The Most Famous
ARCHITECTS from United States
This page contains a list of the greatest American Architects. The pantheon dataset contains 518 Architects, 33 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the 5th most number of Architects behind France, and Germany.
Top 10
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Architects of all time. This list of famous American Architects is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Architects.
1. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959)
With an HPI of 73.01, Frank Lloyd Wright is the most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 146 different languages on wikipedia.
Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) 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. Wright believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was exemplified in Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture". Wright was a pioneer of what came to be called the Prairie School movement of architecture and also developed the concept of the Usonian home in Broadacre City, his vision for urban planning in the United States. He also designed original and innovative offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, museums, and other commercial projects. Wright-designed interior elements (including leaded glass windows, floors, furniture and even tableware) were integrated into these structures. He wrote several books and numerous articles and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time". In 2019, a selection of his work became a listed World Heritage Site as The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Raised in rural Wisconsin, Wright studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin and then apprenticed in Chicago, briefly with Joseph Lyman Silsbee, and then with Louis Sullivan at Adler & Sullivan. Wright opened his own successful Chicago practice in 1893 and established a studio in his Oak Park, Illinois home in 1898. His fame increased and his personal life sometimes made headlines: leaving his first wife Catherine "Kitty" Tobin for Mamah Cheney in 1909; the murder of Mamah and her children and others at his Taliesin estate by a staff member in 1914; his tempestuous marriage with second wife Miriam Noel (m. 1923–1927); and his courtship and marriage with Olgivanna Lazović (m. 1928–1959). Wright was born on June 8, 1867, in the town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, but maintained throughout his life that he was born in 1869. In 1987 a biographer of Wright suggested that he may have been christened as "Frank Lincoln Wright" or "Franklin Lincoln Wright" but these assertions were not supported by any evidence. Wright's father, William Cary Wright (1825–1904), was a "gifted musician, orator, and sometime preacher who had been admitted to the bar in 1857." He was also a published composer. Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been a Baptist minister, but he later joined his wife's family in the Unitarian faith. Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39–1923) was a teacher and a member of the Lloyd Jones clan; her parents had emigrated from Wales to Wisconsin. One of Anna's brothers was Jenkin Lloyd Jones, an important figure in the spread of the Unitarian faith in the Midwest. According to Wright's autobiography, his mother declared when she was expecting that her first child would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals torn from a periodical to encourage the infant's ambition. Wright grew up in an "unstable household, [...] constant lack of resources, [...] unrelieved poverty and anxiety" and had a "deeply disturbed and obviously unhappy childhood". His father held pastorates in McGregor, Iowa (1869), Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1871), and Weymouth, Massachusetts (1874). Because the Wright family struggled financially also in Weymouth, they returned to Spring Green, where the supportive Lloyd Jones family could help William find employment. In 1877, they settled in Madison, where William gave music lessons and served as the secretary to the newly formed Unitarian society. Although William was a distant parent, he shared his love of music with his children. In 1876, Anna saw an exhibit of educational blocks called the Froebel Gifts, the foundation of an innovative kindergarten curriculum. Anna, a trained teacher, was excited by the program and bought a set with which the 9-year old Wright spent much time playing. The blocks in the set were geometrically shaped and could be assembled in various combinations to form two- and three-dimensional compositions. In his autobiography, Wright described the influence of these exercises on his approach to design: "For several years, I sat at the little kindergarten table-top... and played... with the cube, the sphere and the triangle – these smooth wooden maple blocks... All are in my fingers to this day... " In 1881, soon after Wright turned 14, his parents separated. In 1884, his father sued for a divorce from Anna on the grounds of "... emotional cruelty and physical violence and spousal abandonment". Wright attended Madison High School, but there is no evidence that he graduated. His father left Wisconsin after the divorce was granted in 1885. Wright said that he never saw his father again. In 1886, at age 19, Wright was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a special student. He worked under Allan D. Conover, a professor of civil engineering, before leaving the school without taking a degree; in 1955, the university presented Wright, then 88 years old, with an honorary doctorate of fine arts. Wright's uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had commissioned the Chicago architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee to design the All Souls Church in Chicago in 1885. In 1886, the Silsbee firm was commissioned by Jones to design the Unity Chapel as his private family chapel in Wyoming, Wisconsin. Although not officially employed by Silsbee, Wright was an accomplished draftsman and "looked after the interior [drawings and construction]" in Wisconsin. This chapel is thus Wright's earliest known work. After the chapel was finished, Wright moved to Chicago. In 1887, Wright arrived in Chicago in search of employment. As a result of the devastating Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and a population boom, new development was plentiful. Wright later recorded in his autobiography that his first impression of Chicago was as an ugly and chaotic city. Within days of his arrival, and after interviews with several prominent firms, he was hired as a draftsman with Joseph Lyman Silsbee. While with the firm, he also worked on two other family projects: All Souls Church in Chicago for his uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and the Hillside Home School I in Spring Green for two of his aunts. Others working in Silsbee's office at the time included Cecil S. Corwin (1860-1941), George W. Maher (1864-1926), and George G. Elmslie (1869-1952). Corwin, who was seven years older than Wright, soon took his young colleague under his wing and the two became close friends. Feeling underpaid and looking to earn more, Wright briefly left Silsbee to work for architect William W. Clay (1849-1926). However, Wright soon felt overwhelmed by his new level of responsibility and returned to Silsbee, but this time with a raise in salary. Although Silsbee adhered mainly to Victorian and Revivalist architecture, Wright found his work to be more "gracefully picturesque" than the other "brutalities" of the period. Wright remained with Silsbee for a little less than a year, leaving to work for Adler & Sullivan around November 1887. Wright learned that the Chicago firm of Adler & Sullivan was "... looking for someone to make the finished drawings for the interior of the Auditorium Building". Wright demonstrated that he was a competent impressionist of Louis Sullivan's ornamental designs and two short interviews later, was an official apprentice in the firm. Wright did not get along well with Sullivan's other draftsmen; he wrote that several violent altercations occurred between them during the first years of his apprenticeship. For that matter, Sullivan showed very little respect for his own employees as well. In spite of this, "Sullivan took [Wright] under his wing and gave him great design responsibility." As an act of respect, Wright would later refer to Sullivan as lieber Meister (German for "dear master"). He also formed a bond with office foreman Paul Mueller. Wright later engaged Mueller in the construction of several of his public and commercial buildings between 1903 and 1923. By 1890, Wright had an office next to Sullivan's that he shared with friend and draftsman George Elmslie, who had been hired by Sullivan at Wright's request. Wright had risen to head draftsman and handled all residential design work in the office. As a general rule, the firm of Adler & Sullivan did not design or build houses, but would oblige when asked by the clients of their important commercial projects. Wright was occupied by the firm's major commissions during office hours, so house designs were relegated to evening and weekend overtime hours at his home studio. He later claimed total responsibility for the design of these houses, but a careful inspection of their architectural style (and accounts from historian Robert Twombly) suggests that Sullivan dictated the overall form and motifs of the residential works; Wright's design duties were often reduced to detailing the projects from Sullivan's sketches. During this time, Wright was assigned to work on the Sullivan's bungalow (1890) and the James A. Charnley bungalow (1890) in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, the Berry-MacHarg House, James A. Charnley House (both 1891), and the Albert Sullivan House (1892), all in Chicago. Despite Sullivan's loan and overtime salary, Wright was constantly short on funds. Wright admitted that his poor finances were likely due to his expensive tastes in wardrobe and vehicles, and the extra luxuries he designed into his house. To supplement his income and repay his debts, Wright accepted independent commissions for at least nine houses. These "bootlegged" houses, as he later called them, were conservatively designed in variations of the fashionable Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles. Nevertheless, unlike the prevailing architecture of the period, each house emphasized simple geometric massing and contained features such as bands of horizontal windows, occasional cantilevers, and open floor plans, which would become hallmarks of his later work. Eight of these early houses remain today, including the Thomas Gale, Robert Parker, George Blossom, and Walter Gale houses. As with the residential projects for Adler & Sullivan, he designed his bootleg houses on his own time. Sullivan knew nothing of the independent works until 1893, when he recognized that one of the houses was unmistakably a Frank Lloyd Wright design. This particular house, built for Allison Harlan, was only blocks away from Sullivan's townhouse in the Chicago community of Kenwood. Aside from the location, the geometric purity of the composition and balcony tracery in the same style as the Charnley House likely gave away Wright's involvement. Since Wright's five-year contract forbade any outside work, the incident led to his departure from Sullivan's firm. Several stories recount the break in the relationship between Sullivan and Wright; even Wright later told two different versions of the occurrence. In An Autobiography, Wright claimed that he was unaware that his side ventures were a breach of his contract. When Sullivan learned of them, he was angered and offended; he prohibited any further outside commissions and refused to issue Wright the deed to his Oak Park house until after he completed his five years. Wright could not bear the new hostility from his master and thought that the situation was unjust. He "... threw down [his] pencil and walked out of the Adler & Sullivan office never to return". Dankmar Adler, who was more sympathetic to Wright's actions, later sent him the deed. However, Wright told his Taliesin apprentices (as recorded by Edgar Tafel) that Sullivan fired him on the spot upon learning of the Harlan House. Tafel also recounted that Wright had Cecil Corwin sign several of the bootleg jobs, indicating that Wright was aware of their forbidden nature. Regardless of the correct series of events, Wright and Sullivan did not meet or speak for 12 years. After leaving Adler & Sullivan, Wright established his own practice on the top floor of the Sullivan-designed Schiller Building on Randolph Street in Chicago. Wright chose to locate his office in the building because the tower location reminded him of the office of Adler & Sullivan. Cecil Corwin followed Wright and set up his architecture practice in the same office, but the two worked independently and did not consider themselves partners. In 1896, Wright moved from the Schiller Building to the nearby and newly completed Steinway Hall building. The loft space was shared with Robert C. Spencer, Jr., Myron Hunt, and Dwight H. Perkins. These young architects, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and the philosophies of Louis Sullivan, formed what became known as the Prairie School. They were joined by Perkins' apprentice Marion Mahony, who in 1895 transferred to Wright's team of drafters and took over production of his presentation drawings and watercolor renderings. Mahony, the third woman to be licensed as an architect in Illinois and one of the first licensed female architects in the U.S., also designed furniture, leaded glass windows, and light fixtures, among other features, for Wright's houses. Between 1894 and the early 1910s, several other leading Prairie School architects and many of Wright's future employees launched their careers in the offices of Steinway Hall. Wright's projects during this period followed two basic models. His first independent commission, the Winslow House, combined Sullivanesque ornamentation with the emphasis on simple geometry and horizontal lines. The Francis Apartments (1895, demolished 1971), Heller House (1896), Rollin Furbeck House (1897) and Husser House (1899, demolished 1926) were designed in the same mode. For his more conservative clients, Wright designed more traditional dwellings. These included the Dutch Colonial Revival style Bagley House (1894), Tudor Revival style Moore House I (1895), and Queen Anne style Charles E. Roberts House (1896). While Wright could not afford to turn down clients over disagreements in taste, even his most conservative designs retained simplified massing and occasional Sullivan-inspired details. Soon after the completion of the Winslow House in 1894, Edward Waller, a friend and former client, invited Wright to meet Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham. Burnham had been impressed by the Winslow House and other examples of Wright's work; he offered to finance a four-year education at the École des Beaux-Arts and two years in Rome. To top it off, Wright would have a position in Burnham's firm upon his return. In spite of guaranteed success and support of his family, Wright declined the offer. Burnham, who had directed the classical design of the World's Columbian Exposition and was a major proponent of the Beaux Arts movement, thought that Wright was making a foolish mistake. Yet for Wright, the classical education of the École lacked creativity and was altogether at odds with his vision of modern American architecture. Wright relocated his practice to his home in 1898 to bring his work and family lives closer. This move made further sense as the majority of the architect's projects at that time were in Oak Park or neighboring River Forest. The birth of three more children prompted Wright to sacrifice his original home studio space for additional bedrooms and necessitated his design and construction of an expansive studio addition to the north of the main house. The space, which included a hanging balcony within the two-story drafting room, was one of Wright's first experiments with innovative structure. The studio embodied Wright's developing aesthetics and would become the laboratory from which his next 10 years of architectural creations would emerge. By 1901, Wright had completed about 50 projects, including many houses in Oak Park. As his son John Lloyd Wright wrote: William Eugene Drummond, Francis Barry Byrne, Walter Burley Griffin, Albert Chase McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts, and George Willis were the draftsmen. Five men, two women. They wore flowing ties, and smocks suitable to the realm. The men wore their hair like Papa, all except Albert, he didn't have enough hair. They worshiped Papa! Papa liked them! I know that each one of them was then making valuable contributions to the pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the full glory, headaches, and recognition today! Between 1900 and 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright completed four houses, which have since been identified as the onset of the "Prairie Style". Two, the Hickox and Bradley Houses, were the last transitional step between Wright's early designs and the Prairie creations. Meanwhile, the Thomas House and Willits House received recognition as the first mature examples of the new style. At the same time, Wright gave his new ideas for the American house widespread awareness through two publications in the Ladies' Home Journal. The articles were in response to an invitation from the president of Curtis Publishing Company, Edward Bok, as part of a project to improve modern house design. "A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with Lots of Room in it" appeared respectively in the February and July 1901 issues of the journal. Although neither of the affordable house plans was ever constructed, Wright received increased requests for similar designs in following years. Wright came to Buffalo and designed homes for three of the company's executives: the Darwin D. Martin House (1904), the William R. Heath House 1905), and the Walter V. Davidson House (1908). Other Wright houses considered to be masterpieces of the Prairie Style are the Frederick Robie House in Chicago and the Avery and Queene Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois. The Robie House, with its extended cantilevered roof lines supported by a 110-foot-long (34 m) channel of steel, is the most dramatic. Its living and dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space. With this and other buildings, included in the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio (1910), Wright's work became known to European architects and had a profound influence on them after World War I. Wright's residential designs of this era were known as "prairie houses" because the designs complemented the land around Chicago. Prairie Style houses often have a combination of these features: one or two stories with one-story projections, an open floor plan, low-pitched roofs with broad, overhanging eaves, strong horizontal lines, ribbons of windows (often casements), a prominent central chimney, built-in stylized cabinetry, and a wide use of natural materials – especially stone and wood. By 1909, Wright had begun to reject the upper-middle-class Prairie Style single-family house model, shifting his focus to a more democratic architecture. Wright went to Europe in 1909 with a portfolio of his work and presented it to Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth. Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, published in 1911, was the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The work contained more than 100 lithographs of Wright's designs and is commonly known as the Wasmuth Portfolio. Wright designed the house of Cornell University's chapter of Alpha Delta Phi literary society (1900), the Hillside Home School II (built for his aunts) in Spring Green, Wisconsin (1901) and the Unity Temple (1905) in Oak Park, Illinois. As a lifelong Unitarian and member of Unity Temple, Wright offered his services to the congregation after their church burned down, working on the building from 1905 to 1909. Wright later said that Unity Temple was the edifice in which he ceased to be an architect of structure, and became an architect of space. Some other early notable public buildings and projects in this era: the Larkin Administration Building (1905); the Geneva Inn (Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 1911); the Midway Gardens (Chicago, Illinois, 1913); the Banff National Park Pavilion (Alberta, Canada, 1914). While working in Japan, Wright left an impressive architectural heritage. The Imperial Hotel, completed in 1923, is the most important. Thanks to its solid foundations and steel construction, the hotel survived the Great Kanto Earthquake almost unscathed. The hotel was damaged during the bombing of Tokyo and by the subsequent US military occupation of it after World War II. As land in the center of Tokyo increased in value the hotel was deemed obsolete and was demolished in 1968 but the lobby was saved and later re-constructed at the Meiji Mura architecture museum in Nagoya in 1976. Jiyu Gakuen was founded as a girls' school in 1921. The construction of the main building began in 1921 under Wright's direction and, after his departure, was continued by Endo. The school building, like the Imperial Hotel, is covered with Ōya stones. The Yodoko Guesthouse (designed in 1918 and completed in 1924) was built as the summer villa for Tadzaemon Yamamura. Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture had a strong influence on young Japanese architects. The Japanese architects Wright commissioned to carry out his designs were Arata Endo, Takehiko Okami, Taue Sasaki and Kameshiro Tsuchiura. Endo supervised the completion of the Imperial Hotel after Wright's departure in 1922 and also supervised the construction of the Jiyu Gakuen Girls' School and the Yodokō Guest House. Tsuchiura went on to create so-called "light" buildings, which had similarities to Wright's later work. In the early 1920s, Wright designed a "textile" concrete block system. The system of precast blocks, reinforced by an internal system of bars, enabled "fabrication as infinite in color, texture, and variety as in that rug." Wright first used his textile block system on the Millard House in Pasadena, California, in 1923. Typically Wrightian is the joining of the structure to its site by a series of terraces that reach out into and reorder the landscape, making it an integral part of the architect's vision. With the Ennis House and the Samuel Freeman House (both 1923), Wright had further opportunities to test the limits of the textile block system, including limited use in the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in 1927. The Ennis house is often used in films, television, and print media to represent the future. Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, supervised construction for the Storer, Freeman, and Ennis Houses. Architectural historian Thomas Hines has suggested that Lloyd's contribution to these projects is often overlooked. After World War II, Wright updated the concrete block system, calling it the Usonian Automatic system, resulting in the construction of several notable homes. As he explained in The Natural House (1954), "The original blocks are made on the site by ramming concrete into wood or metal wrap-around forms, with one outside face (which may be pattered), and one rear or inside face, generally coffered, for lightness." In 1903, while Wright was designing a house for Edwin Cheney (a neighbor in Oak Park), he became enamored with Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah was a modern woman with interests outside the home. She was an early feminist, and Wright viewed her as his intellectual equal. Their relationship became the talk of the town; they often could be seen taking rides in Wright's automobile through Oak Park. In 1909, Wright and Mamah Cheney met up in Europe, leaving their spouses and children behind. Wright remained in Europe for almost a year, first in Florence, Italy (where he lived with his eldest son Lloyd) and, later, in Fiesole, Italy, where he lived with Mamah. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted Mamah a divorce, although Frank's wife Catherine refused to grant him one. After Wright returned to the United States in October 1910, he persuaded his mother to buy land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May 1911. The recurring theme of Taliesin also came from his mother's side: Taliesin in Welsh mythology was a poet, magician, and priest. The family motto, "Y Gwir yn Erbyn y Byd" ("The Truth Against the World"), was taken from the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg, who also had a son named Taliesin. The motto is still used today as the cry of the druids and chief bard of the Eisteddfod in Wales. On August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, Julian Carlton, a servant, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and then murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead included Mamah; her two children, John and Martha Cheney; a gardener (David Lindblom); a draftsman (Emil Brodelle); a workman (Thomas Brunker); and another workman's son (Ernest Weston). Two people survived, one of whom, William Weston, helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house. Carlton swallowed hydrochloric acid following the attack in an attempt to kill himself. He was nearly lynched on the spot, but was taken to the Dodgeville jail. Carlton died from starvation seven weeks after the attack. In 1922, Kitty Wright finally granted Wright a divorce. Under the terms of the divorce, Wright was required to wait one year before he could marry his then-mistress, Maude "Miriam" Noel. In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna (Lloyd Jones) Wright, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separation, but while still married, Wright met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, and soon after Olgivanna became pregnant. Their daughter, Iovanna, was born on December 3, 1925. On April 20, 1925, another fire destroyed the bungalow at Taliesin. Crossed wires from a newly installed telephone system were deemed to be responsible for the blaze, which destroyed a collection of Japanese prints that Wright estimated to be worth $250,000 to $500,000 ($4,343,000 to $8,687,000 in 2023). Wright rebuilt the living quarters, naming the home "Taliesin III". In 1926, Olga's ex-husband, Vlademar Hinzenburg, sought custody of his daughter, Svetlana. In October 1926, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested in Tonka Bay, Minnesota. The charges were later dropped. The divorce of Wright and Miriam Noel was finalized in 1927. Wright was again required to wait for one year before remarrying. Wright and Olgivanna married in 1928. In 1932, Wright and his wife Olgivanna put out a call for students to come to Taliesin to study and work under Wright while they learned architecture and spiritual development. Olgivanna Wright had been a student of G. I. Gurdjieff who had previously established a similar school. Twenty-three came to live and work that year, including John (Jack) H. Howe, who would become Wright's chief draftsman. A total of 625 people joined The Fellowship in Wright's lifetime. The Fellowship was a source of workers for Wright's later projects, including: Fallingwater; The Johnson Wax Headquarters; and The Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Considerable controversy exists over the living conditions and education of the fellows. Wright was reputedly a difficult person to work with. One apprentice wrote: "He is devoid of consideration and has a blind spot regarding others' qualities. Yet I believe, that a year in his studio would be worth any sacrifice." The Fellowship evolved into The School of Architecture at Taliesin which was an accredited school until it closed under acrimonious circumstances in 2020. Taking on the name "The School of Architecture" in June 2020, the school moved to the Cosanti Foundation, which it had worked with in the past. Wright is responsible for a series of concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City. He proposed the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932 and unveiled a 12-square-foot (1.1 m2) model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years. Concurrent with the development of Broadacre City, also referred to as Usonia, Wright conceived a new type of dwelling that came to be known as the Usonian House. Although an early version of the form can be seen in the Malcolm Willey House (1934) in Minneapolis, the Usonian ideal emerged most completely in the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House (1937) in Madison, Wisconsin. Designed on a gridded concrete slab that integrated the house's radiant heating system, the house featured new approaches to construction, including walls composed of a "sandwich" of wood siding, plywood cores and building paper – a significant change from typically framed walls. Usonian houses commonly featured flat roofs and were usually constructed without basements or attics, all features that Wright had been promoting since the early 20th century. Usonian houses were Wright's response to the transformation of domestic life that occurred in the early 20th century when servants had become less prominent or completely absent from most American households. By developing homes with progressively more open plans, Wright allotted the woman of the house a "workspace", as he often called the kitchen, where she could keep track of and be available for the children and/or guests in the dining room. As in the Prairie Houses, Usonian living areas had a fireplace as a point of focus. Bedrooms, typically isolated and relatively small, encouraged the family to gather in the main living areas. The conception of spaces instead of rooms was a development of the Prairie ideal. The built-in furnishings related to the Arts and Crafts movement's principles that influenced Wright's early work. Spatially and in terms of their construction, the Usonian houses represented a new model for independent living and allowed dozens of clients to live in a Wright-designed house at relatively low cost. His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that influenced countless postwar developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright: open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization and efficiency in building. Fallingwater, one of Wright's most famous private residences (completed 1937), was built for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., at Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Constructed over a 30-foot waterfall, it was designed according to Wright's desire to place the occupants close to the natural surroundings. The house was intended to be more of a family getaway, rather than a live-in home. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. The house cost $155,000 (equivalent to $3,285,000 in 2023), including the architect's fee of $8,000 (equivalent to $170,000 in 2023). It was one of Wright's most expensive pieces. Kaufmann's own engineers argued that the design was not sound. They were overruled by Wright, but the contractor secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. In 1994, Robert Silman and Associates examined the building and developed a plan to restore the structure. In the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed structural analysis could be done. In March 2002, post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed. Taliesin West, Wright's winter home and studio complex in Scottsdale, Arizona, was a laboratory for Wright from 1937 to his death in 1959. It is now the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The design and construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City occupied Wright from 1943 until 1959 and is probably his most recognized masterpiece. The building's unique central geometry allows visitors to experience Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective geometric paintings by taking an elevator to the top level and then viewing artworks by walking down the slowly descending, central spiral ramp. The only realized skyscraper designed by Wright is the Price Tower, a 19-story tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It is also one of the two existing vertically oriented Wright structures (the other is the S.C. Johnson Wax Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin). The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price of the H. C. Price Company, a local oil pipeline and chemical firm. On March 29, 2007, Price Tower was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior, one of only 20 such properties in Oklahoma. Monona Terrace, originally designed in 1937 as municipal offices for Madison, Wisconsin, was completed in 1997 on the original site, using a variation of Wright's final design for the exterior, with the interior design altered by its new purpose as a convention center. The "as-built" design was carried out by Wright's apprentice Tony Puttnam. Monona Terrace was accompanied by controversy until the structure was completed. Florida Southern College, located in Lakeland, Florida, constructed 12 (out of 18 planned) Frank Lloyd Wright buildings between 1941 and 1958 as part of the Child of the Sun project. It is the world's largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. His Prairie houses use themed, coordinated design elements (often based on plant forms) that are repeated in windows, carpets, and other fittings. He made innovative use of new building materials such as precast concrete blocks, glass bricks, and zinc cames (instead of the traditional lead) for his leadlight windows, and he famously used Pyrex glass tubing as a major element in the Johnson Wax Headquarters. Wright was also one of the first architects to design and install custom-made electric light fittings, including some of the first electric floor lamps, and his very early use of the then-novel spherical glass lampshade (a design previously not possible due to the physical restrictions of gas lighting). In 1897, Wright received a patent for "Prism Glass Tiles" that were used in storefronts to direct light toward the interior. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his philosophy of organic architecture. According to Wright's organic theory, all components of the building should appear unified, as though they belong together. Nothing should be attached to it without considering the effect on the whole. To unify the house to its site, Wright often used large expanses of glass to blur the boundary between the indoors and outdoors. Glass allowed for interaction and viewing of the outdoors while still protecting from the elements. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he compared it to the mirrors of nature: lakes, rivers and ponds. One of Wright's earliest uses of glass in his works was to string panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to create light screens to join solid walls. By using this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a balance between the lightness and airiness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright's best-known art glass is that of the Prairie style. The simple geometric shapes that yield to very ornate and intricate windows represent some of the most integral ornamentation of his career. Wright also designed some of his own clothing. Wright, an individualist, did not affiliate with the American Institute of Architects during his career; he called the organization "a harbor of refuge for the incompetent" and "a form of refined gangsterism". When an associate referred to him as "an old amateur" Wright confirmed, "I am the oldest." Wright rarely credited any influences on his designs, but most architects, historians and scholars agree he had five major influences: Louis Sullivan, whom he considered to be his lieber Meister (dear master) Nature, particularly shapes/forms and colors/patterns of plant life Music (his favorite composer was Ludwig van Beethoven) Japanese art, prints and buildings Froebel gifts Wright was given a set of Froebel gifts at about age nine, and in his autobiography he cited them indirectly in explaining that he learned the geometry of architecture in kindergarten play: For several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making four-inch squares; and, among other things, played upon these 'unit-lines' with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)—these were smooth maple-wood blocks. All are in my fingers to this day.: 359 Wright later wrote, "The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structures in Nature… I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw.": 25 : 205 He routinely claimed the work of architects and architectural designers who were his employees as his own designs, and believed that the rest of the Prairie School architects were merely his followers, imitators, and subordinates. As with any architect, though, Wright worked in a collaborative process and drew his ideas from the work of others. In his earlier days, Wright worked with some of the top architects of the Chicago School, including Sullivan. In his Prairie School days, Wright's office was populated by many talented architects, including William Eugene Drummond, John Van Bergen, Isabel Roberts, Francis Barry Byrne, Albert McArthur, Marion Mahony Griffin, and Walter Burley Griffin. The Czech-born architect Antonin Raymond worked for Wright at Taliesin and led the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He subsequently stayed in Japan and opened his own practice. Rudolf Schindler also worked for Wright on the Imperial Hotel and his own work is often credited as influencing Wright's Usonian houses. Schindler's friend Richard Neutra also worked briefly for Wright. In the Taliesin days, Wright employed many architects and artists who later become notable, such as Aaron Green, John Lautner, E. Fay Jones, Henry Klumb, William Bernoudy, and Paolo Soleri. Wright was a passionate Japanophile — he once proclaimed Japan to be "the most romantic, artistic, nature-inspired country on earth." He was particularly interested in ukiyo-e woodblock prints, to which he claimed he was "enslaved." Wright spent much of his free time selling, collecting, and appreciating these prints. He held parties and other events centered around them, proclaiming their pedagogical value to his guests and students. Before arriving in Japan, his impressions of the nation were based almost entirely on them. Wright found particular inspiration in the formal aspects of Japanese art. He described ukiyo-e prints as "organic," because of their understated qualities, their harmony, and their ability to be appreciated on a purely aesthetic level. Additionally, he cherished their free-form compositions, where elements of the scene would frequently breach in front of one another, and their lack of extraneous detail, which he called a "gospel of elimination." His interpretation of chashitsu (tea ceremony venues), mediated by the ideas of Okakura Kakuzō, was that of an architecture which emphasized openness, the "vacant space between the roof and walls." Wright applied these principles on a large scale, and they became trademarks of his practice. Wright's floor plans exhibit strong similarities to their presumed Japanese forebears. The open living spaces of his early homes were likely appropriated from the World's Columbian Exposition's Ho-O-Den Pavilion, whose sliding-screen dividers were removed in preparation for the event. Likewise, Unity Temple follows a gongen-zukuri layout, characteristic of Shinto shrines and likely inspired by his 1905 visit to the Rinnō-ji temple complex, and the shape of many of his cantilevered towers, including the Johnson Research Tower, may have been inspired by Japanese pagodas. Wright's ornamental flourishes, as seen in his leaded glass windows and lively architectural drawings, demonstrate a technical indebtedness to ukiyo-e. One modern commentator, discussing the Robie House, suggests that such elements combined allow Wright's architecture to exhibit iki, a particularly Japanese aesthetic value marked by a subdued stylishness. His ideas about the art of Japan appear to have drawn greatly from the activities of Ernest Fenollosa, whose work he likely first encountered between 1890 and 1893. Many of Fenollosa's ideas are quite similar to those of Wright: these include his view of architecture as a "mother art," his condemnation of the West's "separation of construction and decoration," and his identification of an "organic wholeness" within ukiyo-e prints. Also like Wright, Fenollosa perceived a "degeneracy" in Western architecture, with particular emphasis on Renaissance architecture; Wright himself admitted that Japanese prints helped to "vulgarize" the Renaissance for him. Wright's art criticism treatise, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, may be read as a straightforward expansion upon Fenollosa's ideas. Though Wright always acknowledged his indebtedness to Japanese art and architecture, he took offense to claims that he copied or adapted it. In his view, Japanese art simply validated his personal principles especially well, and as such it was not a source of special inspiration. Responding to a claim by Charles Robert Ashbee that he was "trying to adapt Japanese forms to the United States," Wright said that such borrowing was "against [his] very religion." Nonetheless, his insistence did not stop others from observing the same throughout his life. Wright was also an active dealer in Japanese art, primarily ukiyo-e. He frequently served as both architect and art dealer to the same clients: he designed a home, then provided the art to fill it. For a time, Wright made more from selling art than from his work as an architect. He also kept a personal collection, which he used as a teaching aid with his apprentices in what were called "print parties"; to better suit his taste, he sometimes modified these personal prints using colored pencils and crayons. Wright owned prints from masters such as Okumura Masanobu, Torii Kiyomasu I, Katsukawa Shunshō, Utagawa Toyoharu, Utagawa Kunisada, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Hiroshige; he was especially fond of Hiroshige, whom he considered "the greatest artist in the world." Wright first traveled to Japan in 1905, where he bought hundreds of prints. The following year, he helped organize the world's first retrospective exhibition on Hiroshige, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, a job which strengthened his reputation as an expert in Japanese art. Wright continued buying prints in his return trips to Japan and for many years he was a major presence in the art world, selling a great number of works both to prominent private collectors and to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In sum, Wright spent over five hundred thousand dollars on prints between 1905 and 1923. He penned a book on Japanese art, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, in 1912. In 1920, many of the prints Wright sold had been found to exhibit signs of retouching, including pinholes and unoriginal pigments. These retouched prints were likely made in retribution by some of his Japanese dealers, who were disgruntled by the architect's under-the-table sales. In an attempt to clear his name, Wright took one of his dealers, Kyūgo Hayashi, to court over the issue; Hayashi was subsequently sentenced to one year in prison, and barred from selling prints for an extended period of time. Though Wright protested his innocence, and provided his clients with genuine prints as replacements for those he was accused of retouching, the incident marked the end of the high point of his career as an art dealer. He was forced to sell off much of his art collection to pay off outstanding debts: in 1928, the Bank of Wisconsin claimed Taliesin and sold thousands of his prints — for only one dollar a piece — to collector Edward Burr Van Vleck. Nonetheless, Wright continued to collect and deal in prints until his death in 1959, using them as bartering chips and collateral for loans; he often relied upon his art business to remain financially solvent. He once claimed that Taliesin I and II were "practically built" by his prints. The extent of his dealings in Japanese art went largely unknown, or underestimated, among art historians for decades. In 1980, Julia Meech, then associate curator of Japanese art at the Metropolitan Museum, began researching the history of the museum's collection of Japanese prints. She discovered "a three-inch-deep 'clump of 400 cards' from 1918, each listing a print bought from the same seller — 'F. L. Wright'" — and a number of letters exchanged between Wright and the museum's first curator of Far Eastern Art, Sigisbert C. Bosch Reitz. These discoveries and subsequent research led to a renewed understanding of Wright's career as an art dealer. Frank Lloyd Wright's commissions and theories on urban design began as early as 1900 and continued until his death. He had 41 commissions on the scale of community planning or urban design. His thoughts on suburban design started in 1900 with a proposed subdivision layout for Charles E. Roberts entitled the "Quadruple Block Plan". This design strayed from traditional suburban lot layouts and set houses on small square blocks of four equal-sized lots surrounded on all sides by roads instead of straight rows of houses on parallel streets. The houses, which used the same design as published in "A Home in a Prairie Town" from the Ladies' Home Journal, were set toward the center of the block to maximize the yard space and included private space in the center. This also allowed for far more interesting views from each house. Although this plan was never realized, Wright published the design in the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910. The more ambitious designs of entire communities were exemplified by his entry into the City Club of Chicago Land Development Competition in 1913. The contest was for the development of a suburban quarter section. This design expanded on the Quadruple Block Plan and included several social levels. The design shows the placement of the upscale homes in the most desirable areas and the blue collar homes and apartments separated by parks and common spaces. The design also included all the amenities of a small city: schools, museums, markets, etc. This view of decentralization was later reinforced by theoretical Broadacre City design. The philosophy behind his community planning was decentralization. The new development must be away from the cities. In this decentralized America, all services and facilities could coexist "factories side by side with farm and home". Notable community planning designs: 1900–03 – Quadruple Block Plan, 24 homes in Oak Park, Illinois (unbuilt); 1909 – Como Orchard Summer Colony, town site development for new town in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana; 1913 – Chicago Land Development competition, suburban Chicago quarter section; 1934–59 – Broadacre City, theoretical decentralized city plan, exhibits of large-scale model; 1938 – Suntop Homes, also known as Cloverleaf Quadruple Housing Project – commission from Federal Works Agency, Division of Defense Housing, a low-cost multifamily housing alternative to suburban development; 1942 – Cooperative Homesteads, commissioned by a group of auto workers, teachers and other professionals, 160-acre farm co-op was to be the pioneer of rammed earth and earth berm construction (unbuilt); 1945 – Usonia Homes, 47 homes (three designed by Wright) in Pleasantville, New York; 1949 – Parkwyn Village, a plat in Kalamazoo, Michigan, developed by Wright containing mostly Usonian houses by other architects with four by Wright. The community was planned to be on circular lots but was re-platted and squared off. 1949 – The Acres, also known as Galesburg Country Homes, with five houses (four designed by Wright) in Charleston Township, Michigan; The Acres remains the sole example of a planned community that has not had its circular lots squared off or been sub-divided. On April 4, 1959, Wright was hospitalized for abdominal pains and was operated upon. Wright seemed to be recovering but he died quietly on April 9 at the age of 91 years. The New York Times then reported he was 89. After his death, Wright's legacy was engulfed in turmoil for years. His third wife Olgivanna's dying wish had been that she, Wright, and her daughter by her first marriage would all be cremated and interred together in a memorial garden being built at Taliesin West. According to his own wishes, Wright's body had lain in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery, next to the Unity Chapel, within view of Taliesin in Wisconsin. Although Olgivanna had taken no legal steps to move Wright's remains (and against the wishes of other family members and the Wisconsin legislature), his remains were removed from his grave in 1985 by members of the Taliesin Fellowship. They were cremated and sent to Scottsdale where they were later interred as per Olgivanna's instructions. The original grave site in Wisconsin is now empty but is still marked with Wright's name. After Wright's death, most of his archives were stored at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin (in Wisconsin), and Taliesin West (in Arizona). These collections included more than 23,000 architectural drawings, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts, and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence. It also contained about 40 large-scale architectural models, most of which were constructed for MoMA's retrospective of Wright in 1940. In 2012, to guarantee a high level of conservation and access, as well as to transfer the considerable financial burden of maintaining the archive, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation partnered with the Museum of Modern Art and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library of Columbia University to move the archive's content to New York. Wright's furniture and art collection remains with the foundation, which will also have a role in monitoring the archive. These three parties established an advisory group to oversee exhibitions, symposiums, events, and publications. Photographs and other archival materials are held by the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The architect's personal archives are located at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Frank Lloyd Wright archives include photographs of his drawings, indexed correspondence beginning in the 1880s and continuing through Wright's life, and other ephemera. The Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, also has copies of Wright's correspondence and photographs of his drawings in their Frank Lloyd Wright Special Collection. Wright's correspondence is indexed in An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence, ed. by Professor Anthony Alofsin, which is available at larger libraries. Wright designed over 400 built structures of which about 300 survived as of 2023. At least five have been lost to forces of nature: the waterfront house for W. L. Fuller in Pass Christian, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Camille in August 1969; the Louis Sullivan Bungalow of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and the Arinobu Fukuhara House (1918) in Hakone, Japan, destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. In January 2006, the Wilbur Wynant House in Gary, Indiana was destroyed by fire. In 2018 the Arch Oboler complex in Malibu, California was gutted in the Woolsey Fire. Many other notable Wright buildings were intentionally demolished: Midway Gardens (built 1913, demolished 1929), the Larkin Administration Building (built 1903, demolished 1950), the Francis Apartments and Francisco Terrace Apartments (Chicago, built 1895, demolished 1971 and 1974, respectively), the Geneva Inn (Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, built 1911, demolished 1970), and the Banff National Park Pavilion (built 1914, demolished 1934). The Imperial Hotel (built 1923) survived the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, but was demolished in 1968 due to urban developmental pressures. The Hoffman Auto Showroom in New York City (built 1954) was demolished in 2013. Several of Wright's projects were either built after his death, or remain unbuilt. These include: Crystal Heights, a large mixed-use development in Washington, D.C., 1940 (unbuilt) The Illinois, mile-high tower in Chicago, 1956 (unbuilt) Marin County Civic Center, a municipal complex in San Rafael, California; groundbreaking occurred just one year after Wright's death Monona Terrace, convention center in Madison, Wisconsin; designed 1938–1959, built in 1997 Clubhouse at the Nakoma Golf Resort, Plumas County, California; designed in 1923, opened in 2000 Passive Solar Hemi-Cycle Home in Hawaii; designed in 1954, built in 1995 Later in his life (and after his death in 1959), Wright was accorded significant honorary recognition for his lifetime achievements. He received a Gold Medal award from The Royal Institute of British Architects in 1941. The American Institute of Architects awarded him the AIA Gold Medal in 1949. That medal was a symbolic "burying the hatchet" between Wright and the AIA. In a radio interview, he commented, "Well, the AIA I never joined, and they know why. When they gave me the gold medal in Houston, I told them frankly why. Feeling that the architecture profession is all that's the matter with architecture, why should I join them?" He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Frank P. Brown Medal in 1953. He received honorary degrees from several universities (including his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin), and several nations named him as an honorary board member to their national academies of art and/or architecture. In 2000, Fallingwater was named "The Building of the 20th century" in an unscientific "Top-Ten" poll taken by members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia. On that list, Wright was listed along with many of the USA's other greatest architects including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; he was the only architect who had more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House, and the Johnson Wax Building. In 1992, the Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin, commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon based on events early in Wright's life. The work has since received numerous revivals, including a June 2013 revival at Fallingwater, in Bull Run, Pennsylvania, by Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the relationship between the personal and working aspects of Wright's life, debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. In 1966, the United States Postal Service honored Wright with a Prominent Americans series 2¢ postage stamp. "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" is a song written by Paul Simon. Art Garfunkel has stated that the origin of the song came from his request that Simon write a song about the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Simon himself stated that he knew nothing about Wright, but proceeded to write the song anyway. In 1957, Arizona made plans to construct a new capitol building. Believing that the submitted plans for the new capitol were tombs to the past, Frank Lloyd Wright offered Oasis as an alternative to the people of Arizona. In 2004, one of the spires included in his design was erected in Scottsdale. The city of Scottsdale, Arizona renamed a portion of Bell Road, a major east–west thoroughfare in the Phoenix metropolitan area, in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright. Eight of Wright's buildings – Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hollyhock House, the Jacobs House, the Robie House, Taliesin, Taliesin West, and the Unity Temple – were inscribed on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites under the title The 20th-century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright in July 2019. UNESCO stated that these buildings were "innovative solutions to the needs for housing, worship, work or leisure" and "had a strong impact on the development of modern architecture in Europe". Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times, fathering four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Svetlana Milanoff, the daughter of his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. His wives/partners were: Catherine "Kitty" (Tobin) Wright (1871–1959); social worker, socialite (married in June 1889; divorced November 1922) Martha Bouton "Mamah" Borthwick (June 19, 1869 – August 15, 1914) was an American translator who had a romantic relationship with architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1909–1914), which ended when she was murdered after a male servant set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as they fled the burning structure. Maude "Miriam" (Noel) Wright (1869–1930), artist (married in November 1923; divorced August 1927) Olga Ivanovna "Olgivanna" (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright (1897–1985), dancer and writer (married in August 1928) His children with Catherine were: Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright (1890–1978), became a notable architect in Los Angeles. Lloyd's son, Eric Lloyd Wright (1929–2023), was an architect in Malibu, California, specializing in residences, but also designed civic and commercial buildings. John Lloyd Wright (1892–1972), invented Lincoln Logs in 1918, and practiced architecture extensively in the San Diego area. John's daughter, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham (1922–2013), was an architect in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She was the mother of Christine, an interior designer in Connecticut, and Catherine, an architecture professor at the Pratt Institute. Catherine Wright Baxter (1894–1979) was a homemaker and the mother of Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter. Anne Baxter is the mother of Melissa Galt, an interior designer in Scottsdale, Arizona. David Samuel Wright (1895–1997) was a building-products representative for whom Wright designed the David & Gladys Wright House, which was rescued from demolition and given to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. Frances Wright Caroe (1898–1959) was an arts administrator. Robert Llewellyn Wright (1903–1986) was an attorney for whom Wright designed a house in Bethesda, Maryland. His children with Olgivanna were: Svetlana Peters (1917–1946, adopted daughter of Olgivanna) was a musician who died in an automobile accident with her son Daniel. After Svetlana's death her other son, Brandoch Peters (1942– ), was raised by Frank and Olgivanna. Svetlana's widower, William Wesley Peters, was later briefly married to Svetlana Alliluyeva, the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. William Wesley Peters served as chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation from 1985 to 1991. Iovanna Lloyd Wright (1925–2015) was an artist and musician. Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Wasmuth Portfolio) (1910) An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1939) In the Cause of Architecture: Essays by Frank Lloyd Wright for Architectural Record 1908–1952 (1987) Visions of Wright: Photographs by Farrell Grehan, Introduction by Terence Riley ISBN 0-8212-2470-0 (1997) Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1889–1909 Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1894 Frank Thomas House, Oak Park, Illinois, 1901 Ward Winfield Willits Residence, and Gardener's Cottage and Stables, Highland Park, Illinois, 1901 Dana–Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois, 1902 Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, New York, 1903 (demolished, 1950) Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York, 1903–1905 Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904 Dr. G.C. Stockman House, Mason City, Iowa, 1908 Edward E. Boynton House, Rochester, New York, 1908 Frederick C. Robie Residence, Chicago, Illinois, 1909 Park Inn Hotel, the last standing Wright designed hotel, Mason City, Iowa, 1910 Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911 & 1925 Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois, 1913 (demolished, 1929) Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence), Los Angeles, 1919–1921 Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1923 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1923 (demolished, 1968; entrance hall reconstructed at Meiji Mura near Nagoya, Japan, 1976) Westhope (Richard Lloyd Jones Residence, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1929 Malcolm Willey House 1934, Minneapolis, Minnesota Fallingwater (Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Residence), Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1935–1937 Johnson Wax Headquarters, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936 First Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1936–1937 Usonian homes, various locations, 1930s–1950s Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1937 Wingspread, Herbert F. Johnson Residence in Wind Point, Wisconsin, 1937 Pope–Leighey House, Alexandria, Virginia, 1941 Child of the Sun, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1941–1958, site of the largest collection of the architect's work First Unitarian Society of Madison, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, 1947 V. C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, 1948 Kenneth and Phyllis Laurent House, Rockford, Illinois, only home Wright designed to be handicapped accessible, 1951 Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952–1956 Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1954 Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956–1961 Kentuck Knob, Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, 1956 Marshall Erdman Prefab Houses, various locations, 1956–1960 Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957–1966 R. W. Lindholm Service Station, Cloquet, Minnesota, 1958 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1956–1959 Gammage Memorial Auditorium, Tempe, Arizona, 1959–1964 Richard Bock Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy Frank Lloyd Wright-Prairie School of Architecture Historic District George Mann Niedecken List of Frank Lloyd Wright works List of Frank Lloyd Wright works by location Jaroslav Joseph Polivka Roman brick The 20th-century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (UNESCO World Heritage site) Category:Frank Lloyd Wright buildings Hoffmann, Donald. Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. ISBN 0-486-28364-X Kienitz, John Fabian. "Fifty-two years of Frank Lloyd Wright's progressivism, 1893–1945". Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 29, no. 1 (September 1945):61–71. McCarter, Robert (ed.). Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991. ISBN 1-878271-26-1 Meehan, Patrick, ed. Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1987. ISBN 0-471-84509-4 Rosenbaum, Alvin. Usonia : Frank Lloyd Wright's Design for America. Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1993. ISBN 0-89133-201-4 Sergeant, John. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1984. ISBN 0-8230-7178-2 Wright, Frank Lloyd (1947). Heywood, Robert B. (ed.). The Works of the Mind: The Architect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. OCLC 752682744. Wright, Frank Lloyd. "In the Cause of Architecture", Architectural Record, March 1908. Reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1: 1894–1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1992. ISBN 0-8478-1546-3 Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House. New York: Horizon Press, 1954. Alofsin, Anthony. Frank Lloyd Wright: the Lost Years, 1910–1922: A Study of Influence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Alofsin, Anthony. Wright and New York: The Making of America's Architect. Yale University Press, 2019. Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1961. Friedland, Roger and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship. New York: Regan Books, 2006. ISBN 0-06-039388-2 Gill, Brendan. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Putnam, 1987. ISBN 0-399-13232-5 Huxtable, Ada Louise. Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2004. ISBN 0-670-03342-1 Nisbet, Earl. Taliesin Reflections: My Years Before, During, and After Living with Frank Lloyd Wright. Petaluma, Calif.: Meridian Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9778951-0-6 Russell, Virginia L. "You Dear Old Prima Donna: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen", Landscape Journal, 20.2 (2001): 141–155. Seckel, Harry. "Frank Lloyd Wright". The North American Review, vol. 246, no. 1 (1938): 48–64. Secrest, Meryle. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-394-56436-7 Treiber, Daniel. Frank Lloyd Wright. 2nd ed. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7643-8697-9 Twombly, Robert C. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1979. ISBN 0-471-03400-2 Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943. Wright, Iovanna Lloyd. Architecture: Man in Possession of His Earth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Wright, John Lloyd. My Father Who Is On Earth. New York: G.P. Putnam's sons, 1946. ISBN 0-8093-1749-4 The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright – Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Frank Lloyd Wright – American Architect Clearly, Richard. Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward. Skira Rizzoli, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8478-3263-7 Betsky, Aaron, Gideon Fink Shapiro, Andrew Pielage. 50 Lessons to Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright: Rizzoli, 2021. ISBN 978-0-8478-6536-9 Aguar, Charles and Berdeana Aguar. Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright's Landscape Designs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. ISBN 0-07-140953-X Blake, Peter. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1964. Fell, Derek. The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright. London: Frances Lincoln, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7112-2967-9 Heinz, Thomas A. Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide. Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-2244-8 Hildebrand, Grant. The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. ISBN 0-295-97005-7 Larkin, David and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks. New York: Rizzoli, 1993. ISBN 0-8478-1715-6 Levine, Neil. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-03371-4 Lind, Carla. Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995. ISBN 0-87654-468-5 McCarter, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright. London: Phaidon Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7148-3148-4 Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867–1959: Building for Democracy. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004. ISBN 3-8228-2757-6 Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks and Peter Gössel (eds.). Frank Lloyd Wright: The Complete Works. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. ISBN 978-3-8228-5770-0 Riley, Terence and Peter Reed (eds.). Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. ISBN 0-87070-642-X Smith, Kathryn. Frank Lloyd Wright: America's Master Architect. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. ISBN 0-7892-0287-5 Storrer, William Allin. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 0-226-77620-4 Storrer, William Allin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 0-226-77621-2 Lind, Carla. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses. San Francisco: Promegranate Artbooks, 1994. ISBN 1-56640-998-5 Toker, Franklin. Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House. New York: Alford A. Knopf, 2003. ISBN 1-4000-4026-4 Whiting, Henry, II. At Nature's Edge: Frank Lloyd Wright's Artist Studio. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-87480-877-3 Boyle, T. Coraghessan (2009). The women: a novel. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-02041-6. OCLC 233548516. Frank Lloyd Wright at archINFORM Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation official website Guide to the Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright 1950 May 16 Taliesin Preservation, stewards of Wright's home Taliesin The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives Archived December 21, 2018, at the Wayback Machine at Columbia University Frank Lloyd Wright documents at the Wisconsin Historical Society Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust – FLW Home and Studio, Robie House Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program Frank Lloyd Wright – PBS documentary by Ken Burns and resources Frank Lloyd Wright. Designs for an American Landscape 1922–1932 Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey Frank Lloyd Wright – Famous Interior Designers Archived April 17, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Complete list of Wright buildings by location Archived April 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Sullivan, Wright, Prairie School, & Organic Architecture Audio interview with Martin Filler on Frank Lloyd Wright from The New York Review of Books Frank Lloyd Wright and Quebec Frank Lloyd Wright Archived January 19, 2013, at the Wayback Machine interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview recorded September 1 & 28, 1957 Interactive Map of Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings, created in the Harvard WorldMap Platform Map of the Frank Lloyd Wright works – Wikiartmap, the art map of the public space Archived November 4, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Fay Jones and Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture Comes to Arkansas digital exhibit, University of Arkansas Libraries Frank Lloyd Wright's Personal Manuscripts and Letters Passive Solar Hemi-Cycle Home in Hawaii, designed in 1954, built in 1995; only Wright home in Hawaii. Interactive Tour. Taylor A. Woolley Papers at University of Utah Digital Library, Marriott Library Special Collections Wright's Tokaido – FLW's annotated Hiroshige album – documentary at hiroshige.org.uk
2. Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924)
With an HPI of 72.15, Louis Sullivan is the 2nd most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 53 different languages.
Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism." He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School. Along with Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson, Sullivan is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture." The phrase "form follows function" is attributed to him, although the idea was theorised by Viollet le Duc who considered that structure and function in architecture should be the sole determinants of form. In 1944, Sullivan was the second architect to posthumously receive the AIA Gold Medal.
3. Richard Meier (b. 1934)
With an HPI of 65.53, Richard Meier is the 3rd most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 49 different languages.
Richard Meier (born October 12, 1934) is an American abstract artist and architect, whose geometric designs make prominent use of the color white. A winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984, Meier has designed several iconic buildings including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and San Jose City Hall. In 2018, some of Meier's employees accused him of sexual assault, which led to him resigning from his firm in 2021.
4. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
With an HPI of 64.55, Buckminster Fuller is the 4th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 71 different languages.
Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity". Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983. Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. In 1960, he was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal from The Franklin Institute. He was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, on the occasion of the 50-year reunion of his Harvard class of 1917 (from which he was expelled in his first year). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. The same year, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member. He became a full Academician in 1970, and he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects the same year. Also in 1970, Fuller received the title of Master Architect from Alpha Rho Chi (APX), the national fraternity for architecture and the allied arts. In 1976, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1977, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan.
5. Robert Venturi (1925 - 2018)
With an HPI of 63.68, Robert Venturi is the 5th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 46 different languages.
Robert Charles Venturi Jr. (June 25, 1925 – September 18, 2018) was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings, and teaching have also contributed to the expansion of discourse about architecture. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991; the prize was awarded to him alone, despite a request to include his equal partner, Scott Brown. Subsequently, a group of women architects attempted to get her name added retroactively to the prize, but the Pritzker Prize jury declined to do so. Venturi coined the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi lived in Philadelphia with Denise Scott Brown. He is the father of James Venturi, founder and principal of ReThink Studio.
6. Minoru Yamasaki (1912 - 1986)
With an HPI of 62.16, Minoru Yamasaki is the 6th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.
Minoru Yamasaki (山崎 實, Yamasaki Minoru, December 1, 1912 – February 6, 1986) was a Japanese-American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of "New Formalism". During his three-decade career, he and his firm designed over 250 buildings. His firm, Yamasaki & Associates, closed on December 31, 2009.
7. Philip Johnson (1906 - 2005)
With an HPI of 60.89, Philip Johnson is the 7th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 57 different languages.
Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect who designed modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York City, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; the Sculpture Garden of New York City's Museum of Modern Art; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks. His January 2005 obituary in The New York Times described his works as being "widely considered among the architectural masterpieces of the 20th century". In 1930, Johnson became the first director of the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he arranged for visits by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe, after he fled Nazi Germany. In 1932, he organized with Henry-Russell Hitchcock the first exhibition dedicated to modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, which gave name to the subsequent movement known as International Style. In 1934, Johnson resigned his position at the museum. During the 1930s, Johnson became an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler, openly praised the Nazi Party, and espoused antisemitic views. He wrote for Social Justice and Examiner, where he published an admiring review of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In 1939, as a correspondent for Social Justice, he witnessed Hitler's invasion of Poland, which he later described as "a stirring spectacle". In 1941, after the U.S. entered the war, Johnson abruptly quit journalism, organizing anti-Fascist league at Harvard Design School. He was investigated by the FBI, and was eventually cleared for military service. He evaded indictment and jail, according to some critics, because of his social connections. Years later he would refer to these activities as "the stupidest thing I ever did [which] I never can atone for". In 1978, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In 1979, he was the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Today his skyscrapers are prominent features in the skylines of New York, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Madrid, and other cities. Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, the son of a lawyer, Homer Hosea Johnson (1862–1960), and the former Louisa Osborn Pope (1869–1957), a niece of Alfred Atmore Pope and a first cousin of Theodate Pope Riddle. He had an older sister, Jeannette, and a younger sister, Theodate. He was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam. His ancestors include the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He grew up in New London, Ohio. He had a stutter and was diagnosed with cyclothymia. He attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, then studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University where he focused on learning Greek, philology, history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Upon completing his studies in 1930, he made a series of trips to Europe, particularly Germany, where his family had a summer house. He visited the landmarks of classical and Gothic architecture, and joined Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a prominent architectural historian, who was introducing Americans to the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other modernists. In 1928, he met German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition. Johnson had a substantial fortune, largely due to his father's successful investment in Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America. With this fortune, in 1930 he financed the new architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1932 he was named its curator. As curator he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe. In 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. The show and their simultaneously published book International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922, published in 1932, played a seminal role in introducing modern architecture to the American public. When the rise of the Nazis in Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany, Johnson helped arrange for them to come to work in the United States. He created a small organization called the Gray Shirts, styled after the Nazi Brownshirts. In December 1934, Johnson abruptly left the Museum of Modern Art and began pursuing a career in journalism and politics. He first became a supporter of Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana. He tried and failed to recruit Long to join the National Party, which he founded. Johnson unsuccessfully ran for representative of New London in the Ohio state legislature. After Long was assassinated in 1935, Johnson became a correspondent for Social Justice, the newspaper of the radical-populist and anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin. Johnson traveled to Germany and Poland as a correspondent, where he wrote admiringly about the Nazis. In Social Justice, Johnson expressed, as The New York Times later reported, "more than passing admiration for Hitler". In the summer of 1932 Johnson attended one of the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and saw Hitler for the first time. Years later he would describe the event to his biographer, Franz Schulze: "You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd". He told of being thrilled at the sight of "all those blond boys in black leather" marching past the Führer.: 89–90 Sponsored by the German government, he traveled on a press tour which covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. Schulze dismissed these early political activities as inconsequential, concluding they merited "little more substantial attention than they have gained" and his politics "were driven as much by an unconquerable esthetic impulse as by fascist philosophy or playboy adventurism".: 144, 146 In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who had recently fled from Nazi Germany. In 1941, Johnson designed and built his first building, a house at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house, strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, has a wall around the lot which merges with the structure. It was used by Johnson to host social events and was eventually submitted as his graduate thesis; he sold the house after the war, and it was purchased by Harvard in 2010 and restored by 2016. In 1942, while still a student of the architecture school, Johnson tried to enlist with Naval Intelligence, and then for a federal job, but was rejected both times. In 1943, after his graduation from Harvard, he was drafted to the Army and was sent to Fort Ritchie, Maryland, to interrogate German prisoners of war. He was investigated by the FBI for his involvement with the German government, Coughlin and Lawrence Dennis, an American fascist economist, and was cleared for continued military service. After the trial of Dennis and his collaborators, Johnson was relieved of his interrogation duties and transferred to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he spent the rest of his military service doing routine duties. In 1946, after he completed his schooling and his military service, Johnson returned to the Museum of Modern Art as a curator and writer. At the same time, he began working to establish his architectural practice. He built a small house, influenced by the work of Mies, in Sagaponack, Long Island. In 1947, he published the first monograph in English on the architecture of Mies. In 1947, he curated the first exhibition of modern architecture of the Museum of Modern Art including a model of the glass Farnsworth House of Mies. In 1949, he began building a new residence, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, that was completed in 1949. It was clearly influenced by Farnsworth House of Mies, an influence which Johnson never denied, but looked quite different. The Glass House is a 56-foot by 32-foot glass rectangle, sited at the edge of a crest on Johnson's estate overlooking a pond. The building's sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel; the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground but sits 10 inches above. The interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling. The New York Times described it in 2005 as "one of the 20th century's greatest residential structures. "Like all of Johnson's early work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal statement; calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle." Johnson continued to add to the Glass House estate during each period of his career. He added a small pavilion with columns by the lake in 1963, an art gallery set into a hillside in 1965, a postmodern sculpture gallery with a glass roof in 1970; a castle-like library with a rounded tower in 1980; and a concrete block tower dedicated to his friend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet; a chain-link "ghost house" dedicated to Frank Gehry. After completing the Glass House, he completed two more houses in New Canaan in a style similar to the Glass House; the Hodgson House (1951) and the Wiley House (1953). In New York City, He designed two major modernist additions to the Museum of Modern Art; a new annex, and, to complement it, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (1953) In 1954–56, he made the pro bono design for Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel, a synagogue for a conservative Jewish congregation in Port Chester, New York. It had a simple interior and a ceiling of curving plaster panels. In 1957, Johnson designed the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel at the invitation of Shimon Peres. Johnson joined Mies van der Rohe as the architect of record (Mies did not have NY license) for the 39-story Seagram Building (1956). Johnson was pivotal in steering the commission towards Mies by working with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. The commission resulted in the iconic bronze-and-glass tower on Park Avenue. The building was designed by Mies, and the interiors of the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants (later redesigned), as well as office furniture were designed by Johnson. In December 1955, the city of New York denied an architect's permit to Mies. He moved back to Chicago and put Johnson fully in charge of construction. Mies returned in late 1956 and finished the building. In 1989, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Seagram's exterior, lobby, and The Four Seasons Restaurant as official city landmarks. In 2006, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Throughout the 1960s, Johnson continued to create in the vocabulary of the modernist style, designing geometrical theatres, a monastery, art galleries and gardens. The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (1960) is a good example of his work in the period; it is supported by eight external ferro-concrete piers, or two on each side. The exterior structural members are clad in bronze and "black" Canadian granite. The windowless cube is set above the office areas, which recessed in a dry moat, giving a "floating" effect. A model of the building was exhibited in the United States Pavilion at the Brussels' World's Fair of 1958,as an example of the new trends in American architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. Another major project of the period was the Atrium of the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theatre, the home of the New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center in New York. In 1967, Johnson entered a new phase of his career, founding a partnership with architect John Burgee. He began to design office building complexes for large corporations. The most prominent of these was Pennzoil Place (1970–76) in Houston, Texas. The two towers of Pennzoil Place have sloping roofs covering the top seven floors and are trapezoidal in form, planned to create two large triangual areas on the site, which are occupied with glass-covered lobbies designed like greenhouses. This idea was widely copied in skyscrapers in other cities. The new building of the Boston Public Library (1972), known as the Johnson building, adjoins the original Boston library built in the 19th century by the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White. Johnson harmonised his building with the original landmark by using similar proportions and the same pink Milford granite. In the late 1970s, Johnson combined architecture and landscape architecture to create two imaginative civic gardens. The Fort Worth Water Gardens opened in 1974, is an urban landscape where visitors experience water in distinct ways. The gardens cover 4.3-acres (1.7 hectare), and comprise three very different kinds of water features; One offers a quiet meditation pool, surrounded with cypress trees and high walls, with a thin sheet of water cascading downward to the pool, making the sound of a rain shower. The second pool is an aerating pool with multiple illuminated spray fountains, beneath a grove of oak trees. The third fountain is the Active Pool, which challenges fit visitors to walk down 38 feet (12 meters) to the pool at the bottom, with water cascading all around them. In 1977, Johnson completed a much quieter garden in Dallas, Thanks-Giving Square. It features a non-denominational chapel in a spiral form, a meditation garden and cascading fountains, tucked between buildings in the center of the city. In 1980, Johnson and Burgee completed a cathedral in a dramatic new style: the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, is a soaring glass megachurch originally built for the Reverend Robert H. Schuller. The interior can seat 2,248 persons. It takes the form of a four-pointed star, with free-standing balconies in three points and the chancel in the fourth. The cathedral is covered with more than ten thousand rectangular pieces of glass. The Glass panels are not bolted, but glued to the structure, with a silicon based glue, to give it greater ability to resist Southern California earthquakes. Johnson and Burgee designed it to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 8.0. The tower was added in 1990. The cathedral quickly became a Southern California landmark, but its costs helped drive the church into debt. When the church declared bankruptcy in 2012, it was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange and became the Roman Catholic cathedral for Orange County. Working with John Burgee, Johnson did not confine himself to a single style, and was comfortable mixing elements of modernism and postmodernism. For the Cleveland Play House, he built a romanesque brick structure; His skyscrapers in the 1980s were clad in granite and marble, and usually had some feature borrowed from historic architecture. In New York he designed the Museum of Television and Radio, (now the Paley Center for Media) (1991). In 1982, working in collaboration with John Burgee, he finished one of his most famous buildings, 550 Madison Avenue, (first known as AT&T Building, then the Sony building before taking its present name). Built between 1978 and 1982, it is a skyscraper with an eight-story high arched entry and a split pediment at the top which resembles an enormous piece of 18th-century Chippendale furniture. It was not the first work of Postmodern architecture, as Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry had already built smaller scale postmodern buildings, and Michael Graves had completed the Portland Building (1980–82) in Portland, Oregon, two years earlier; But the building's Manhattan location, size and originality made it the most famous and recognizable example of postmodern architecture. It was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2018. Between 1979 and 1984, Johnson and Burgee built PPG Place the postmodern headquarters of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. It is a complex of six buildings within three city blocks, covering five and a half acres. The centerpiece is the forty-story tower, One PPG Place,which has a crown of spires at the corners which suggest the neogothic tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. During the 1980s Johnson and Burgee completed a series of other notable postmodern landmarks. The TC Energy Center (Formerly Republic Bank Center, later, Bank of America Center), in Houston (1983), was the first postmodern skyscraper in the Houston skyline. Fifty-six Stories high, it has two setbacks creating what appear to be three different buildings, one against the other. The Three triangular gables were inspired by Flemish Renaissance architecture. The interior and exterior are covered with rough-textured red granite, which also covers the surrounding sidewalks. The new building for the Hines College of Architecture (1985) of the University of Houston paid homage to forms drawn from earlier periods of architectural history, using modern materials, construction methods and scale. The facade of the Hines building resembles, on a larger scale, the neoclassic facades of the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. 400 West Market (1993), in Louisville, Kentucky is a thirty-five story office tower built of reinforced concrete rather than the typical steel. It is topped by a concrete cupola, a vestige of the building's original owner and builder, Capital Holding. In 1986, Johnson and Burgee had moved their offices into one of their new buildings, the elliptical Lipstick Building at 885 Third Avenue in New York, nicknamed because of its resemblance to the color and shape of a stick of lipstick. A feud was beginning between the two architects, with Burgee demanding greater recognition. As their business flourished and number of clients grew, the feud between Burgee and Johnson continued to grow. In 1988, the firm's name was changed to John Burgee Architects with Johnson as the "design consultant". In 1991, Johnson responded by establishing his own firm. The feud ended badly for Burgee; he was saddled with all of the debts of the firm, while Johnson no longer had any responsibility. Burgees was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy, and to retire, while Johnson continued to get commissions. After four years as a solo practitioner, Johnson invited Alan Ritchie to join him as a partner. Ritchie had been a partner for many years in the Johnson-Burgee office and was the partner-in-charge of the AT&T building and the 190 South LaSalle office building, a skyscraper designed as an homage to the demolished Masonic Temple of Chicago. In 1994, they formed the new practice of Philip Johnson-Alan Ritchie Architects. During the next ten years, they worked closely together and explored new directions in architecture, designing buildings as sculptural objects. The Gate of Europe in Madrid (1989 - 1996) was originally a collaboration with Burgee, and one of his rare works in Europe. It features two office buildings leaning toward each other, the first example of this style, which spread to America. The towers are twenty-six stories each, and both lean by 15 degrees from vertical. 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta was a project begun with Burgee. It is composed of two fifty-story towers joined, and crowned with two classical pavilions. The Comerica Tower (1991-1993) was also begun with Burgee. Like their earlier Postmodern works, it featured elements borrowed from historical architecture, particularly the triangular gables, borrowed from Renaissance Flemish architecture. It is the second tallest building in the state of Michigan. The Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas (1992) is notable late work. The design includes a domed chapel, a campanile, and a mediation garden, a labyrinth. Its structure is combination of the basic forms; a cube, a sphere, and a plane. The cube contains the worship area, beneath a semi-sphere, which is presented as the symbolic opening to heaven. The vertical rectangular granite plane divides the church and opens the chapel to light. During daytime the interior is lit entirely with natural light. In 1995, Johnson added a postmodern element to his own residence, the Glass House. This was a new entry pavilion in a sculptural form, which he called the "Monsta", or "Monster". Other late works include the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the Habitable Sculpture (a 26-story apartment tower in lower Manhattan); The Children's Museum in Guadalajara, Mexico, and The Chrysler Center. The Urban Glass House in lower Manhattan was one of last designs with Alan Ritchie, and was not completed after Johnson's death. It is a condominium building in lower Manhattan whose form was inspired by Johnson's most famous early work, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The final building he designed with Richie was the Pennsylvania Academy of Music building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was completed in 2008, three years after his death. In 1978, Johnson was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In 1979, he became the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize the most prestigious international architectural award. In 1991, Johnson received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Johnson was gay. He came out publicly in 1993, and was regarded as "the best-known openly gay architect in America". In 1934, Philip Johnson began his first serious relationship with Jimmie Daniels, a cabaret singer. The relationship lasted one year. Johnson died in his sleep at his Glass House retreat on January 25, 2005, at the age of ninety-eight. His partner of 45 years, David Whitney, died later that year at age 66. Johnson was among the public figures at the core of the effort to save Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church, before it was dedicated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and subsequently became a New York State Historic Site. In his will Johnson left his residential compound to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is now open to the public. As an art collector Johnson had an eclectic eye. He supported avant-garde movements and young artists often before they became widely known. His collection of American art was strong in Abstract expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Neo-Dada, Color Field, Lyrical Abstraction, and Neo-Expressionism and he often donated important works from his collection to institutions like MoMA, and other important private museums and University collections like the Norton Simon Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University among many others. Johnson's publicly held archive, including architectural drawings, project records, and other papers up until 1964 are held by the Drawings and Archives Department of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Getty, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reviewing Franz Schulze's biography of Johnson, Kazys Varnelis wrote that "between 1932 and 1940, Johnson was an antisemite, fascist sympathizer, and active propagandist for the Nazi government." According to Varnelis, "Johnson makes no apologetic gesture toward his past behavior unless he is confronted by direct questioning, nothing even as paltry as an open letter accounting for and regretting his past actions and condemning the motives that led him to them". Johnson's activities included organizing political rallies for populist Huey Long; funding figures such as the right-wing agitator Joe McWilliams and his "Christian Mobilizers"; and writing for three periodicals, including Charles Coughlin's Social Justice, whose "almost every issue contained articles about the 'Jewish conspiracy' or about destructive economic forces led by figures with Jewish names". Because his family had a home in Germany and spent their summers there, Johnson traveled there frequently. As a Social Justice correspondent, he covered the huge Nazi rally at Nuremberg and the 1939 invasion of Poland with approval. The American correspondent William L. Shirer, traveling with him on the Nazi-sponsored press tour, labeled him in Berlin Diary, as "the American fascist" and suspected him of spying for the Germans. On the same tour, three weeks after Poland fell to the Nazis, Johnson, with Shirer, "was with German troops at the front as the guest of the Propaganda Ministry". He wrote to a friend that "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy... There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." In his Social Justice report on his trip to Poland, Johnson declared that the German victory amounted to an unmitigated triumph for the Polish people and that nothing in the war's outcome need concern Americans. Johnson went on to say that German forces had not significantly harmed Polish civilians, and said that "99 percent of the towns I visited since the war are not only intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers." He said reports of Nazi mistreatment of Poles was "misinformed". Referring to political developments in France, Johnson wrote in Social Justice that "Lack of leadership and direction in the state has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation's time of weakness—the Jews". In 1940 Johnson quit journalism and distanced himself from politics. In April 1942, on reports that Johnson might be working in Colonel Donovan's Office of the Coordinator of Information, the United States Assistant Attorney General James H. Rowe wrote to Director Hoover, saying, "I can think of no more dangerous man to have working in an agency which possesses so many military secrets." Johnson was later investigated by the FBI, but no charges were brought against him, and he was cleared for military service. Johnson was inducted into the U.S. Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1943, but controversy continued. His name arose again in the so-called "Great Sedition Trial" of 1944 through his former contacts in the 1930s with its main target, the former diplomat and economist Lawrence Dennis, who in the 1930s supported fascist economics as an alternative to capitalism. Dennis was charged with sedition, or advocating the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government, under the Smith Act. Johnson was accused of "close and steady contact" with Dennis in the spring of 1938, and providing financial support towards publishing Dennis's 1940 book The Dynamics of War and Revolution. Johnson had already testified in 1942 in the government case against another former associate, the German poet and journalist George Sylvester Viereck in 1942. The ongoing federal case against Dennis, an FBI investigation, and a congressional investigation investigated about 30 people, including Johnson, but in the end he was not charged. Johnson was formally asked to appear at trial as a witness, and—by his own account—was speaking to prosecutor O. John Rogge, but after Judge Edward C. Eicher died of a heart attack a mistrial was declared and the case was dropped. In 1993, when asked by Vanity Fair about his past political views, he said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity. ... I don't know how you expiate guilt." In 1956, he donated a design for Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York. Architecture professor Anat Geva observed in a paper that "all critics agree that his design of the Port Chester Synagogue can be considered as his attempt to ask for forgiveness." He discussed his trips to Germany and his infatuation with fascism in a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose. He said, "It was the stupidest thing I ever did, and I never forgive myself and I never can atone for it. There's nothing I can do... That's been torture to me ever since." He admitted to Rose that, while he had "difficulty" with Franklin D. Roosevelt because of his inability to achieve what he set out, he "worshiped the man" and "voted for him four times." Replying to Rose asking if he liked "strong figures", he said "Sure do. I like good architects that are strong, like Gehry." In 2018, Nikil Saval wrote in The New Yorker that "Johnson would later describe Hitler as 'a spellbinder'; in 1964, well after he had been forced to abjure his Nazi past, he insisted in letters that Hitler was 'better than Roosevelt.'" In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the wave of place name changes that followed, the Johnson Study Group—a group of 40 architects, designers, and educators—approached the Museum of Modern Art asking that honors given to Johnson be removed from public view, citing his "commitment to white supremacy", spread of Nazi publications, involvement with American fascist politics, and "effective segregation" of the architectural collection at the museum. "When it comes to racist urban planning policies in the 20th century and a deeply Eurocentric antiblack archive of American architecture," V. Mitch McEwen said, "MoMA under white supremacist Philip Johnson did largely create the problem. It innovated white supremacy in architecture ... where under his leadership not a single work by any Black architect or designer was included." In a 2020 article in Elle Decor magazine, articles editor Charles Curkin asked Pritzker Prize laureate Balkrishna Doshi if the architecture world was due for a reckoning, citing the Museum of Modern Art's chief architecture and design curatorship still being named after Johnson. Doshi replied that "Life itself is due for a reckoning, and architects must give respect to life." In 2020, Johnson's name was dropped from the Harvard University Philip Johnson Thesis House, which was designed by Johnson. Sarah Whiting, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, announced the change on December 5, 2020, citing Johnson's "widely documented white supremacist views and activities." "I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original. As Mies van der Rohe said, 'I don't want to be original. I want to be good.'" "Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating." "Everybody should design their own home. I'm against architects designing homes. How do I know that you want to live in a picture-window Colonial? It's silly, but you might want to. Who am I to say?" "Architecture is the arrangement of space for excitement". "Storms in this house (The Glass House) are horrendous but thrilling. Glass shatters. Danger is one of the greatest things to use in architecture." "A room is only as good as you feel when you're in it". "Merely that a building works is not sufficient." "We still have a monumental architecture. To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it." Johnson is mentioned (along with fellow architect Richard Rogers) in the song "Thru These Architect's Eyes" on the album Outside (1995) by David Bowie. He appears in Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, a 2003 documentary about Kahn's father, Louis Kahn. Philip Johnson's Glass House, along with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, was the subject of Sarah Morris's 2010 film Points on a Line. Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Roheʼs controversial 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, and Chicagoʼs Newberry Library. List of works by Philip Johnson Fascist movement in the United States Schulze, Franz (1996). Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-74058-4. Retrieved May 15, 2018. Bony, Anne (2012). L'Architecture Moderne (in French). Larousse. ISBN 978-2-03-587641-6. Taschen, Aurelia; Taschen, Balthazar (2016). L'Architecture Moderne de A à Z (in French). Bibliotheca Universalis. ISBN 978-3-8365-5630-9. Prina, Francesca; Demaratini, Demartini (2006). Petite encyclopédie de l'architecture (in French). Solar. ISBN 2-263-04096-X. Hopkins, Owen (2014). Les styles en architecture- guide visuel (in French). Dunod. ISBN 978-2-10-070689-1. De Bure, Gilles (2015). Architecture contemporaine- le guide (in French). Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-134385-6. Lamster, Mark (2018). The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-12643-4. Watkin, David (1986). A History of Western Architecture. London: Barrie and Jenkins. ISBN 0-7126-1279-3. Lacayo, Richard (June 28, 2007). Splendor in The Glass. Time. Retrieved March 2021. Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect, 1997 documentary. Retrieved March 2021 "Extending the Legacy" Alexandra Lange article on the preservation of the Glass House, from the November 2006 issue of Metropolis magazine. Philip Johnson article at Great Buildings Online. Retrieved September 27, 2003. Philip Johnson bio on the Pritzker Architecture Prize website. Retrieved September 27, 2003. Philip Johnson and Charlie Rose. Retrieved March 2021. Heyer, Paul, ed. (1966). Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America, p. 279. New York: Walker and Company. One hour interview with Charlie Rose (July 8, 1996) Retrieved March 2021 Other interviews with or about Philip Johnson on Charlie Rose at Google Video Retrieved March 2021 Tomkins, Calvin (May 15, 1977). "Forms Under Light" (Profile of Philip Johnson).The New Yorker. Jenkins, Stover, et al. The Houses of Philip Johnson, New York: Abbeville Publishing Group (Abbeville Press, Inc.), 2001. Obituary Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine Philip Johnson architectural drawings, 1943-1994 (bulk 1943-1970).Held by the Department of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. The Architecture of Philip Johnson "Philip Johnson Biography and Interview". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement. Finding aid for Philip Johnson architectural projects at the Getty Research Institute Finding aid for Philip Johnson papers at the Getty Research Institute Philip Johnson at IMDb
8. Peter Eisenman (b. 1932)
With an HPI of 60.27, Peter Eisenman is the 8th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.
Peter David Eisenman (born August 11, 1932) is an American architect, writer, and professor. Considered one of the New York Five, Eisenman is known for his high modernist and deconstructive designs, as well as for his authorship of several architectural books. His work has won him several awards, including the Wolf Prize in Arts.
9. William Le Baron Jenney (1832 - 1907)
With an HPI of 57.17, William Le Baron Jenney is the 9th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 34 different languages.
William Le Baron Jenney (September 25, 1832 – June 14, 1907) was an American architect and engineer known for building the first skyscraper in 1884. In 1998, Jenney was ranked number 89 in the book 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium.
10. Charles Eames (1907 - 1978)
With an HPI of 57.06, Charles Eames is the 10th most famous American Architect. His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.
Charles Ormond Eames Jr. (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978) was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. In professional partnership with his spouse Ray Kaiser Eames, he made groundbreaking contributions in the fields of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.
People
Pantheon has 39 people classified as American architects born between 1763 and 1986. Of these 39, 9 (23.08%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living American architects include Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, and Adrian Smith. The most famous deceased American architects include Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Buckminster Fuller. As of April 2024, 6 new American architects have been added to Pantheon including John Hejduk, Richard Morris Hunt, and Max Abramovitz.
Living American Architects
Go to all Rankings
Richard Meier
1934 - Present
HPI: 65.53
Peter Eisenman
1932 - Present
HPI: 60.27
Adrian Smith
1944 - Present
HPI: 55.94
Nicholas Negroponte
1943 - Present
HPI: 55.77
Thom Mayne
1944 - Present
HPI: 52.03
Steven Holl
1947 - Present
HPI: 51.83
Robert A. M. Stern
1939 - Present
HPI: 43.27
Maya Lin
1959 - Present
HPI: 41.94
Alexis Sablone
1986 - Present
HPI: 0.00
Deceased American Architects
Go to all RankingsFrank Lloyd Wright
1867 - 1959
HPI: 73.01
Louis Sullivan
1856 - 1924
HPI: 72.15
Buckminster Fuller
1895 - 1983
HPI: 64.55
Robert Venturi
1925 - 2018
HPI: 63.68
Minoru Yamasaki
1912 - 1986
HPI: 62.16
Philip Johnson
1906 - 2005
HPI: 60.89
William Le Baron Jenney
1832 - 1907
HPI: 57.17
Charles Eames
1907 - 1978
HPI: 57.06
Cedric Gibbons
1893 - 1960
HPI: 54.75
Kevin A. Lynch
1918 - 1984
HPI: 54.36
Sixto Durán Ballén
1921 - 2016
HPI: 53.39
Charles Jencks
1939 - 2019
HPI: 52.10
Newly Added American Architects (2024)
Go to all Rankings
John Hejduk
1929 - 2000
HPI: 48.78
Richard Morris Hunt
1827 - 1895
HPI: 43.27
Max Abramovitz
1908 - 2004
HPI: 40.90
Marion Mahony Griffin
1871 - 1961
HPI: 39.84
Charles Bulfinch
1763 - 1844
HPI: 39.41
Alexis Sablone
1986 - Present
HPI: 0.00
Overlapping Lives
Which Architects were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Architects since 1700.
