, site, circulation and social elements. After studying at Cornell, Meier sought unsuccessfully to work for his idol Le Corbusier in Paris, but instead began his career with Skidmore Owings & Merrill and Marcel Breuer in America. Opening his own practise in 1963, Meier’s early work consists of a series of detached dwellings in natural settings, notably the Smith house in Darien, Connecticut (1965-67) and the Douglas house in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Meier exhibited with the New York Five from 1969, eventually turning out to be the most mainstream and prolific member of that intellectual and sometimes arcane group. His Athenaeum at New Harmony, Indiana, which serves as an orientation centre at the site of an early 19th-century utopian colony, again deploys a Corbusian vocabulary of ramps, columns and planes while privileging the notion of circulation; its white enamel cladding ensures a maximal contrast between nature and man-made geometry. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia is focused around a huge top-lit atrium, its long ramp improving on that of the Guggenheim by being kept rigorously separate from display areas. In 1984 Meier was chosen to design the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, a monumental complex of buildings set on a hilltop, with gallery spaces, library and study facilities, and conservation labs. Though each wing of this lavish and expensive complex is articulated differently, the whole comes together as a kind of collage, a medium which Meier in fact embraces in his secondary role as an artist.

 

Erich Mendelsohn

(Olsztyn, 1887 – San Francisco, 1953)

Mendelsohn’s work is characterised by a sculptural curvilinearity that introduced a new dynamism into early modern architecture even as it sometimes underplayed functional considerations. This tendency first emerged in a series of tiny sketches of imaginary buildings that he produced while serving in the trenches in the First World War. Following the lead of the German Expressionist painters, Mendelsohn’s goal was to convey a sense of energetic spontaneity. The earliest material manifestation of this expressionistic approach can be seen at the Einstein Tower, an observatory built at Potsdam (1919-21). The Tower’s organic curves were originally to have been built in reinforced concrete, but practical considerations forced him to achieve the desired effect using plaster over brick. Through the 1920s Mendelsohn designed a series of industrial buildings of unusually diverse and imaginative form, while his large department stores in Stuttgart and Chemnitz deployed sweeping curves for their façades. Sensing the coming troubles for Jewish architects, Mendelsohn left Germany in 1933 to form a partnership in London with Serge Chermayeff. Their most notable collaboration is the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, an elegantly modernistic entertainment centre characterised by smooth white surfaces, large areas of glass and a dramatic spiral staircase. In the later 1930s Mendelsohn was active in Palestine, erecting a house for Chaim Weizmann in Rehovot and the Hadassah University Medical Centre on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Seeking further commissions, Mendelsohn moved to the United States in 1941. His Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco (1946-50) contains reminiscences of his youthful expressionism in the form of rounded balconies and staircases, and his last works were a series of synagogues in the American Midwest.

 

Charles Moore

(Benton Harbor, 1925 – Austin, 1993)

The multi-faceted Moore succeeded in bringing many forgotten elements back to modern architecture, including colour, ornamentation, humor and a sensitive awareness of historical typologies. Moore studied at the University of Michigan and at Princeton, where he acted as a teaching assistant for Louis Kahn. Based largely in Berkeley, California from 1959, Moore moved around America constantly and hence worked with many partners, including Donald Lyndon, William Turnbull and Richard Whitaker. He served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1965-70, went to teach at UCLA in 1975, and finally came to Austin in 1985 to teach at the University of Texas. Moore’s own house in Orinda, California (1962) attracted attention for its conceptual identity as a series of nested aedicules. The wooden-clad geometries of his innovative condominiums at Sea Ranch on the northern California coast (1964 and later, with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin) respond to the bleak, windswept setting as well as to older buildings (barns, the Russian settlement at Fort Ross) nearby. Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz (1971) is articulated as a fanciful version of an Italian hill town. Moore’s later works appear even more theatrical and scenographic: the famous Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, a collection of dislocated Classical elements reproduced in incongruous materials, introduced Postmodern humor and historical pastiche to American architecture. Moore’s last building, the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma (1996), features huge arched gables. Eclectic, extroverted and colourful, Moore’s approach may at first seem superficial, but his fruitful dialogue with older architectural typologies, as well as his influential and thoughtful books, makes Moore one of the pre-eminent architectural thinkers of the 20th century.

 

Julia Morgan

(San Francisco, 1872 – San Francisco, 1957)

Morgan’s career represents a series of firsts in the all-too-brief story of women in the architectural profession. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Morgan took a degree in engineering at UC Berkeley before making the unprecedented step of going to Paris to study architecture at the famed École des Beaux-Arts. Morgan thus not only received the best possible architectural education, but went on to establish one of the most prolific and successful architectural practises in California. By the time of her death she had designed (and in most cases actually erected) between 700 and 800 domestic, religious, educational, commercial and public buildings. Much of her early work was residential: in the first decade of the 20th century she became famous for her many shingle-clad Arts and Crafts houses in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. Morgan in fact worked simultaneously in many different styles, including English half-timbered, Mediterranean, Spanish Colonial and Classical. In 1915 she was made the official architect for the national YWCA in the West, and her subsequent career was to include much patronage from female clients and organisations. All such commissions were inevitably overshadowed by her role as architect for the palatial hilltop estate that newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst built for himself on a remote part of the California coast. For the main building of San Simeon (begun 1919), Morgan combined allusions to California missions, reminiscences of medieval and Renaissance architecture, and many other points of reference. This eclecticism was in part necessary in order to incorporate the many fragments of historical buildings — doorcases, ceilings, paneling, tapestries and large pieces of furniture — that Hearst had purchased in Europe; many of these still remain in warehouses. When she finally closed her office, Morgan destroyed many of her blueprints and documentation, making the reconstruction of her long and groundbreaking career a difficult task.

 

Richard Neutra

(Vienna, 1892 – Wuppertal, 1970)

Neutra was instrumental in bringing the innovations of European modernism to North America. Born and educated in Vienna, he was influenced early on by the architect and theorist Adolf Loos, who instilled in him the need to reject the ornamentalism of the earlier Secessionist school. This tendency was reinforced by his discovery of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Neutra trained as an urban planner in Switzerland and worked for Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin before moving to the United States in 1923. Here he had a position in a large commercial firm in Chicago and studied under Wright at Taliesin before moving on to start a practise in Los Angeles. Neutra’s early domestic buildings in California, exemplified by his ‘Health’ house for Dr. Philip Lovell, were radically modern in form, materials and ideology: set atop a steep hillside, the Lovell house used an innovative system of steel framing and cable suspension to create a stack of planar, partially transparent and seemingly weightless terraces. Neutra’s influence was to be decisive for the later ‘Case Study’ house program in southern California and for modernist house design in general. Neutra also took an interest in larger-scale social projects, including the design of mass housing complexes and innovative school typologies. After the war, his most prominent masterwork was the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, an elegant series of glass-walled spaces arranged according to a ‘pinwheel’ plan (recalling those of Wright) and focused outwards to the spectacular desert landscape. Neutra’s later and larger buildings in Los Angeles are less memorable, but his writings, such as Survival through Design (1947), lay out an intriguing theory of the role that psychological factors should take in the shaping of architectural space.

 

Oscar Niemeyer

(Rio de Janeiro, 1907 – )

The remarkably long-lived Niemeyer will be remembered not only for bringing European modernism to South America, but for modulating a sometimes puritanical approach to suit a distinctive vision of Brazil’s regional character. Niemeyer’s vocabulary remains that of international modernism, but is crucially inflected by his preference for expressive and sensual forms: he has often stated his belief that rectangular design is unnatural, hard and inflexible, and that he prefers the sensuality of the curves to be found in natural and organic forms. Niemeyer’s decisive influence came from Le Corbusier, who visited Rio in 1936 to assist in the design of the new Ministry of Health and Education, a building for which Niemeyer acted as design head in succession to Lucio Costa. His first internationally recognised commission was a series of pavilions of varied and sculptural forms for the resort at Pampulha (1942-44). Through the following decade he designed factories, schools, houses and apartment blocks in Brazil, all of which recast the typologies of modernism into a more lyrical and curvilinear idiom. In 1957 Niemeyer embarked on the project that would come to occupy him for the rest of his life: the new national capital of Brasilia, master-planned by Costa. Here each widely-spaced building, including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court, National Congress and National Cathedral, is of unique form and simple elegance, the keynote again provided by repeated curves; his most recent buildings in the capital were added as recently as 2006. Niemeyer’s staunchly Communist politics may seem at odds with his work for élite and establishment clients, but the beauty of his forms, as epitomised by the Sambadrome parade ground in Rio (1984), is meant to bring joy to all social classes and to embody national pride. His more recent works, equally striking in form, include the Niterói Art Museum (1996) and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba (2002).

 

Jean Nouvel

(Fumel, 1945 – )

Nouvel’s architectural output is of such diversity that it resists summation, but it is held together by his incessant creative experimentation with new forms and technologies, and in this he may be seen to continue the legacy of French engineering running from Viollet-le-Duc through Contamin, Eiffel, Freyssinet, Perret and Prouvé. He is particularly enamoured of complex effects of light, transparency and screening. Born in Fumel, France, Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before working for the architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio (1967-70). He gained an international following with his Arab World Institute in Paris, which recasts traditional Arabic symbolism in a High-Tech language: though the cultural centre presents a curving glass screen to the Seine, the south façade comprises a grid of titanium and steel diaphragms of complex geometrical character; equipped with photoelectric cells, each opens and closes in response to changing conditions of ambient light. They are meant to recall, in fact, the pierced wooden screens that shade windows in traditional Middle Eastern and North African houses. Nouvel’s Nemausus housing complex at Nîmes (1987) is more uncomprisingly industrial, with many metallic elements. The unbuilt project for an ‘Endless Tower’ at the La Défense district of Paris (1989) proposed a tall cylinder whose progressive vertical articulation in granite, aluminum, stainless steel and glass would cause it to appear to vanish into the sky. Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris is partly concealed behind a series of free-standing glass screens. His more recent work includes the bullet-shaped Torre Agbar in Barcelona (2005) and the new branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, a domed building presently under construction. Nouvel won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2008, and his practise is presently one of the largest in France.

 

Andrea Palladio

(Padua, 1508 – Vicenza, 1580)

Andrea Palladio was an important artist, architect and author for the entire development of Western architecture. His original name was Andrea di Pietro. Palladio, the name he adopted, refers to the Greek goddess of wisdom Pallas Athena. At the age of thirteen years we find him in the stonemasons’ guild of Vicenza as an assistant. Then he met the amateur architect Giangiorgio Trissino, who looked after him and changed his name to Andrea Palladio. After a number of commissions in the classical tradition, he dedicated himself primarily to the construction of palaces and villas for the aristocracy. In the 1560s he took up designing religious buildings. He completed the refectory of the Benedictine monastery San Giorgio Maggiore, the cloister of the monastery Santa Maria della Carita (now the Galleria dell’Accademia), and the façade of the church of San Francesco della Vigna. His Venetian work culminated in three magnificent churches which have been preserved to this day: San Giorgio Maggiore, Il Redentore and “Le Zitelle” (Santa Maria della Presentazione). Surprisingly, in spite of numerous attempts, Palladio never managed to get commissions for worldly buildings in Venice. In 1570 he published his theoretical paper I Quattro Libri dell ‘Architettura. In the same year he was appointed architectonic consultant of the Venetian Republic. Although he was influenced by a number of thinkers and architects of the Renaissance, he developed his conceptions quite independently from most contemporary ideas. Palladio’s work slightly lacks the splendour of other Renaissance architects, but instead he established a successful method, which survived the times, of invoking the architecture of classical antiquity as a source of inspiration. His loggias, equipped with colonnades, constituted an innovation which was later taken up in the whole of Europe.

 

Ieoh Ming Pei

(Guangzhou, 1917 – )

Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei’s work validates the idea that modernist abstraction and Classical monumentality can be successfully reconciled. Born in Guangzhou (Canton), China, where his family can trace its roots back to the 15th century, Pei was schooled in Hong Kong and Shanghai before arriving in America at the age of 18. There he studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, at MIT, and finally at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Gropius. Establishing his practise in New York, Pei worked closely for many years with developer William Zeckendorff. Much of his early work, such as the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado (1954-59) or the Place Ville Marie in Montreal (1962), consisted of large-scale commercial projects in a conventionally modernist idiom. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, however, featured bold sculptural forms in concrete to match the scale and power of the mountain setting. His mature style, owing much to Brutalist aesthetics, became increasingly reliant on simple geometries deployed on a grand scale; the Dallas City Hall (1972) is a good example. Pei’s high-profile East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., made use of massive triangulated forms that nevertheless succeed in creating a respectful dialogue with the older Classical monuments of the capital, an effect in part achieved through cladding with white stone sourced from the same quarries that had been used by its historic neighbours. Pei’s greatest professional coup, however, was undoubtedly his selection by French President François Mitterrand to design the massive renovation and expansion of the Louvre museum in Paris; Pei’s self-effacing approach was to sink almost all of the new construction under the main courtyard, allowing public access through a large but minimal glass pyramid. Many of his later works were created in collaboration with James Ingo Freed and Henry N. Cobb.

 

Auguste Perret

(Ixelles, 1874 – Paris, 1954)

Though his reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by the subsequent fame of his one-time pupil Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret is today best remembered for bringing the hitherto utilitarian material of reinforced concrete into use for formal and domestic structures, including churches. In this regard, his technical innovations are perhaps more notable than his architectural aesthetics, which generally remained anchored to historical precedent. Working in partnership with his two brothers, Perret erected his first major building: a block of flats at 25b rue Franklin in Paris, whose façades of floral tile served as an external expression of its concrete framing. The now-demolished garage in the rue Ponthieu (1905) exposed its reinforced concrete structure even more openly while including such decorative flourishes as a large rose window in its façade. Perret again used reinforced concrete for his Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1911-14), but here the rigorously rectilinear forms and decorative bas-relief sculptural panels recall a more conservative Classical idiom. His church of Notre-Dame du Raincy essentially reinterprets the Gothic tradition in terms of concrete, using the structural possibilities of the new material to draw out the older style’s innate tendencies toward skeletonisation and the dematerialisation of walls into fields of luminous colour. Perret’s post-war rebuilding of the cities of Le Havre and Amiens made use of his favoured material on a huge scale, most dramatically for the tall skyscraper at Amiens (1947) and the impressive but lugubrious church of St. Joseph (1951-58) with its 106 metre spire, though here again his vocabulary is that of a rationalised Neoclassicism. In 2005, UNESCO declared Perret’s reconstruction of Le Havre to be a World Heritage Site.

 

Renzo Piano

(Genoa, 1937 – )

Sometimes labeled as a High-Tech architect, Piano has in fact used technology in a nuanced and not always overt manner, and his career can more fairly be characterised by its diversity of formal approach and responsiveness to context and user needs. Piano studied and later taught in Milan, and worked with Louis Kahn from 1965-70. He formed a partnership with Richard Rogers from 1970-77 to design and build the Pompidou Centre in Paris, his first major commission. This great cultural complex famously appears as a giant factory or machine, but its design was largely predicated on notions of flexibility and user-friendliness. Its exposed steel exoskeleton was meant to free up the internal spaces, while its equally emphatic display of services, all colour-coded, creates a busy, decorative patterning on the outside of the building. Many of Piano’s subsequent projects were erected in Italy, but notable among his work in other countries is the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas (1981-87 and later), an art museum housed in a self-effacing series of wood-clad pavilions in a domestically-scaled neighbourhood, with internal toplighting controlled by curving concrete leaves. Piano’s Kansai International Airport, Osaka (1987-94), built on an unprecedentedly large scale on an artificial island, has a linear arrangement that is conceptually and visually simple, and its subtly curved silver roof aids in the circulation of fresh air. His many later museum projects include the remarkable Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea, New Caledonia (1991-98), a series of wooden, egg-like forms arranged in a shallow arc to suggest a lagoon-side village. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas (opened 2003), as well as the Morgan Library expansion, New York (2003-06), are notable for their lightness, transparency and elegant restraint. His most recent project, the New York Times Building (2008), has been praised as a rebirth of innovative skyscraper form in Manhattan.

 

Henry Hobson Richardson

(St. James Parish, 1838 – Brookline, 1886)

Henry Hobson Richardson was an American architect born of a rich family. He graduated from Harvard University in 1859 and entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After returning, he established himself in New York where he soon made his way into practise as an architect. In 1878, he moved to Boston where he passed the remaining years of his life.

Richardson’s career was short (he died at the age of forty-seven), and the number of his works was small compared with the attention they attracted and the influence he left behind him. One of the most important and characteristic is Trinity Church in Boston. In Trinity Church, his first monumental work, he broke away from the prevailing English Gothic fashion. The style, though mixed, shows his surrender to the attraction of the European Romanesque and particularly of the churches in Auvergne, which furnished the material for the design of the apse.

Among other monuments that he designed, one can note the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh and Glessner house in Chicago. Richardson’s uncommon personality so embodied itself in his works that it cannot be overlooked. He had an inexhaustible energy of body and mind, an enthusiasm more genial than combative, but so abounding and at times vehement that few men could resist him.

He found American architecture restless, incoherent and exuberant; his example did much to turn it back to simplicity and respose.

 

Richard Rogers

(Florence, 1933 – )

In our present era of computers, cybernetics and unending technological innovation, it may well be asked why we continue to build with heavy, archaic materials like bricks and concrete when we could be using light, precision components of metal and glass. Rogers has taken such experiments further than most designers, though his aims are not merely technical. After training at the Architectural Association in London and at Yale, Rogers formed Team 4 with Norman Foster, Wendy Foster and his wife Su Rogers. Their Reliance Controls factory in Swindon (1967), a modest industrial structure with exposed diagonal bracing, highlights most of Rogers’ later strategies: the building’s skin (cladding), structure and services are kept distinct and visually evident, creating a free and flexible internal space. This approach was repeated on a monumental scale for the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1971-77, with Renzo Piano), whose structural frame and service elements—air, water, electricity, circulation—are moved to the exterior and brightly colour-coded. Rogers’ headquarters for Lloyds of London, based around a tall interior atrium, privileges the idea of future change: he reasoned that the frame of the building (in reinforced concrete) has a long life expectancy, but that individual service elements—toilets, kitchens, elevators, stairs, etc.—may not; hence they are plugged into the exterior as prefabricated units, accessible for cleaning or replacement. Externally, Lloyds is picturesquely defined by six servant towers with cranes, with many elements clad in stainless steel. Among Rogers’ many other large-scale commissions are Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (1989-2008), the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg (1995), the Millennium Dome, Greenwich, and the Law Courts in Bordeaux (1992-98) and Antwerp (1998-2005). Increasingly concerned with urbanistic issues, Rogers is as an impassioned advocate for a technologically progressive architecture with a social and ecological conscience, as laid out in his book Architecture: A Modern View (1991).

 

Aldo Rossi

(Milan, 1931-1997)

The work of Aldo Rossi has a richness, poetry and historical resonance rare in modern architecture. Equally active as an artist, Rossi developed a repertoire of imagery that was at once repetitive, eclectic and personal. Based in Milan for most of his life, Rossi was originally classified as a Neorationalist, meaning that he continued the tradition of earlier Italian modernism (‘rationalism’) and utilised a minimal vocabulary of stark geometry. In fact, Rossi often made reference to the traditions of Classicism, as well as to purely personal reminiscences of religious, domestic and industrial buildings encountered in his earlier years; the melancholic mood of his renderings further reveals a specific debt to the Metaphysical painter Giorgio di Chirico. Rossi first gained prominence as a historian and theorist of urbanism, and his influential treatise The Architecture of the City (1966), strongly informed by linguistics, proposed a typological reading of urban form: focusing mainly on traditional Italian towns, he posited that building types assume typical configurations whose usage nevertheless changes over time. His thought was also analogical, drawing scalar comparisons between a street and a corridor, a house and a city. Some of these ideas can be sensed in the Gallaratese housing complex in Milan (1970-73): stark, linear row housing raised above ground level to create a continuous covered street, it is both uncompromisingly modern and evocative of traditional Italian architecture. Rossi’s formal, axial design for the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena (1971 and later) deployed giant geometries to haunting effect: the hollow cube of the columbarium, conceived as a ‘house of the dead,’ is notably affective. His Theatre of the World, a floating wooden construction built for the 1980 Venice biennale, recalled Renaissance precedents and created a dialogue with the towers and domes of the city. Rossi’s ironically titled Scientific Autobiography (1981) reveals the essentially poetic nature of his motivation.

 

Eero Saarinen

(Kirkkonummi, 1910 – Ann Arbour, 1961)

Born into an artistically distinguished Finnish family, Saarinen studied sculpture in Paris and architecture at Yale. His first buildings were done in Michigan in collaboration with his father, Eliel, though he first rose to public attention with his simple and distinctive design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis. Saarinen rapidly assimilated the forms and aesthetics of Miesian modernism, as demonstrated on a monumental scale in the elegant rectilinear pavilions that make up the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Centred on a giant lagoon, the complex was feted as an ‘industrial Versailles’ at the time of its construction. After this time, Saarinen’s career took an imaginative and eclectic turn, and his subsequent projects each betray a distinctive appearance, form, structure and use of materials. His expressive, sculptural manner is best represented by the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale and the TWA Terminal at Idlewild, New York. In the latter, four intersecting shells of reinforced concrete are supported by Y-shaped columns, the whole composition irresistibly recalling an eagle about to take flight; Saarinen said only that his aim was to express “the drama and specialness and excitement of travel.” In contrast, the façades of his John Deere administration centre in Moline, Illinois, appear as densely layered grids of rusted steel. Though Saarinen’s untimely death cut short this intriguing and diverse series of experiments, a number of prominent American architects, such Cesar Pelli and Roche & Dinkeloo, first found their creativity in Saarinen’s office, and the expressive innovations in modern architecture that Saarinen had set in motion became irreversible.

 

Jacopo Sansovino

(Florence, 1486 – Venice, 1570)

The Italian sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino’s original name was Jacopo Tatti. He took the surname Sansovino as a sign of respect for the Florentine sculptor Andrea Sansovino, to whom he was apprenticed. He spent the years from 1506 to 1511 and from 1516 to 1527 in Rome, where he took part in theoretical and practical debates on architecture. His early sculptures were mainly influenced by classical antique art. Having dedicated himself to sculpture in his early years, he then designed several buildings in Rome as an architect and went to Venice in 1527, introducing the classical style of Roman architecture of the High Renaissance there. In 1529 he was appointed the highest master builder in the town, designing palaces, churches and public buildings. The style of these buildings was characterised by the merging of the classical tradition of the Florentine master Bramante with the more decorative Venetian approach. His building work in Venice began with four notable buildings: the high altar of the Scuola Grande di San Marco (approximately 1533), the new Scuola Grande di Misericordia (building started 1533), the church of San Francesco della Vigna (started 1534) and the Palazzo Corner a San Maurizio (designed in 1532). In addition to these masterpieces, he built the Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Grande, the mint, the hall at the foot of the great campanile and several churches. When the Venetian town government made the decision to renew the town centre (the Piazza San Marco), in order to express municipal liberty symbolically, Sansovino was entrusted with the construction of the most important buildings of the new urban complex: Biblioteca Marciana, Zecca and Loggetta del Campanile. Sansovino achieved a wonderful balance between classicism and Venetian tradition as a result of the successful studies of the urban complex. Another one of his masterpieces was the Villa Garzoni, laid out like a small factory, in Pontecasale (building started approximately 1540). Sansovino deserves the artistic importance of being the most significant figure in Venetian art of the sixteenth century. His designs became the fundamental model of Venetian palaces in the entire century. His outstanding masterpiece, the Libreria Vecchia (1536-88) at the Piazzetta San Marco follows the antique Roman theatre of Marcellus: Doric columns frame the arcade on the ground floor and Ionic columns the one on the first floor, so that there is a long majestic façade. As with all his buildings, the architecture is richly decorated with impressive free-standing sculptures and friezes.

Sansovino had a great influence on the future Venetian architects Andrea Palladio and Baldassare Longhena.

 

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

(Neuruppin, 1781 – Berlin, 1841)

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a German architect and painter, and professor in the Academy of Fine Arts at Berlin. He was a pupil of Friedrich Gilly, the continuation of whose work he undertook when Gilly died in 1800. In 1803 Schinkel went to Italy, returning to Berlin in 1805. The Napoleonic wars seriously interfered with his work as an architect, so he took up landscape painting, displaying a talent for the romantic delineation of natural scenery.

In 1810 he drew a plan for the mausoleum of Queen Louise and in 1819 a brilliant sketch for the Berlin cathedral in Gothic style. From 1808 to 1814 he painted a number of dioramas for Gropins. From 1815 he devoted much time to scene painting, examples of his work are still in use in the royal theatres of Germany. Schinkel’s principal buildings are in Berlin and its neighbourhood. His merits are, however, best shown in his unexcetuted plans for the transformation of the Acropolis into a royal palace, for the erection of the Orianda palace in the Crimea and for a monument to Frederick the Great.

 

Sir John Soane

(Goring-on-Thames, 1753 – London, 1837)

Sir John Soane was an English architect and art collector born of a humble family. His talent as a boy attracted the attention of George Dance the Younger, the architect, who with other friends helped him on. He won the Royal Academy’s silver (1772) and gold (1776) medals, and a travelling studentship and went to Italy to study. Upon returning to England, he got into practise and married a rich wife. He became architect to the Bank of England, his best-known work which he practically rebuilt in its present form, and did other important public work such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery. His architectural works are distinguished by their clean lines, careful proportions and skilful use of light sources. He became an Associate Royal Academician (A.R.A.) in 1795, then Royal Academician (R.A.) in 1802, and professor of architecture to the Royal Academy in 1806. In 1831 he was knighted. In his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he brought together a valuable antiquarian museum (now the Sir John Soane’s museum in London), which in 1835 he presented to the nation with an endowment; and there he died in 1837.

 

James Stirling

(Glasgow, 1926 – Edinburgh, 1992)

One of the more influential architects of the second half of the 20th century, Stirling was of a generation that began to question the achievements and assumptions of the pioneering modernists of the 1920s. His critique of modernist orthodoxies ultimately allowed him to recoup the past history of Western architecture, which had previously been repressed. Born in Glasgow, Stirling studied architecture at the University of Liverpool, where he was particularly marked by the teachings of the historian and theorist Colin Rowe. From 1956 he practised in London with James Gowan. Their Engineering Building at Leicester University (1959-63), a violent collision of blocky geometries featuring red bricks, extensive glazing, dramatic cantilevering and sawtooth skylights, was seen as brazenly industrial, and its ostensible refusal to make any concession to conventional notions of taste secured Stirling’s reputation as a proponent of Brutalism. The History Faculty Building at Cambridge (1964-67) was in a similar vein, though its extensive glazing turned out to be functionally defective. Collaborating with Michael Wilford from 1971, Stirling had little success in getting his projects built during this period. But with the stone-clad Clore Gallery at the Tate, London (1980), Stirling began to reveal a hitherto unsuspected interest in historical and Classical forms: entered through a large triangular opening, the façade evinced a non-specific monumentality that presaged much postmodern architecture. This was equally true of the new Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, whose brilliantly hued high-tech elements could not disguise its overall reading as a colossal ruin recalling both Roman and Neoclassical precedent. Ironically, however, Stirling’s exuberant office building at No.1 Poultry in London (1986-96) was specifically criticised for historical insensitivity in replacing a listed Victorian structure.

 

Louis Henry Sullivan

(Boston, 1856 – Chicago, 1924)

In the later 19th century Sullivan was the leading figure of the Chicago School, which strove to develop a new kind of architecture suited to the socio-geographic conditions of the American Midwest. His architectural education consisted of a one-year stint at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, though he later worked with engineer William LeBaron Jenney in Chicago and at the Académie Vaudremer in Paris. He partnered with the engineer Dankmar Adler from 1881. Sullivan was strongly influenced by the rugged neo-Romanesque style of H.H. Richardson, as can clearly be seen in the firm’s breakthrough building, the colossal Auditorium in Chicago (1886-90), a multi-use facility housing a theatre, hotel and office space. Even in this early commission, Sullivan’s trademark decorative motifs make an appearance: vegetative and prolific in character, they bear a coincidental resemblance to European Art Nouveau of the same date, but were intended to reference Sullivan’s theory of an ‘organic’ architecture growing naturally from its environment. Sullivan went on to design a series of early skyscrapers, notably the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis (1890-91) and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1895). After the Carson, Pirie, Scott Department Store in Chicago, Sullivan’s career was largely spent, and apart from a few small Midwestern banks of astonishing originality his last years were marked by alcoholism and critical neglect. His book Kindergarten Chats (1901), uniquely idealistic and sardonic in tone, sets out his architectural philosophy. Sullivan’s famous but much misunderstood dictum that “form ever follows function” does not advocate a Spartan utilitarianism; he in fact remained obsessed with the possibilities of a symbolic system of ornamentation, which formed the subject of his last, unfinished treatise. Many of Sullivan’s ideas were carried forward in the work of his brilliant pupil Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Kenzo Tange

(Sakai, Osaka, 1913 – Tokyo, 2005)

The pre-eminent Japanese modernist of the post-war years, Tange was able to assimilate the latest innovations in European architecture while maintaining a regard for traditional Japanese forms, structures, and traditions. Tange studied (and for many years taught) at the University of Tokyo. Specialising in urbanistic projects, he first worked in the office of Kunio Maekawa, a pupil of Le Corbusier. In 1949 Tange won the prestigious competition to build the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: here his modern post-and-beam structures recall both older Japanese wooden construction as well as the more robust Brutalist aesthetic of Le Corbusier. His Kagawa Prefectural Government Building (1955-58) again has emphatically trabeated façades. In 1960, Tange proposed a massive redesign of Tokyo, which would have seen the city expand onto the water in grids of repeated modular units; though never built, this proved remarkably influential, eventually even finding an echo in the late work of Le Corbusier himself (his unbuilt project for the Venice Hospital, 1965). Its rationale is essentially that of Structuralism, which had great impact in architecture and other intellectual fields at the time. The swooping forms of Tange’s Olympic stadium for the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 brought him international recognition, while the massively sculptural Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Centre again deployed Brutalist aesthetics to powerful emotional effect. Notable among Tange’s many later projects, which have been built in Bahrain, America, Nigeria and Singapore, is the colossal Tokyo Metropolitan Government building (1991), which at 243 metres was until recently the tallest building in the capital. His mannered and memorable Fuji Television Building is an asymmetrical composition of two blocky towers linked by an openwork grid of suspended corridors that intersect a huge silver sphere in mid-air. Tange’s students have included some of the most prominent Japanese modernists, including Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki and Fumihiko Maki.

 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

(Aachen, 1886 – Chicago, 1969)

Mies van der Rohe appears at once as one of the most characteristic and one of the most conservative of all modern architects. His famous dictum “less is more,” as well as his dedicated investigations into the nature of materials, served as guiding principles in all of his mature work. Despite his later influence, Mies van der Rohe had no formal training in architecture. After an apprenticeship in furniture design and construction, he worked as an assistant to Peter Behrens in Berlin, thus cementing his love of careful craftsmanship and launching his search to find an appropriate means of expression for the Machine Age. At the same time, he was strongly influenced by Neoclassical tradition as exemplified by his German predecessor K.F. Schinkel, and even in his most uncompromisingly modern compositions we can still trace the Classical virtues of precision, elegance, carefully considered proportions and the deployment of simple trabeated construction in repeated bays. From 1919, following contemporary Constructivist influences, Mies’s projects and brick houses became both free-form and elementarist. At the same time, he began to envision the erection of tall glass-clad skyscrapers, a vision he would only be able to realise after his move to America in 1937. His most notable intervention in German architecture before the war was his management of the Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart, where the uniformity of the prototype houses built by Europe’s leading modernists indicated to many visitors that a new ‘style’ had been born. Once in America, Mies van der Rohe took up a teaching post at (and designed a new campus for) the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. His later masterworks, such as the glass-walled Farnsworth House, captured the imagination of many architects but failed to impact the design of post-war housing, though his skyscrapers, such as the Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago and Seagram Building in New York City, set clear typological and stylistic precedents for much modernist production over the next two decades.

 

Robert Venturi

(Philadelphia, 1925 – )

Sometimes described as the ‘godfather’ of Postmodernism, Venturi was for many years better known as a polemical theorist than as an architect. His work reflects both his academic knowledge of architectural history and an ironic appreciation of popular culture, an attitude derived from Pop Art. Born and based in Philadelphia, Venturi studied at Princeton and worked for Saarinen and Kahn before entering into a series of professional partnerships with John Rauch, Denise Scott-Brown and others. His first major commission, the Guild House retirement home in Philadelphia (1960-63), illustrates his validation of a non-heroic, even ‘ordinary,’ architecture which nevertheless foils convention in subtle ways and includes covert, coded references to historical forms calculated to appeal to a select audience of architectural insiders. Built for his mother, the Vanna Venturi house in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania (1960-64) appears at first sight to be a conventional suburban tract house, though its many ambiguous and unresolved elements exemplify the principles set out in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). This influential manifesto questioned such basic modernist tenets as simplicity and clarity while championing a new plurality and hybridity. Venturi later published Learning from Las Vegas (with Scott Brown and Steve Izenour, 1972), which proposed an embrace of the commercial ‘vernacular’ of ordinary American landscapes. Some of Venturi’s later commissions work more directly with history: his Franklin Court in Philadelphia (1972-76) uses hollow steel members to outline a hypothetical ‘ghost’ of Benjamin Franklin’s original house and outbuildings, while the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery (1986 on) plays with Classical elements to humorous effect. Breaking further modernist taboos, the Seattle Art Museum is unabashedly decorative and colourful. Venturi’s most important contribution is perhaps his recognition that architecture is inevitably a matter of signs and symbols, as well as his validation of a “messy vitality” in urban design.

 

Otto Wagner

(Vienna, 1841-1918)

Otto Wagner was an Austrian architect. Accepted to the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna at the age of sixteen, he continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Construction in Berlin, ultimately graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Vienna. He built his first structures in a resolutely classical style until 1890, when he found himself entrusted with the urban management of the city of Vienna. Wagner abandoned the historicist style and introduced a decorative and ornamental architecture that lent distinction to the thirty or so stations that he built for the new subway. He was so successful that in 1894 he was appointed Director of the Academy of Architecture in Vienna.

In 1896, he published a book entitled Modern Architecture, in which he revealed his ideas about the role of the architect, then in 1897 he co-founded the Viennese Secession movement with a group of artists including Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser. This movement, breaking away from the preferred artistic tastes of the time, aimed to renew interest in the applied arts. Wagner’s most significant project associated with this movement is the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, built in reinforced concrete, decorated with marble and topped by an ornate victory balustrade.

Otto Wagner’s style, placing him at the crossroads of historicism and modernity, had a strong influence on modern architecture.

 

Sir Christopher Wren

(East Knoyle, 1632 – Hampton Court, 1723)

Christopher Wren was an English architect. He first studied geometry and applied mathematics in Oxford before becoming professor of astronomy. It is as an architect that Wren is best known, and the great fire of London, by its destruction of the cathedral and nearly all the city churches, gave Wren a unique opportunity as he made designs for rebuilding them.

St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is one of his greatest achievements. As a scientific engineer and a practical architect, Wren was perhaps more remarkable than as an artistic designer. The construction of the wooden external dome, and the support of the stone lantern by an inner cone of birchwood, quite independent of either the external or internal dome, are wonderful examples of his constructive ingenuity. Wren was an enthusiastic admirer of Bernini’s design and designed a colonnade to enclose a large piazza forming a clear space around the church, somewhat after the fashion of Bernini’s colonnade in front of St Peter’s.

Among Wren’s city churches the most noteworthy are St. Michael’s, Cornhill; St Bride’s, Fleet Street and St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside. Wren was very judicious in the way in which he expended the limited money at his command; he devoted it chiefly to one part or feature, such as a spire or a rich scheme of internal decoration. The other buildings designed by Wren are very numerous, including Trinity College in Cambridge, the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich and the reconstruction of Hampton Court.

Wren was knighted in 1673 and elected President of the Royal Society in 1681. He was in Parliament for many years before dying in 1723.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright

(Richland Center, 1867 – Phoenix, 1959)

The prolific and often prolix Wright remains the most famous American architect of the 20th century. Coming from a background of Transcendentalist idealism, Wright was largely self-taught, though his work under Louis Sullivan was to prove decisive for his later architectural philosophy. Like Sullivan, Wright was preoccupied with the need to develop a radically new kind of architecture suited to his vision of America, which necessarily meant rejecting all past stylistic allegiances. Having spent his youth on a farm, Wright desired to create an ‘organic’ architecture that would emerge naturally from the soil. His solution was the ‘Prairie House,’ a new typology characterised by emphatic horizontality, as manifested in a low podium (instead of a basement), deep eaves, and extended strips of clearstorey windows. Wright at the same time tacitly embraced the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, notably the emphasis on natural and local materials and the unified design of all elements within a given interior. His early houses also embody a radical rethinking of the ground plan, allowing a freer flow of space between rooms. After a relatively fallow spell working in Japan and Los Angeles, Wright’s career staged a spectacular comeback in the 1930s, when he produced such unquestioned masterpieces as Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax administrative headquarters. Wright’s very late works, like the Guggenheim Museum and the Marin County Civic Center, have been criticised for their formalistic and decorative mannerisms, and his most lasting legacy may well prove to have been in the field of inexpensive modern house design, as epitomised by the first Herbert Jacobs house in Wisconsin (1936). Wright’s architectural school, Taliesin, continued to operate for many years after his death, but his philosophy of organic architecture has found only sporadic adherence among later architects.