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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]