Norman Foster
Leading British modern architect noted for his High-Tech structures. After service in the RAF he received his architectural training at Manchester University School of Architecture (1956-61) and Yale University (1961-2).
One of his first projects, a house for Richard Rogers’s parents, was carried out with his late wife, and former partner, Wendy Foster, and Richard and Sue Rogers, working together as “Team 4″. Foster Associates was founded in London in 1967 and has grown into an enormously successful practice, with projects in many parts of the world.
Major projects include the controversial Reliance Controls Factory (1966-7), the much-admired black glass Willis Faber Dumas offices, Ipswich (1974-5), the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1976-8), what was described as the most expensive office building ever constructed, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (1979-85), and the Stansted Airport Terminal (1980-90).
Over the years Foster has worked with a number of partners, who are all now well established in their own practices, including Birkin Haward and Michael Hopkins. The “High-Tech” vocabulary of the practice is uncompromising and clear in its exploration of technological innovation: technology produces form. [...]
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Peter Eisenman
Prominent New York avant-garde critic, architect and theorist. Eisenman studied at Cornell and Columbia Universities and then at Cambridge, England. He taught at Cambridge, Princeton and the Cooper Union in New York, where he was founder director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, co-coordinating an ambitious programme of lectures, seminars, research and publications.
Until recently he has built little but received critical attention for a series of controversial “anti-houses” which flout practicality in an attempt to create an autonomous abstract architecture. A 1988 MoMa exhibition in New York defined him and other architects as “Deconstructivist”, subverting received ideas about structure and function related to the earlier movement of Constructivism.
Eisenman, however, has always sought somewhat obscure parallels between his work in architecture and philosophical ideas and literary theory. His earlier houses were “generated” from the transformation of forms, as structural linguistics holds that language is related to an underlying structure. Latterly in a number of larger commissions he has taken up some of the metaphysical and “anti-humanist” ideas of Post-structuralism or Deconstructionism. [...]
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Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier was the most important, influential and famous architect of the 20th century. Swiss by birth and trained as an artist in his home town under a fastidious teacher, L’Eplattenier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret (he adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier only in the early 1920s) was a remarkably talented pupil.
He travelled widely in the Near and Middle East, and worked his way through a study tour of Germany at a time when the ideas for a new architecture were being formulated. In 1908-9 he went to Paris to attend classes with Auguste Perret. Paris later became his métier: he was absorbed in the cultural and artistic life of the great city as an editor, a writer, architect and artist.
His dedication to the synthesis of the arts – particularly sculpture, painting and drawing and designing – never wavered. His early work, like that of his most important contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, was related to nature but also owed much to the famous French theorists Charles Blanc and Auguste Choisy. [...]
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Frank O. Gehry
Frank O. Gehry, one of the first “punk-style” famous architects, whose curious, irreverent buildings have been described as “functional sculpture” and Deconstructivist architecture. Although he was born in Canada, Gehry has become synonymous with the American West Coast where he works.
He studied at the universities of Southern California and Harvard. His first practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, was founded in 1963 and was succeeded in 1979 by the firm Gehry & Krueger Inc. Gehry has held a long fascination for painting and sculpture and first won public acclaim for his chunky corrugated cardboard furniture in 1972.
His distinctive exploded-then-reconstructed architectural style began to emerge in the late 1970s, when the design for his home at Santa Monica used corrugated metal, an exposed wooden frame and shields of chain-link fencing. [...]
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Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano – Leading Italian architect and designer concerned with technological innovations and environmentally balanced buildings. From 1959 to 1964 Piano studied at the Milan Politecnico, where he subsequently taught until 1968. In 1970 he set up in partnership with the English architect Richard Rogers and undertook a number of commissions in Italy and England, including the PATScentre in Cambridge in 1975.
The practice’s most important work, however, was its winning entry for the Place Beaubourg competition for a national arts centre in the middle of Paris, organized by the French government in 1973 (the Pompidou Centre). The imposing six-storey design takes the metaphor of “cultural machine” to its technological extreme by placing the structural skeleton and colour-coded servicing elements on the outside of the building. [...]
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Louis I. Kahn
Louis Isadore Kahn was one of the foremost architects of the second half of the 20 century. He went to the United States in 1905, and having mastered the Beaux-Arts-inspired curriculum of Dean Paul Cret, he graduated with honour from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. In the 1920s and early 30s, he worked first as a draughtsman and later as head designer in a succession of Philadelphia-based firms.
Most notably during this period, Kahn was Chief of Design for the Sesquicentennial Exhibition (1925-6) in his capacity as senior assistant in the Philadelphia City Architect’s office. During the Depression, he was particularly active in the design of public assisted housing. From 1935 Kahn was in private practice until his death in 1974. He was associated with George Howe in 1941, with Howe and Oscar Stonorov in 1942, and with Stonorov alone 1943-8. He was Design Critic and Professor of Architecture at Yale University from 1947 to 1957, when he accepted a similar appointment at his alma mater in Philadelphia. [...]
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I.M. Pei (Pei Ieoh Ming)
One of the American-naturalized famous architects, I.M. Pei (Pei Ieoh Ming) is known for his large scale and sophisticated glass-clad buildings including the controversial glass pyramid at the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Pei left China aged 18 and studied architecture at MIT and then under citoPitis at Harvard. He became an instructor then assistant professor at Harvard before joining Webb & Knapp Inc., New York (1948-55). In 1955 he founded I. M. Pei & Partners, New York, which in 1979 became Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners. Pei frequently works on a large scale and is renowned for his sharp, geometric designs.
He first achieved recognition for the Dallas Municipal Center (1966-78), which is built of concrete and resembles an upturned pyramid wedged into the ground. It is heavier in style than subsequent buildings, such as the 60- storey John Hancock Tower in Boston [...]
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Michael Graves
Michael Graves was one of the major figures of American Post-Modernism. Graves studied at the University of Cincinatti, Ohio, and then at Harvard. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome for two years and in 1964 started his own practice in Princeton, NJ.
He became a professor at Princeton University in 1972. He first came to prominence through the hook Five Architects (1972). The members of the “New York Five” were termed “Neo-Modernist” because of their austere reinterpretation of the rational style of Le Corbusier in the 1920s.
However, at the end of the 1970s, Graves’ work evolved away from concern with the roots of Modernism towards a wide- ranging borrowing from architectural history. His borrowings are eclectic; he uses historical forms in a more abstract and decorative way than some other Post-Modern classicists [...]
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Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a very famous architect for his much-misunderstood dictum “Less is More”. He sought to create contemplative, emotionally neutral spaces through an architecture based on material honesty and structural integrity. The first seeds of this austere vision of architecture may have been planted when Mies attended mass as a schoolboy in the Palatine Chapel, Aachen.
Early employment in the family stone carving business gave him an appreciation of materials that was to endure throughout his life. Following an apprenticeship in the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin, he entered the studio of Peter Behrens in 1908 and stayed there, with a brief intermission, until early 1912. Under the influence of Behrens, Mies discovered the combination of Prussian Classicism and advanced structural techniques that were to determine his subsequent development. [...]
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Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudi (25 June 1852–10 June 1926) is one of architecture’s most original and unusual talents. Also know as Antonio Gaudí in English, he was one of the Spanish Catalan famous architects. The son of a coppersmith, pot and kettle maker, he was working in northern Spain at the time of an enthusiastic revival of all things Catalan, and became absorbed in the idea of producing a style of architecture for the region.
He studied at the Escola Superior d’Arquitectura in Barcelona and began his architectural career with a Gothic Revival style for his first major commission – the Casa Vincens in Barcelona (1883-5). As his work progressed, he developed a sinuous, flowing, almost surreal form of design which placed him at the forefront of the Spanish Art Nouveau movement. [...]