TOP 5 ARCHITECTS

Jean Nouvel is a French architect who was born on 12 August 1945. Nouvel studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He has been honored with prestigious awards throughout his career, e.g. the Wolf Prize in Arts (2005) and the Pritzker Prize (2008). Retrospectives of his work have been shown in museums and architectural centers.

At the age of 25 Nouvel finished his studies and entered into partnership with François Seigneur after working as an assistant to Claude Parent. Parent referred clients to them and recommended Nouvel to the directors of the seventh Biennale de Paris; Nouvel served as an architect at the Biennale for fifteen years, establishing contacts in the world of arts and theater. He was attracted to intellectual debate about architecture in France early in his career: in 1976 he co-founded the “Mars 1976” movement and, a year later, the Syndicat de l’Architecture. Nouvel helped organize the competition for the rejuvenation of the district of Les Halles (1977), and in 1980 he founded the first Paris Biennale d’Architecture.In 1981, Nouvel placed first in the competition to design the building for the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) in Paris. Construction was completed in 1987, bringing Nouvel international fame. In the south wall of the structure, mechanical “lenses” reminiscent of Arabic latticework open and shut automatically, adjusting the incidence of light within the building as photoelectric cells in the lenses respond to light levels outside.

Nouvel successively worked with various associates from 1972 to 1984 including Gilbert Lezenes, Jean-François Guyot, and Pierre Soria. In 1985 he founded Jean Nouvel et Associés with his junior architects Emmanuel Blamont, Jean-Marc Ibos and Mirto Vitart. He subsequently set up JNEC with Emmanuel Gattani in 1988. Ateliers Jean Nouvel, his present practice, was launched in 1994 with Michel Pélissié and is one of the largest in France The main office is in Paris and has a staff of about 140 persons. Ateliers Jean Nouvel local offices are located in Barcelona, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, New York, and Rome.

Norman Robert Foster, a British architect, was born to a working-class family in Reddish, Stockport, United Kingdom, on June 1, 1935. He is the most prolific builder of landmark office buildings of the United Kingdom. 

Foster left school at the age of 16, working in the Manchester City Treasurer’s office before entering military service in the Royal Air Force. After his discharge, Foster enrolled in the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture and City Planning and graduated in 1961. He was attracted to the works of Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Foster won a Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture in Connecticut, where he earned his master’s degree in 1962 and made friends with future business partner Richard Rogers. He then traveled around North America for a year, returning to the United Kingdom in 1963 and setting up architectural practice under the name Team 4, in association with his wife Wendy, her sister Georgie Cheesman, and Rogers. Georgie Cheesman (later Wolton) was the only member of the team who had passed the RIBA exams allowing the four to go into business on their own. Soon Team 4 became highly regarded for its high-tech industrial designs. 

In 1967 the members of Team 4 went their separate ways, and Foster and his wife founded Foster Associates, later to become Foster and Partners. In 1968 a long period of collaboration started with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, only to end upon Fuller’s death in 1983. The joint projects ultimately served as catalysts in developing an environmentally sensitive approach to design, as with the Samuel Beckett Theatre project. 

In 1974, the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, United Kingdom, proved an architectural breakthrough for Foster + Partners. It had been commissioned by a family-run insurance company that wished to restore a sense of community within the workplace. For the client’s offices, Foster created open-plan floors well before these became the norm. 

Foster + Partners meld architectural design with engineering, to integrate complex computer systems and exploit the most elementary laws of physics, such as convection. From this twofold approach, intelligent and efficient structures like the Swiss Re London headquarters emerge. Situated at 30 St Mary Axe and nicknamed “The Gherkin,” the structure’s complex facade admits outside air for use in passive cooling of the interior, then vents that air as it warms and rises. 

Foster’s early style bore a strong industrial influence, showed high-tech vision. His later works adopted a more transcendent tone. 

In 2007 Foster joined Philippe Starck and Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group to work on the Virgin Galactic project. 

Foster is on the Board of Trustees of Article 25, an architectural charity which designs, constructs, and manages innovative, safe, and sustainable buildings in some of the world’s most inhospitable and volatile places.

Frank Owen Gehry, (born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Ontario. on 28 February 1929) is a Canadian-American architect based in Los Angeles, California.

Gehry’s parents were Polish Jews. A creative child, he received encouragement from his grandmother, Mrs Caplan; together they built little cities out of scraps of wood. The Saturday mornings he used to spend at his grandfather’s hardware store helped inspire Gehry’s later use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing, and other industrial materials. He spent time drawing with his father while his mother introduced him to the wider world of art. 

Gehry studied at Los Angeles City College and eventually graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture in 1954, financing his studies by driving a delivery truck. Before going into architecture, Gehry worked at many different jobs and served in the United States Army. After studying city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year he left without completing the program. In 1952 he married Anita Snyder, who convinced him to change his name from Goldberg to Gehry in 1954. Snyder and Gehry were divorced in 1966; in 1975, Gehry married Berta Isabel Aguilera. They are still married and live in Santa Monica, in the home he remodeled and extended in the 1970s. Gehry has four children.

Frank Gehry holds dual citizenship in Canada and the USA and continues to practice out of Los Angeles.

Gehry’s works are tourist attractions, as is his private residence. His buildings were quoted by the 2010 World Architecture Survey as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture.

Among Gehry’s best-known works are the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; and the addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The Santa Monica residence he redesigned for his own family, however, sparked his career and saved Gehry’s work from the status of “paper architecture;” something many famous architects suffered early on, being restricted almost exclusively to experimentation on paper for many years before receiving their first major commission.

Gehry’s work largely qualifies as deconstructivist. Deconstructivism – or DeCon architecture – may be called post-structuralist, i.e. it goes beyond current structural definitions. Frequent reference is made to the architect’s home in Santa Monica as being deconstructivist, severed from its original context and intention.

Sometimes a Gehry structure might look like a collage, or even a work in progress, but this is consistent with the California “funk” art movement of the 1960s and early 1970s featuring found objects, clay, and other non-traditional media to make serious art. All the same, in 1988 an important showing of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York showed the world that this visionary is a classical artist in his own right, at home with both European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.

Herzog & de Meuron Architekten (HdM) is a Swiss architecture firm that was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1978 and is still based in that city. Its founders and senior partners Jacques Herzog (born 19 April 1950) and Pierre de Meuron (born 8 May 1950) had very similar careers, both graduating in architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1975. The commission to convert the old Bankside Power Station in London to house the Tate Modern collection is probably their most famous work. Since 1994, Herzog and de Meuron have both been visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and held professorships at the ETH since 1999.

In 2001 Herzog & de Meuron were awarded the Pritzker Prize: the highest distinction an architect can receive. It was also the first time in history that this prestigious award went to Swiss architects.

The team’s early works were reductivist in style, on the same level as the minimalist art of Donald Judd. However, their recent work for Prada in Tokyo, Forum 2004 in Barcelona, and the National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing suggests a changing attitude.

A common thread in all of their projects appears to be HdM’s commitment to articulation through materiality. In general, the formality apparent during their early career has shifted; pure rectangular forms transmuting into more complex, dynamic geometries. Their skilled exposure of new or unfamiliar relationships together with an innovative choice of materials is the source of their success.

Renzo Piano (born on 14 September 1937), architect, hails from Genoa, Italy where he still has his home and office. He has been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, AIA Gold Medal, Kyoto Prize, and Sonning Prize. After graduating from the Politecnico di Milano in 1964 he taught there till 1968. Piano began experimenting with lightweight structures and designing basic shelters. From 1965 to 1970 he worked with Louis Kahn and with Makowsky. From 1971 to 1978 Piano collaborated with Richard Rogers, when the two won the commission for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, their most famous joint project (1971-1977). Piano also worked together with Peter Rice, the engineer, for many years until Rice’s death in 1993.

In 1981 Piano changed his Genoa studio into a “building workshop.” The Renzo Piano Building Workshop employs 100 persons and has expanded to include sites in Paris, and New York. The city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina made Piano an honorary citizen on 18 March 2008.