The following famous architects changed the way we think about construction and gave us some the most breathtaking buildings to photograph.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Easily the famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright designed 1,114 works of various types which turned into 532 completed projects. Over 7 decades he was one of the most innovative, prolific designers ever and changed the way we live by changing the way we build.
Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí believed the essence and the meaning of architecture are found in the very patterns of nature and its laws. Gaudí himself once said: “originality consists of going back to the origins.” Gaudí tremendously impacted subsequent generations of modernists architects. His genius created a unique, personal and incomparable style that defies typical classification.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Starting as an innovative architect in 1920’s Germany, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a seminal school in modern architecture. After Nazism rose to power, due to it’s strong opposition to modernism, Bauhaus was closed. Mies emigrated to the United States and accepted the position to head the architectural school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Mies sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth-century architectural style of extreme clarity and simplicity. He made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces and strove toward an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He is often associated with his quotation of the aphorisms, “less is more” and “God is in the details”.
Philip Johnson
Johnson’ role as the founding director of Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architect meant that he helped to shape architectural trends from 1935 onward. In 1979, Johnson was the first recipient of the Pritzker Prize. From his early modern structures to his later postmodern buildings, Johnson defined several architectural movements over the course of his decades-long career.
Eero Saarinen
The modernist ideal of simplicity became a form of corporate conformity after the war, and it is against this backdrop that Eero Saarinen’s mid-century designs provided a fresh perspective. In contrast to the standardized box adopted by the International Style, Saarinen employed swooping curves that gave his architecture a sense of soaring transcendence which is evident in projects such as his 1947 design for St. Louis’s magisterial Gateway Arch.