Famous Architects (A-G)
Here is a list of notable Architects (A to G) Go here for Architects (H to P) Go here for Architects (Q to Z)
Adam, Robert
(b. Kirkcaldy, Fife 1728; d. London, England 1792)
Robert Adam was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife in 1728. Often considered Scotland's most famous architect, Adam became a leader of classical revival in England for both architecture and interior decoration. His designs are particularly notable for their lavish use of color.
Robert Adam was an eclectic who depended as much on good business sense as on his personal design innovations. His designs incorporated light, color, and detailed ornamentation. To generate his style he adapted motifs from classical antiquity, Italian, French and Renaissance influences and abstracted them into a personal style.
Adam's most unusual designs were based on Etruscan vase decorations. The Etruscan Dressing Room at Osterley Park, Middlesex (1775-1776) is the only substantial survivor of eight such designs.
Adam died in London in 1792.
Alberti
b. Genoa, Italy 1404; d. Rome 1472)
Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404. The first theorist of Humanist art, Alberti belonged to an important Florentine family that had been exiled from Florence since 1387. When the family returned to the city in 1429 Alberti gained access to the city's great architecture and art which he studied extensively. Well-versed in Latin and Greek, Alberti never received a formal architectural education. His architectural ideas were the product of his own studies and research.
Alberti's two main architectural writings are "De Pictura" (1435), in which he emphatically declares the importance of painting as a base for architecture and "De Re Aedificatoria" (1450) his theoretical masterpiece. Like Vitruvius's "Ten Books on Architecture", "De Re Aedificatoria" was subdivided into ten books. Unlike Vitruvius's book, Alberti's told architects how buildings should be built, not how they were built. "De Re Aedificatoria" remained the classic treatise on architecture from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century.
The unfinished Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (1450) was the first building that Alberti designed and attempted to build based on his architectural principals. Up to that point Alberti's architectural experience was purely theoretic. The facade of Santa Maria Novella (1458-71) is considered his greatest achievement since it allows the pre-existing and newly added parts of the building to merge into a clear statement of his new principles.
Alberti was a methodical theorist of Roman architecture – and he was innovative in the application of specific Roman forms to modern architectural requirements. Thus, in the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai ( he accomplishes the first post-Classical superposition of orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian). Similarly, in the façade of the church of S. Francesco, Rimini he adapts the form of the Roman triumphal arch to meet the needs of contemporary Christian architecture
Alberti died in Rome in 1472.
Galeazzo Alessi
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Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – April 15, 1446) was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. All of his principal works are in Florence, Italy. As explained by Antonio Manetti, who knew Brunelleschi and who wrote his biography, Brunelleschi "was granted such honors as to be buried in the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, and with a marble bust, which they say was carved from life, and placed there in perpetual memory with such a splendid epitaph."
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- Florence Cathedral cupola
Charles Barry, Sir
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Bernini
(b. Naples, Italy 1598; d. Rome, Italy 1680)
Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598, the son of a Florentine sculptor by whom he was trained. After settling in Rome, Bernini came to the attention of the future Pope Urban VIII. Under the patronage of Pope Urban VIII, Bernini spent his entire career in Rome where he gained his architectural fame under Alexander VII (1655-67).
Considered the creator of the Baroque style, Bernini created a fusion of architecture, painting, and sculpture that led to the generation of new, dynamic forms. His works used the drama of false perspective and trompe-l'oeil to create an impact that involved the spectator. He also created a much copied palace facade type which he articulated with massive pilasters above a rusticated base.
Although Bernini grafted completely new sculptural forms onto Renaissance buildings, he maintained a continuity with the original serenity of the Renaissance ideal.
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- St Peter's Piazza
- S. Andrea al Quirinali
- Baldacchino, St Peter's
- Apollo and Daphne
- Ecstasy of Santa Teresa
Edward Blore
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Borromini
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Bramante
Donato Bramante (1444 – March 11, 1514) was an Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his most famous design was St. Peter's Basilica.
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Burlington,Lord
(b. Yorkshire, England 1694; d. Londesborough, England 1753)
Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington and Fourth Earl of Cork, was born in Yorkshire in 1694. In 1714 he began his Grand Tour of Italy. This tour, in conjunction with his study of Palladio's Four Books, influenced Burlington's decision to revive what he considered the true architecture of Vitruvius as interpreted by Andrea Palladio.
By the early 1720s Burlington had become a practicing architect, employed mostly by fellow members of the aristocracy. His influence on architecture stems mostly from his political connections. As Lord Treasurer of Ireland, Lord Lieutenant of the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire, a Privy Councillor and a Director of the Royal Academy of Music, he managed to push his architectural views into the forefront. Through his efforts, Palladionism became the leading style in England.
Although he lacked the critical analysis to create a new architecture, and his strict reproductions lacked imagination, Burlington greatly influenced the development of English Neoclassicism. Most of his work has been demolished or redesigned
Colen Campbell
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William Cecil
Courtier and 1st Baron Burghley who designed Burghley House
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Burghley House
William Chambers
William Chambers (b. Gothenburg, Sweden, 1723; d. London, 1796)
Born the son of a Scottish merchant in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1723, William Chambers studied in England. He returned to Sweden at the age of sixteen to join the Swedish East India Company. His subsequent travels through Bengal and China gave him an Oriental perspective on art and design. By 1749 he had saved enough money from his travels to make architecture his only profession.
Chambers studied in Paris and Italy, absorbing ideas current at the French Academy in Rome. Upon his return to England, Chambers became the architectural tutor to the Prince of Wales. This led to a long and fruitful patronage by the royal family. In 1761 Chambers was appointed as one of the Joint Architects of the King's Work and by 1769 he was so indispensable that he was appointed Comptroller of the King's Works. When the office was reorganized in 1782 he became the Surveyor General and the Comptroller.
William Chambers was a confidant of George III and the first Treasurer of the Royal Academy of the Arts, which became public in 1768. He wrote a Treatise on Civil Architecture, and was a patron of John Soane while Soane was a student at the Academy.
Chamber's architecture blended the symmetrical, well-ordered facades of Palladianism with early forms of Neoclassicism. He died in London in 1796.
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Le Corbusier
(b. La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland 1887; d. Cap Martin, France 1965)
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1887. Trained as an artist, he travelled extensively through Germany and the East. In Paris he studied under Auguste Perret and absorbed the cultural and artistic life of the city. During this period he developed a keen interest in the synthesis of the various arts. Jeanneret-Gris adopted the name Le Corbusier in the early 1920s.
Le Corbusier's early work was related to nature, but as his ideas matured, he developed the Maison Domino, a basic building prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid floors. In 1917 he settled in Paris where he issued his book Vers une architecture [Towards a New Architecture], based on his earlier articles in L'Esprit Nouveau.
From 1922 Le Corbusier worked with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. During this time, Le Corbusier's ideas began to take physical form, mainly as houses which he created as "a machine for living in" and which incorporated his trademark five points of architecture.
During World War II, Le Corbusier produced little beyond some theories on his utopian ideals and on his modular building scale. In 1947, he started his Unite d'habitation. Although relieved with sculptural roof-lines and highly colored walls, these massive post-war dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism.
Le Corbusier's post-war buildings rejected his earlier industrial forms and utilized vernacular materials, brute concrete and articulated structure. Near the end of his career he worked on several projects in India, which utilized brutal materials and sculptural forms. In these buildings he readopted the recessed structural column, the expressive staircase, and the flat undecorated plane of his celebrated five points of architecture.
Although a proponent of high Modernism, however pared-down, unadorned and 'functional' they may appear, Le Corbusier's buildings do still exhibit powerfully stylised and aesthetic qualities. Thus Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye exhibits the same sumptuous 'rhetoric of whiteness' as does Inigo Jones' Queens House; Indeed one might arguably say that high Modernism makes the very lack of 'ornament' itself into a positive aesthetic quality - a sort of minimalist chic.
hOWEVER, what looked so splendid on the drawing-board (such as Le Corbusier’s vast city-scapes, with their gleaming towers set amid open expanses of grassland and gardens) all too often turned out in practice to be socially disastrous – precisely because the crucial element in the social-architectural equation (the communities who were expected to live in these gleaming towers) had been omitted from the planning process. It is surely significant that the one feature inevitably absent from the drawing-board visions of Le Corbusier and his allies, was the people who were to inhabit these utopian visions: they appear either as minute dots in the distance, or not at all.
Pietro da Cortona
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Pierre François Léonard Fontaine
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- Arc de Triomphe
Norman Foster
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Antonio Gaudi
(b. Reus, Spain 1852; d. Barcelona, Spain 1926)
The son of a coppersmith, Antoni Gaudi was born in Reus, Spain in 1852. He studied at the Escola Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona and designed his first major commission for the Casa Vincens in Barcelona using a Gothic Revival style that set a precedent for his future work.
Over the course of his career, Gaudi developed a sensuous, curving, almost surreal design style which established him as the innovative leader of the Spanish Art Nouveau movement. With little regard for formal order, he juxtaposed unrelated systems and altered established visual order. Gaudi's characteristically warped form of Gothic architecture drew admiration from other avant-garde artists.
Although categorized with the Art Nouveau, Gaudi created an entirely original style. He died in Barcelona in 1926.
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Erno Goldfinger
1902-1987. Architect associated with the Brualist style
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James Gibbs
James Gibbs (1682 – 5 August 1754) was one of Britain's most influential architects. Born in Scotland, he trained as an architect in Rome, and practised mainly in England. His most important works are St Martin-in-the-Fields, in London, and the cylindrical, domed Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University.
Gibbs very privately was Roman Catholic and a Tory, and was therefore not part of the Palladian movement which was prevalent in English architecture of the period. The Palladians were largely Whigs, led by Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, a fellow Scot who developed a rivalry with Gibbs. Gibbs' professional Italian training under the Baroque master, Carlo Fontana, also set him uniquely apart from the Palladian school.[1] However, despite being unfashionable, he gained a number of Tory patrons and clients, and became hugely influential through his published works, which became popular as pattern books for architecture.
His architectural style did incorporate Palladian elements, as well as forms from Italian baroque and Inigo Jones (1573-1652), but was most strongly influenced by the work of Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), who was an early supporter of Gibbs. Overall, Gibbs was an individual who formed his own style independently of current fashions. Architectural historian John Summerson describes his work as the fulfilment of Wren's architectural ideas, which were not fully developed in his own buildings.[2] Despite the influence of his books, Gibbs, as a stylistic outsider, had little effect on the later direction of British architecture, which saw the rise of Neoclassicism shortly after his death
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Guarino Guarini
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Frank Gehry
(b. Toronto, Ontario, Canada 1929)
Frank Gehry was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1929. He studied at the Universities of Southern California and Harvard, before he established his first practice, Frank O. Gehry and Associates in 1963. In 1979 this practice was succeeded by the firm Gehry & Krueger Inc.
Over the years, Gehry has moved away from a conventional commercial practice to a artistically directed atelier. His deconstructed architectural style began to emerge in the late 1970s when Gehry, directed by a personal vision of architecture, created collage-like compositions out of found materials. Instead of creating buildings, Gehry creates ad-hoc pieces of functional sculpture.
Gehry's architecture has undergone a marked evolution from the plywood and corrugated-metal vernacular of his early works to the distorted but pristine concrete of his later works. However, the works retain a deconstructed aesthetic that fits well with the increasingly disjointed culture to which they belong.
In the large-scale public commissions he has received since he converted to a deconstructive aesthetic, Gehry has explored the classical architecture themes. In these works he melds formal compositions with an exploded aesthetic. Most recently, Gehry has combined sensous curving forms with complex deconstructive massing, achieving significant new results.
Erno Goldfinger
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Walter Gropius
(b. Berlin, Germany 1883; d. Boston, Massachusetts 1969)
Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883. The son of an architect, he studied at the Technical Universities in Munich and Berlin. He joined the office of Peter Behrens in 1910 and three years later established a practice with Adolph Meyer. For his early commissions he borrowed from the Industrial Classicism introduced by Behrens.
After serving in the first world war, Gropius became involved with several groups of radical artists that sprang up in Berlin in the winter of 1918. In March 1919 he was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and a month later was appointed Director of the Bauhaus.
As war again became imminent, Gropius left the Bauhaus and resumed private practice in Berlin. Eventually, he was forced to leave Germany for the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University. From 1938 to 1941, he worked on a series of houses with Marcel Breuer and in 1945 he founded "The Architect's Collaborative", a design team that embodied his belief in the value of teamwork.
Gropius created innovative designs that borrowed materials and methods of construction from modern technology. This advocacy of industrialized building carried with it a belief in team work and an acceptance of standardization and prefabrication. Using technology as a basis, he transformed building into a science of precise mathematical calculations.
An important theorist and teacher, Gropius introduced a screen wall system that utilized a structural steel frame to support the floors and which allowed the external glass walls to continue without interruption.
Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969
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Guarani
(b. Modena, Italy 1624; d. Milan, Italy 1683)
Guarino Guarini was born in Modena, Italy in 1624. He was ordained a Theatine priest in 1648 and consequently generated most of his designs for the Theatine order.
One of Europe's leading mathematicians, as evidenced in the geometric elaboration of his buildings, Guarini was deeply influenced by the radical designs of Borromini. Developing a similar design approach, he combined "complexity and inventiveness with a profound feeling for color and light" that was highly unusual, but successful.
His early works took him to Sicily, Paris, Portugal and Spain, but his career particularly flourished under the House of Savoy in Turin. Guarini died in Milan, Italy in 1683
