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.

However, Foster is also deeply concerned with architectural details and the craftsmanship that goes into them. Emphasis is often laid on the repetition of industrialized “modular” units in his work. Prefabricated off-site-manufactured elements are frequently employed and specialist components are often specially designed for individual projects, as at Hong Kong.

Foster was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1983, and in 1990 the RIBA Trustees Medal was made for the Willis Faber Dumas building, Ipswich. He was knighted in 1990.

List of major buildings / works:
Reliance Controls Factory, Swindon, 1966-7.
Willis Faber Dumas offices, Ipswich, Suffolk, 1974-5.
Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1976-8.
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 1979-85.
M6diatheque, Maison Carree, Nimes, France, from 1984.
Airport Terminal, Stansted, Essex, 1980-91.
Kings Cross Redevelopment, London, 1988- .

Bibliography
R. Banham (intro.) Foster Associates, London 1979.
Various authors, Foster Associates: Buildings and Protects, 3 vols., London, 1989.

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.

List of major buildings / works:
House I (Bareholtz Pavilion), Princeton, N J, 1967-8.
House II (Falk House) Hardwick, Conn., 1969-70.
House III (Miller House), Lakesville, Conn., 1969-71.
Apartments, Kochstrasse, Berlin, 1981-7.
Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (extension), Ohio State University, Columbus, 1985-9. Bio-Centre, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987-9.
Guardiola House, Bay of Cadiz, Spain, 1988.
Convention Center, Ohio, 1989

Bibliography
P Eiseman, House of Cards, New York, 1978.
K. Frampton et al., Five Architects, New York, 1972.
P. Johnson and M. Wigley, Deconstructiost Architecture, New York, 1988.
C. Jencks, The New Moderns, London, 1990.

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.

He began his career as an architect in his native town, building Villa Schwoh, an early example of reinforced- concrete construction, in 1916. He had by that time also worked out his basic building diagram, the so-called Maison Domino, a prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid over- sailing floors.

In 1917 he settled in Paris, where, together with his painter and writer colleague Amêdee Ozenfant, he issued his Purist manifesto Apres le Cubisme (1918). With the poet Paul Dermee they edited together a new review, L’Esprit Nouveau, from 1920 to 1925, the year in which Le Corbusier won international recognition for the small pavilion of the same name at the 1925 Paris Expo. Two years earlier his hook Vers lore architecture, mainly culled from articles in L’Esprit Nouveau, had appeared in French: it was to have worldwide repercussions, the most discussed architectural text of the age. It was translated into German in 1926 and English in 1927, and is still in print.

Other influential texts followed, including L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Urbanisme, Le Peinture moderne 1925), Precisions (1930), La Ville radieuse (1935) and the hooks on harmonious proportions, Le Modulor in 1954 and 1958. From 1922 he worked as an architect in conjunction with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and that year they exhibited the Maison Citrohan at the Paris Salon, together with proposals for a city of three million people.

Among the early executed domestic projects are the Vaucresson Villa (1922), the Maison La Roche (1923), Maison Cook at Boulogne-sur-Seine (1926), Villa Stein at Garches (1927) and the internationally renowned house and apartment block at the 1927 Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition, the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), the Villa Savoye, Poissy (1928-9), and the Clam’. Flats in Geneva (1932). These houses, mainly for wealthy clients but not necessarily expensive structures, established the form language of the new rational architecture, which seems to epitomize its definition as a machine a habiter (”a machine for living in”). Public buildings included the Swiss Pavilion in the University of Paris (1930-33) and the masterly Cite de Refuge for the Salvation Army in Paris (1929-33).

In international competition Le Corbusier did not fare well and complained ceaselessly that he was constantly compromised. He did, however, see the Centrosoyus Building in Moscow built, although he failed to realize his schemes for the League of Nations in Geneva (1927), the Palace of Soviets (1931), and United Nations, New York (largely carried out by Harrison & Abramovitz). He produced town-planning schemes for many parts of the world, often as an adjunct to a lecture tour. In these schemes the routes of mankind (vehicular and pedestrian) and the functional zones of the settlements were always emphasized and eventually embodied in the principles underlying “The Athens Charter”, issued as a result of the CIAM Congress IV in 1933. The famous Ville radieuse, more personal, humanistic and megalomanic, was issued in book form in 1935.

During the Second World War he produced little, emerging with his utopian Propos d’urbanisme of 1945 and some years later the fruit of his mathematical meditations in the form of the Modulor. In 1947 lie began work on his monumental Unite d’habitation at Marseille, completed in 1952. A prototype block of over 300 flats, it had internal streets, duplex maisonettes and internal shopping malls. It was followed by further examples in Berlin, Nantes, Meaux etc. Although relieved of their dominant rectangularity by sculptural roof-lines and highly coloured walls, these massive postwar dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism, although they were also plagiarized throughout the world.

As if to contrast with their megalomanic scale, Le Corbusier’s post-war small-scale poetic essays in architecture caught many designers unaware of his potentiality as an inventor of rich, new and varied forms. His Maisons Jaoul (1951-5) were a revelation of vernacular materials, brute concrete (beton brut) and articulated structure. The Monastery of Ste Marie de la Tourerte at Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle (1957¬60) and the splendid free-shaped pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-55) changed the direction of architectural and liturgical thinking.

Towards the end of his career Le Corbusier was appointed architect for the public buildings at Chandigarh, the new capital city of the Punjab in India (1952-64), and worked closely with Maxwell FRY and Jane Drew, who with others did a number of infrastructure buildings. This episode ran parallel to the more inspired work carried out at Ahmedabad, where his clients included the wealthy Sarabhai family. With the Shodan House (1956) and the Mill Owners Association (1951-9) some of his early design themes were taken up once again, such as the route, the recessed structural column and the expressive staircase and, of course, the flat undecorated plane, most of which formed part of his celebrated five principles of a free architecture which derive from the late 1920s.

With Le Corbusier, every building worked within its time as a testimony to his unremitting genius as the architect of the epoch. Much of it, even though this great architect’s popularity was marred by his tendency to overstate his case, will prove of lasting significance and value.

List of Le Corbusier’s major works

• Various villas in and around La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1908-16.
• Maison Citrohan (first project), 1920.
• Ozenfant Studio, Paris, 1924.
• Matson La Roche, Paris-Auteuil, 1925.
• Pavillon de [Esprit Nouveau, Paris Exposition, 1925.
• Villa Cook, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1927.
• Houses, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927.
• Villa Stein, Larches, 1927.
• Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-9.
• Cite de Refuge, Paris, 1929-33.
• Maison aarte, Geneva, 1930-32.
• Swiss Pavilion, Paris, 1933. V
• ille Radieuse project, 1935.
• Ministry of Health and Education, Rio de Janeiro, 1936.
• “Temps Nouveau” Pavilion, Paris, 1937.
• Unite d’habitation, Marseille, 1945-8.
• Duval Factory, St Die, 1946.
• Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55.
• Projects and plans, Chandigarh, Punjab (with Fry, Drew and Jeanneret). 1951-64. Maisons Jaoul, 1951-5.
• Ahmedabad villas and Mill Owners Association, between 1954 and 1959.
• Ste Marie de la Tourette monastery, Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle, 1957-60.
• Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass. (with stria), 1959-63.
• Centre Le Corhusier, Zfirich, 1963-5.
• Cultural Centre, Firminy, 1965.

Bibliography

• Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Etude du mouvement d’art decoranf en Allemagne, La Chaux de Fonds, 1912 (reissued, New York, 1968); Vers taste architecture, Paris, 1923; Urbanisme, Paris, 1925; L ‘Art decoratif d’aujourd’hut, Paris, 1925 (1959); Le Pemture moderate, Paris, 1926; Une Matson – un palais, Paris, 1928; Precisions: sur on Etat present de !’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Paris, 1928 (1960); La Ville radieuse, Paris 1935 (1964); Quand les Cathedrales etaient blanches, Paris, 1937; Les Trois Etablissements human’s, Paris, 1945; UN Headquarters, New York, 1947; Le Modulor, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1950; Modulor 2, Boulogne-stir-Seine, 1955; Le Livre de Ronchamp (c.1956, multilingual editions), etc.
• S. Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, 1979.
• R. Walden (ed.), The Open Hand, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.
• W Curtis, Le Corbusier: ideas and Forms, London and New York, 1986.
• For a full bibliography with English and other foreign-language titles, see D Brady, Le Corbusier: an annotated bibliography, New York, 1985.

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. He justifies his unusual use of materials saying “If Jasper Johns and Donald Judd can make beauty with junk materials, then why can’t that transfer into architecture?”

His off-beat style continued at the Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributorship Offices, Santa Monica, which contained a maze of odd-shaped offices painted in different colours. The Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, was again idiosyncratic, with its aluminium portico and Romanesque-style chapel made from plywood and glass.

Gehry’s strangest work is a fish-shaped restaurant in Japan, called “Fishdance”, and his most sophisticated is the Vitra Design Museum, Wein am Rhein. The jumble of plain white geometric shapes of the latter resembles a Russian Constructivist sculpture. Inside the museum is a calm top-lit space with galleries linked by bold curving ramps. His work was exhibited as part of the “Deconstructivist Architecture” show at MOMA, New York in 1988.

List of Gehry’s  major works

• Gehry House, Santa Monica, 1978.9.
• Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributorship Offices, Santa Monica, 1978.
• Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, 1981-4.
• California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles, 1982-4.
• Fishdance Restaurant, Kobe, Japan, 1985.
• Vitra Design Museum, Wein am Rhein, 1989.

Bibliography

• Olivier Roissière, Gehry, SITE. Tigerman, trois portraits de l’artiste en architecture, Paris, 1981.
• Luciano Rubino,Il Bovindo/5 Frank O. Gehry Special, Rome, 1984.

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.

Piano’s use of technological function as a point of departure characterizes the work of what has become known as the “High-Tech” group of famous architects. This movement includes English designers such as Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins. However, Piano’s desire to achieve a particular aesthetic quality is tempered by a concern for accommodating the user’s needs.

In his later work Piano has continued the structural experiments of the Pompidou Centre, applying them to a range of social and civic projects such as the residential quarter at Corciano in Perugia, the museum building for the De Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and, most recently, a new football stadium in Bari, S Italy, built for the 1990 World Cup. The Stadio Nuovo continues Piano’s fruitful collaboration with the English engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup and Partners.

List of Piano’s major works:

• Centre Beaubourg, Paris (with Richard Rogers and Peter Rice), Paris, 1973-7.
• PATScentre Research Laboratories and Workshops, Cambridge, England (with Richard Rogers), 1975.
• Experimental residential quarter, Corciano, Perugia (with Peter Rice), 1978-82.
• Museum for the De Mend Collection, Houston, ‘Eexas, 1981.
• Stadio Nuovo, Bari (with Peter Rice), 1990.

Bibliography

• “Renzo Piano”, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Feb. 1982.
• Dino Massimo, Renzo Piano: progetti e arcbitettnra 1964-1953, Paris and Milan, 1983.
• Paul Goldberger (intro.), Renzi, Piano: Buildings and Protects 1971.1989, New York, 1989.

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.

Kahn received the AIA Gold Medal (1971) and the RIBA Gold Medal (1972) and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1971). In his teaching and practice, Kahn profoundly influenced a generation of famous architects. He brought to both endeavours a talmudic questioning of the first principles of architectural design. This fundamental enquiry led him to dwell on the relationship between the underlying Form of a project and its Design.

Kahn’s architecture is notable for its simple, platonic forms and compositions. Through the use of brick and poured-in-place concrete masonry, he developed a contemporary architecture of great power and monumentality. At the same time, his buildings invariably display a keen sensitivity to the nuances of site conditions through the artful manipulation of natural light. While rooted in the International Style Modernism of his age, Kahn mined both the Beaux-Arts education of his youth and a deeply felt aesthetic impulse to develop a personal architectural vocabulary of forms that has been a point of departure for many subsequent architects.

Projects such as the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum, masterpieces of the reconciliation of Form and Order through inspired construction, are among the most studied works of architecture of the last half-century. Noted for his cryptic pronouncements and aphoristic remarks, Kahn often spoke of his desire to discover “what a material wants to be”. The diligence and depth of his search set him apart from his colleagues and ensures Kahn’s lasting recognition as one of the masters of c20 architecture.

List of Kahn’s major works

• Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1951-3.
• Richards Medical Research Building, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1957-64. Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, 1959-65.
• New Capital of Bangladesh, Dacca, 1962-74.
• Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1966-72.
• Library and Dining Hall, Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, 1967-72.
• Center for British Art and Studies, Yale University, New Haven, 1969-74.

Bibliography

• Vincent Scully Jr, Louis I. Kahn, New York, 1962.
• Romaldo Giurgola and Jaimini Mehta, Louis I. Kahn, Boulder, Colorado, 1975. Alexandra Tyng, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture, New York, 1984.
• Heinz Ronner and Sharad Maven (eds.) Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work 1935.1974, Basel, 1987.

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, a slender glass-clad tower on a rhomboid plan described by the critic Charles Jencks as an “ice-blue skyberg”. The fascination for pyramids surfaced again at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building (1978), where the simple stone and brick gallery is given interest in the roof constructed of small glass pyramids.

One of Pei’s most startling structures is the Bank of China, Hong Kong (1984-8), which has a shaft of fractured triangular shapes that look like a dented space frame. Towards the top the skyscraper is finished with an off-centre spire topped by two slender communications towers resembling skyward-pointing chopsticks. Pei’s greatest triumph is the large glass pyramid at the Cour Napoleon outside the Louvre, Paris. The structure in the courtyard is, as it suggests, the tip of an iceberg; below is a vast subterranean hall through which visitors pass to the Metro, shops and galleries.

List of Pei’s works:

• Dallas Municipal Center, 1966-78.
• John Hancock Tower, Boston, Mass., 1973-7.
• East Building, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1978.
• J. I. Kennedy Library, South Boston, Mass., 1979.
• Bank of China, Hong Kong, 1984-8.
• Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas, 1989.
• Louvre pyramid, Paris, 1989.

Bibliography

• Bruno Sillier, leoh Ming Pei, Paris, 1984.

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 and puts much emphasis on a painterly use of colour. Famous architect Graves has become an amusing anti-Modern propagandist. Humour is an integral part of his architecture, and much of his recent work, especially for Disney, seems to be a celebration of kitsch.

List of Graves’s major works:

• Handselmann House, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1967.
• Addition to Benacerraf House, Princetown, NJ, 1969.
• Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center (bridge), Minnesota, designed 1977.
• Kalko House, Green Brook, NJ, designed 1978.
• Public Services Building, Portland, Oregon, 1982.
• Humana Corporation Building, Louisville, Kentucky, 1983.
• Witney Museum Extension Project, NY, from 1985.
• Dolphin and Swan Hotels, Disneyland, 1989.
• Newark Museum, New York, 1990.

Bibliography

• Michael Graves, Buildings and Projects, New York, 1982.
• K. Frampton et al., Five Architects, Nev. York, 1972; A. Colquhoun and P. Michael Carl, Graves, London, 1979.

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.

An important model was provided by Schinkel, whose clearly articulated architectural language, based on a simple post-and-lintel construction, was to be rivalled by Mies in the c20 materials of steel and glass. Although never intimately involved with the glass fantasists of post-1918 German Expressionism, Mies created the most powerful early icons of the glass architecture of the future with his proposals for an office tower on Friedrichstrasse, Berlin (1921), and for a thirty-storey glass skyscraper (1922).

Mies’s sympathy for the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group explains his involvement with the magazine G, launched in July 1923 by El. Lissitzky, Hans Richter and Werner Graeff. In the second issue, Mies described his current scheme for a concrete office building as follows: “The office is a building of work, of organization, of clarity, of economy…The materials are concrete, steel, and glass. Reinforced concrete buildings are naturally skeletal constructions…skin and bone buildings.” While this office project was firmly ordered by Classical axiality, Mies’s contemporary projects for a Concrete Country House (1923) and a Brick Country House (1924) have open plans strongly reminiscent of De Stijl paintings, with wall panels and windows arranged as vertical planes around which internal and external spaces can flow without interruption.

Mies made a major contribution to the architectural polemics of the late 1920s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project, in which a model estate was constructed on a site outside Stuttgart as a test-bed for the white, functionalist housing of “Neues Bauen”. In addition to designing the site-plan and an apartment block, Mies commissioned house designs from sixteen leading Modernists, including famous architects – Gropius, Scharoun, Rehrens, Bruno and Max Taut, Oud, Siam, and Le Corbusier.

A sensuous delight in flowing space and highly finished materials can he admired in the Barcelona Pavilion (1928-9), a single-storey building set on a travertine podium, with a grid of chrome-plated columns and vertical planes of onyx and coloured glass. With the curved steel frame of the Barcelona chair, designed for the same occasion, famous architect Mies achieved a timeless minimalist elegance.

As Director of the Bauhaus, Mies supervised the last two years of the school’s life in Dessau (1930-32) and the final year of its existence in Berlin (1932-3). Deprived of regular employment, and with few prospects in the hostile environment of Nazi Germany, he looked to a future in the USA. He moved to Chicago in 1938, and commissions rapidly followed, most notably a master-plan for the IIT campus (1940-41), in which a series of modestly scaled and immaculately detailed buildings are set in a loosely axial relationship, to create an oasis of calm and repose amid the disorder of the Chicago suburbs.

The Farnsworth House (1946-51) – a single storey glazed box floating on a steel frame above a meadow in rural Illinois – achieved similar results in a more propitious setting. Over the last two decades of his life, Mies realized his vision of a monumental “skin and hone” architecture in a series of designs that established an international model and standard for the urban office block: the Seagram Building, New York (1954-8), Federal Center, Chicago (1959-64), and the Dominion Center, Toronto (1963-9). Mies’s design for the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-7) provides a fitting coda to a life dedicated to the notion of a universal architecture, reduced to its essentials.

List of Mies’s major works:
Kiehl House, Berlin-Neuhahelsherg, 1907.
Project: Krüller-Miiller House, Wassenaar, Holland, 1912.
Project: Office Building, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, 1921.
Project: Glass Skyscraper, 1922.
Wolf House, Guben, 1925-7.
Monument to the November Revolution: Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, 1926.
Site planning and apartment building, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927.
German Pavilion, Barcelona Exhibition, 1928-9 (rebuilt 1986).
Tugendhat House, Brno, 1928-30. Model House and Apartment, Berlin Building Exhibition, 1931.
Project: Reichshank, Berlin, 1933.
Project: Resor House, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 1937-8.
Preliminary Plan for Campus of Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1939.
Master Plan, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1940-41 (implemented 1942-57). Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1946-51.
860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, 1948-51.
Crown Hall, TIT, Chicago, 1950-56.
Seagram Building, New York, 1954-8.
Project: Bacardi Office Building, Santiago, Cuba, 1957.
Federal Center, Chicago, 1959-64.
New National Gallery, Berlin, 1962-7.
Lafayette Towers, Lafayette Park, Detroit, 1963.
Dominion Center, Toronto, 1963-9.
Project: Mansion House Square and Tower, London, 1967.

Bibliography
Philip C. Johnson Mies van der Rohe, London, 1978.
Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, Chicago and London, 1985.
Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe: Das kunstiose Wort, Berlin, 1986.

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.

Gaudi’s idiosyncratic and bizarre-looking architecture drew admiration from other avant-garde artists, including his fellow countryman the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali. The emergence of Gatlin entirely original style is to be found at the Palau Giiell in Barcelona (1885-9). Here, under the patronage of a textile businessman, Count Guell, Gaudi was given the opportunity to experiment with unusual, sculpted chimney pots and the use of tiled mosaic. These two features frequently occur in his later work.

Such was the success of this house design that Gaudi was invited by Güell to design a workers’ community for his textile plant at Santa Coloma de Cervello (Colonia Güell) in 1891. Seventeen years later he worked on the chapel. For Güell he also designed the Park Güell on Barcelona’s outskirts. Here glittering, gaudy mosaics of tiles and mirror bedeck the swooping stairways, sculpted benches, the mock Grecian theatre, underground grottoes and curious stone beasts which Gaudi planted in the rural setting. It was full of fantasy, far removed from the original intention of creating an English garden suburb.

Gaudi’s imagination was also given full rein on two housing projects in Barcelona, the Casa Batlló, (1905-7) and the exuberant Casa Mila (1905-7). Both incorporate strong maritime imagery. Casa Batlló has a sculpted facade of waves and fishbone shapes surrounding windows and forming balconies. The exterior was completed with a coral effect of broken ceramic tiles. The sense of the bizarre was continued inside, where no two apartments were the same, and none had straight walls. At the nearby Casa Mila the sculpted facade was further embellished with ornate iron balconies resembling tangles of seaweed.

Gaudi’s undoubted masterpiece is the unfinished Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, where he worked from 1884 until his tragic death in 1926 when he was knocked down and killed by a tram just outside the building. Work on the church charts the styles Gaudi evolved during his career as one of the famous architects in the history of architecture. At the crypt level a Gothic design is used, but as the building climbs towards the sky the structure passes through an Art Nouveau stage before becoming more surreal and fanciful, finishing in the four intricately carved, open-work cone-shaped spires. Work to Gaudi’s designs is still continuing on the church.

List of Gaudi’s major works

• Casa Vincens, Barcelona, 1883-5.
• Palau Gild, Barcelona, 1885-9.
• Workers’ community at Santa Coloma de Cement), Barcelona, 1891, and a chapel at the same site, 1908.
• Park Güell, Barcelona, 1900- 1911.
• Casa Batik., Barcelona, 1905-7.
• Casa Mila, Barcelona. 1905-7.
• Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, from 1884.

Bibliography

• George Collins, Antoni Gaudi, New York, 1960.
• Roberto Pane, Antoni Gaudi, Milan, 1964.
• Ignast de Sola-Morales, Gaudi, New York, 1984.
• Rainer Zerbst, Antoni Gaudi, Cologne, 1988.