Famous architects and their works: 30 names from Imhotep to Zaha Hadid, what each built and why it mattered

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Most buildings in history have no known architect, and the ones with names are the ones where a person changed what a building could be: Imhotep, who first built in stone; Brunelleschi, who made the dome of Florence without centering and rediscovered perspective; Palladio, whose villas became every country house and capitol in the English-speaking world; Wren, who rebuilt London; Frank Lloyd Wright, who made the American house; Le Corbusier and Mies, who made the modern city; and Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, who made the computer draw curves. The list below gives thirty, in order of time, with the one building to know for each, what they were trying to do, and where to see it, from the Villa Rotonda to the Guggenheim in Bilbao; all the buildings are in the Buildings by style collection and the styles they belong to are linked.

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

• Imhotep (about 2650 BC). Chancellor to the pharaoh Djoser, and the first architect whose name is known: the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first monumental building of cut stone in the world, six mastabas stacked to 62 m, with a walled complex of dummy buildings around it; deified as a god of medicine 2,000 years later. The story is in how the pyramids were built.
• Ictinus and Callicrates (5th century BC). The Parthenon, 447–438 BC, with Phidias in charge of the sculpture; the most perfect Doric temple, with its curved stylobate and leaning columns, in how the Parthenon was built.
• Apollodorus of Damascus (about 60–130). Trajan's architect: Trajan's Forum and Market in Rome, the bridge over the Danube of 1,135 m on twenty piers, and, possibly, the Pantheon, from which Hadrian is said to have had him killed for mocking the emperor's designs.
• Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus (6th century). Mathematicians who built Hagia Sophia in five years, 532–537, the first great dome on pendentives; in Hagia Sophia history.
• Abbot Suger (1081–1151). Not an architect but the client who invented Gothic: the choir of Saint-Denis of 1140–44, with the first rib vaults, pointed arches and walls of glass together, "the light that is God".
• Villard de Honnecourt (about 1230). The only medieval architect whose sketchbook survives, 33 sheets of plans, machines, figures and the elevation of Reims; the master masons of the cathedrals are otherwise names on a stone, Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil at Notre-Dame, Robert de Luzarches at Amiens.

Renaissance and Baroque

• Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). The dome of Florence Cathedral, 1420–36, built without centering; the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the first Renaissance building; the rediscovery of linear perspective; the first architect in the modern sense, who designed and left the building to others. In Renaissance architecture.
• Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). The theorist: "On the Art of Building" of 1452, the first architectural treatise since Vitruvius; the facade of Santa Maria Novella, the Tempio Malatestiano, Sant'Andrea in Mantua with the first triumphal-arch church front.
• Donato Bramante (1444–1514). The Tempietto of 1502, the perfect small classical building; the plan of St Peter's, 1506, the Greek cross under a dome that Michelangelo returned to.
• Michelangelo (1475–1564). The Laurentian Library and its stair, the Campidoglio, and the dome and apses of St Peter's from 1547; the sculptor who treated a building as a body, and the inventor of the giant order. In St Peter's Basilica facts.
• Andrea Palladio (1508–80). The Villa Rotonda, the Basilica in Vicenza, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice, and "The Four Books of Architecture" of 1570, from which England, Ireland, Russia and America learned their classicism: Chiswick, Monticello, the White House and every columned porch descend from him, and he is the most imitated architect in history.
• Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). St Peter's Square and its colonnade, the baldachin, the Cornaro Chapel with the Ecstasy of St Teresa, Sant'Andrea al Quirinale; the sculptor who made Baroque Rome a theatre. In Baroque architecture.
• Francesco Borromini (1599–1667). Bernini's rival: San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant'Ivo, the curving walls and the spiral lantern, the Baroque of geometry rather than of gold.
• Christopher Wren (1632–1723). St Paul's Cathedral, 1675–1710, and 51 City churches after the Great Fire of 1666, Greenwich Hospital, Hampton Court, and the Sheldonian; an astronomer who became the greatest English architect. "If you seek his monument, look around you", says his tomb.
• Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708). Versailles's Hall of Mirrors and garden front, the Invalides dome, the Place Vendôme; Louis XIV's architect and the maker of the French grand style.
• Balthasar Neumann (1687–1753). The Würzburg Residence and its staircase under Tiepolo's ceiling, and the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, the summit of German Rococo.

The 18th and 19th centuries

• Robert Adam (1728–92). Syon, Kedleston, Osterley and the Adam style of light neoclassical interiors, plaster, colour and furniture designed together, which crossed to Federal America.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Monticello, the Virginia State Capitol, the first temple-form public building since Rome, and the University of Virginia with its Rotunda; the president who made classicism the American style. In Neoclassical architecture.
• Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841). The Altes Museum, the Schauspielhaus and the Neue Wache in Berlin; Prussia's classicist and the teacher, through Mies, of modern Germany.
• A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52). The Houses of Parliament with Charles Barry, and the book "Contrasts" of 1836 that made Gothic a moral cause; the Gothic Revival in a person. In Victorian architecture.
• Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79). The restorer of Notre-Dame, Carcassonne, Vézelay and Pierrefonds, whose "Dictionary" explained Gothic as rational structure and taught the modernists; his spire is the one that fell in 2019.
• Joseph Paxton (1803–65). The Crystal Palace of 1851, a greenhouse of iron and glass 564 m long built in nine months from standard parts, the first prefabricated building and the ancestor of every glass box; he was a gardener.
• Louis Sullivan (1856–1924). The Wainwright Building, the Guaranty Building, the Carson Pirie Scott store, "form ever follows function" and the tall building as an artistic problem; Wright's master. In the first skyscraper.
• Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). The Sagrada Família, Park Güell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà; the architect who designed with hanging chains and built without straight lines. In Gaudí buildings in Barcelona.

The 20th century

• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). Fallingwater, the Robie House, the Guggenheim, Taliesin and the Usonian houses; the greatest American architect by the AIA's vote and the maker of the American house. In Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
• Walter Gropius (1883–1969). The Bauhaus at Dessau and the school itself, the Fagus factory, and Harvard's architecture department; the teacher of modernism. In Bauhaus architecture.
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). The Barcelona Pavilion, the Farnsworth House, the Seagram Building and Lake Shore Drive; "less is more" and the glass tower that every city has. In Mid-century modern architecture.
• Le Corbusier (1887–1965). The Villa Savoye, the Unité d'Habitation, Ronchamp, Chandigarh and the Carpenter Center; "a machine for living in", the five points of modern architecture, pilotis and the roof garden, and, through his followers, the concrete housing block and the tower in the park. In Brutalist architecture.
• Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). The Paimio Sanatorium, the Villa Mairea, Säynätsalo Town Hall and Finlandia Hall; the modernist of wood, brick and curves, and the humane one.
• Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012). Brasília, the cathedral, the congress and the palaces, and the Pampulha church; the curve as the line of Brazil, and a career of 104 years.
• Louis Kahn (1901–74). The Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Exeter Library and the parliament of Bangladesh; the poet of concrete, light and "what a brick wants to be".
• Jørn Utzon (1918–2008). The Sydney Opera House, 1957–73, and the shells that took fourteen years to build; he resigned in 1966 and never saw it finished.
• Philip Johnson (1906–2005). The Glass House, the Seagram Building's interiors with Mies, the AT&T Building with its Chippendale top; the man who named the International Style in 1932 and Postmodernism in 1978.
• I. M. Pei (1917–2019). The Louvre Pyramid, the East Building of the National Gallery, the Bank of China in Hong Kong, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha; geometry in glass and stone.
• Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. The Centre Pompidou of 1977, inside out; Piano's Shard, Rogers's Lloyd's of London; high-tech.
• Norman Foster (born 1935). The HSBC building in Hong Kong, the Reichstag dome, the Gherkin, the Millau Viaduct, Apple Park; the engineer's architect and the largest practice in the world.
• Frank Gehry (born 1929). The Guggenheim Bilbao of 1997, which made a museum save a city, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall; titanium curves drawn with aircraft software.
• Zaha Hadid (1950–2016). The MAXXI in Rome, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, the London Aquatics Centre, the Guangzhou Opera House; the first woman to win the Pritzker, in 2004, and the architect of flow.
• Tadao Ando (born 1941). The Church of the Light, the Water Temple, Naoshima; a former boxer, self-taught, and the master of concrete and silence.
• Herzog and de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels. The Bird's Nest and Tate Modern; the CCTV loop in Beijing; VIA 57 West; the present.

Versions and theories

• The greatest architect is Wright, or Palladio, or Brunelleschi. Wright by the AIA's vote of 1991 and by his effect on the house; Palladio by imitation, the most copied architect in history; Brunelleschi by invention; Michelangelo by everything. Lists disagree, and this one puts them in order of time.
• Architects design buildings alone. Every name above stands for an office, a client, engineers and builders; Wren had Hooke, Wright had Wesley Peters, Gehry has CATIA and 200 people. The name is the one on the drawing.
• Women are missing. Until the 20th century they were kept out of the profession: Julia Morgan, of Hearst Castle, was the first woman licensed in California in 1904 and built 700 buildings; Eileen Gray, Lina Bo Bardi, Denise Scott Brown, Kazuyo Sejima (Pritzker 2010), Hadid, and the partners uncredited beside husbands, Marion Mahony Griffin with Wright and Walter Burley Griffin among them.
• The Pritzker is the Nobel of architecture. Since 1979, and the list of winners, from Johnson to Gehry, Hadid, Piano, Foster, Ando, Sejima and Diébédo Francis Kéré in 2022, is the canon of the last fifty years.
• Le Corbusier ruined cities. His plan to demolish central Paris for towers, the Plan Voisin of 1925, and the housing blocks his followers built are blamed for the worst of the 20th-century city; Ronchamp and the Villa Savoye are on every list of its best buildings. Both are true.
• Famous means good. Famous means influential; Gaudí was mocked for a century, and the most admired building of the 19th century, the Paris Opéra, has an architect, Charles Garnier, whom few can name.

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