Famous Architects

A deck by Blake Haney · 56 cards

Master builders from Imhotep and Brunelleschi to Zaha Hadid, Gehry, and Pritzker laureates shaping the world we live in.

Norman Foster

Norman Foster is an English architect closely associated with the development of high-tech architecture. His firm Foster + Partners is the largest in the United Kingdom. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1999.

Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor is a Swiss architect whose minimalist, atmospheric works—like the Therme Vals—won him the 2009 Pritzker Prize.

Imhotep

Imhotep was an Egyptian chancellor to King Djoser and the possible architect of Djoser's step pyramid, later deified as a god of medicine and wisdom.

Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer was a Brazilian architect considered one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture, best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília and his collaboration on the UN headquarters.

Kenzō Tange

Kenzō Tange was a Japanese architect best known for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect known for the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the master plan for the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

Richard Meier

Richard Meier is an American architect known for crisp, white geometric buildings. A 1984 Pritzker laureate, his works include the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Santiago Calatrava

Santiago Calatrava is a Spanish-Swiss architect and engineer known for sculptural bridges, railway stations, and the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia.

Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren was an English architect, astronomer, and mathematician, one of the most highly acclaimed architects in the history of England. He designed 52 London churches, including St Paul's Cathedral.

Charles Eames

Charles Eames was an American architect, designer and filmmaker who, with his wife Ray, made groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture, and industrial design.

Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi was a Florentine architect, considered a founding father of Renaissance architecture, most famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral and developing linear perspective.

Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio was an Italian Renaissance architect whose villas and treatise The Four Books of Architecture profoundly influenced Western architecture for centuries.

Frank Gehry

Frank Owen Gehry was a Canadian and American architect and designer known for his postmodern designs and use of unconventional forms and materials. His most famous works include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

Anne Lacaton

Anne Lacaton is a French architect who, with Jean-Philippe Vassal, won the 2021 Pritzker Prize for socially engaged work that transforms rather than demolishes existing buildings.

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson was an American architect who designed modern and postmodern architecture. Notable works include the Glass House in New Canaan and 550 Madison Avenue in New York City.

Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. His notable works include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Shard in London, and Kansai International Airport. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando is a Japanese architect. Self-taught, he is known for his unique integration of architecture and landscape, often using exposed concrete. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1995.

Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn was an Estonian-born American architect whose monumental, masonry-rich buildings include the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh.

Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi was an American architect and founding principal of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, a defining figure of postmodernism known for the dictum "less is a bore".

Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel is a French architect awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2008. Major works include the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Moshe Safdie

Moshe Safdie is an Israeli-Canadian-American architect best known for Habitat 67 in Montreal and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Rem Koolhaas

Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, theorist and urbanist, and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard. He is often cited as a representative of deconstructivism.

Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers was a British-Italian architect noted for his modernist high-tech designs including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Lloyd's building in London.

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan was an American architect called the father of skyscrapers and modernism, a Chicago School pioneer who coined the maxim "form follows function".

Álvaro Siza Vieira

Álvaro Siza Vieira is a Portuguese architect and 1992 Pritzker laureate, known for poetic modernist works deeply attuned to site and context.

Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was a Catalan architect and designer from Spain, widely known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernisme. Most of his works are in Barcelona, including his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família.

Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi was an Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect who promoted the social and cultural potential of design; major works include the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and SESC Pompéia.

André Le Nôtre

André Le Nôtre was a French landscape architect and principal gardener of Louis XIV, designer of the gardens of Versailles and the height of the formal French garden style.

Jacques Herzog

Jacques Herzog is a Swiss architect and co-founder of Herzog & de Meuron, recipient of the Pritzker Prize and Royal Gold Medal. Notable works include Tate Modern and the Beijing National Stadium.

Inigo Jones

Inigo Jones was an English architect, the first significant architect in England in the early modern era and the first to bring Italian Renaissance classical proportion and symmetry to English building.

Thomas Heatherwick

Thomas Heatherwick is an English designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio, known for Vessel at Hudson Yards, the UK Pavilion at Expo 2010, and the London 2012 Olympic cauldron.

César Pelli

César Pelli was an Argentine-American architect who designed some of the world's tallest buildings, including the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Rafael Moneo

Rafael Moneo is a Spanish architect, winner of the 1996 Pritzker Prize and the 2003 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

Fumihiko Maki

Fumihiko Maki was a Japanese architect and 1993 Pritzker laureate whose work explores new materials and fuses Eastern and Western traditions.

Arata Isozaki

Arata Isozaki was a Japanese architect and theorist, awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1986 and the Pritzker Prize in 2019.

Pierre de Meuron

Pierre de Meuron is a Swiss architect and co-founder of Herzog & de Meuron, designers of Tate Modern in London and the Beijing National Stadium.

Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect, designer and theorist, a leading proponent of the postmodern movement and the first Italian to win the Pritzker Prize.

Glenn Murcutt

Glenn Murcutt is an Australian architect known for environmentally sensitive, regionally rooted buildings; he received the 2002 Pritzker Prize.

Wang Shu

Wang Shu is a Chinese architect and 2012 Pritzker laureate, the first Chinese citizen to win the prize, known for projects that reuse traditional materials in contemporary forms.

Alejandro Aravena

Alejandro Aravena is a Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker laureate, executive director of ELEMENTAL, known for "half-a-house" incremental social housing.

Ray Eames

Ray Eames was an American artist and designer who, with husband Charles Eames, shaped 20th-century furniture, architecture, and film.

B. V. Doshi

Balkrishna Doshi was an Indian architect and the first Indian recipient of the Pritzker Prize, whose work fused modernism with Indian context and craft.

Antonio Sant'Elia

Antonio Sant'Elia was an Italian architect and a key member of the Futurist movement, remembered for bold visionary sketches of a modern industrial city.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German-American architect and interior designer regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture, known for the maxim "less is more".

Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Bundgaard Ingels is a Danish architect and founder of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Projects include VIA 57 West in New York, CopenHill in Copenhagen, and the Two World Trade Center proposal.

Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray was an Irish architect and furniture designer, a pioneer of the Modern Movement whose villa E-1027 is a landmark of early modernism.

Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, and writer known for foundational contributions to postmodern architecture and her partnership with Robert Venturi.

I. M. Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect best known for the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a French-Swiss architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture.

Zaha Hadid

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi and British architect, artist, and designer. She is recognised as a key figure in the architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

Shigeru Ban

Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect known for innovative work with paper and cardboard tubes, often used to house disaster victims. He won the Pritzker Prize in 2014.

Mimar Sinan

Mimar Sinan was the chief Ottoman architect for sultans Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad III, responsible for more than 300 major structures including the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements of the twentieth century, influencing architects worldwide through his works and mentoring hundreds of apprentices in his Taliesin Fellowship.

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture.

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer whose work spans architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, ranging from Nordic Classicism to organic modernism.

Diébédo Francis Kéré

Diébédo Francis Kéré is a Burkinabè-German architect and the 2022 Pritzker laureate, celebrated for community-driven, climate-responsive buildings in West Africa.