Mario Cucinella: a house printed from the earth it stands on
Massa Lombarda, 2021. A robotic arm prints a house of raw earth in about 200 hours, without a single brick laid by hand. Mario Cucinella, trained at Renzo Piano's practice, has spent thirty years building an architecture that starts from the environmental question — from China to Ghana to a field in Emilia-Romagna.
Denys Lasdun: the concrete cliff on the Thames
London, 1976. Terraces of exposed concrete descend toward the Thames like an artificial cliff. Denys Lasdun builds the Royal National Theatre, and Prince Charles calls it a nuclear power station: fifty years later, those same terraces are full of people.
Snøhetta: the opera you climb
Oslo, 2008. An opera house with no façade: a white marble roof that rises from the fjord and on which the city sits. Snøhetta, born in 1989 with the library of Alexandria, has made the relationship between building and landscape a trade.
Peter Eisenman: 2,711 blocks without meaning
Berlin, 2005. A memorial with no names, no symbols and no entrance: 2,711 concrete blocks on ground that undulates. Peter Eisenman, a theorist before a builder, brings to Berlin the idea that a building can be a grammar rather than a message.
Bernard Tschumi: the park without nature
A 55-hectare park designed as a system of points, lines and surfaces, with red cubes (the folies) laid out on a grid. Tschumi argues that architecture is what happens in space, not space itself.
Daniel Libeskind: building the void
The Jewish Museum in Berlin is a bolt of zinc crossed by voids that no visitor can occupy. Libeskind wins at forty-three without ever having built, and turns absence into architectural matter.
SANAA: the architecture that steps out of the way
A circular glass museum with no façade. An undulating concrete slab with no walls. Sejima and Nishizawa work by subtraction: every building is hundreds of study models to remove the last superfluous element.
Carlo Scarpa: detail as design
Scarpa did not draw buildings: he drew joints. The junction between two materials, between an old wall and a new floor. In forty years of career he built very little and changed everything.
Aldo Rossi: the analogous city
In 1966 he publishes “The Architecture of the City”. In a hundred and fifty pages he demolishes forty years of functionalist urbanism and proposes collective memory as the foundation of form.
Rem Koolhaas: the great empty space
1978: he publishes “Delirious New York” at just over thirty. Then he builds for twenty years. Then he writes “Junkspace” and theoretically demolishes what he had built.
Renzo Piano: lightness as a program
At the 1971 Pompidou the pipes are on the outside and coloured by function. At 80, Piano hides everything. The program does not change: understanding how the building works without seeing it.
Frank Gehry: titanium that dances
In 1978 Gehry remodels his own house in Santa Monica with industrial wire mesh and raw plywood panels. The neighbours protest. It is the moment he understands what he wants to do.
Tadao Ando: concrete as meditation
Ando's first work is a house where, to get from the kitchen to the bathroom, you have to cross the open courtyard. If it rains, you get wet. It is not a mistake: it is a program.
Zaha Hadid: form as movement
From 1983 to 2006 Hadid wins competitions that are never built. First woman Pritzker laureate in 2004. The MAXXI in Rome opens in 2010.
Norman Foster: transparent steel
The dome of the Reichstag in Berlin (1999) has a spiral ramp open to the public that overlooks the parliamentary chamber. It is an argument about democracy built in glass.
Peter Zumthor: atmosphere as design
Zumthor has a studio in Haldenstein, population 800. He has no website. He builds little. The Vals Thermal Baths took five years just to find out how to cut the stone.
Kengo Kuma: disappearing into the environment
Kuma's program: “erase architecture”. The Stone Museum in Tochigi is clad in local stone inclined at 45°. From a distance, you cannot see it.
Bjarke Ingels: practical utopia
BIG builds “hedonistically sustainable”. CopenHill is a waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on the roof. The additional cost: 10% of the total. The impact on public consensus: enormous.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha: humane Brutalism
The MuBE in São Paulo is a concrete block floating on four piers. Underneath is a public garden, not a car park. Mendes da Rocha says: give back the ground you occupy.
Wang Shu: the bricks of demolition
Wang Shu collects millions of bricks from demolished Chinese villages. He waits ten years before using them. The Hangzhou campus is the memory of what was destroyed to build it.
Álvaro Siza: white as a method
Matosinhos, 1958. Álvaro Siza — 25 years old, fresh out of school — designs his first work: the Leça de Palmeira swimming pools, wedged into the rocks of…
David Chipperfield: respect for history
Berlin, October 2009. David Chipperfield inaugurates the Neues Museum — a reconstruction of Friedrich August Stüler's museum, destroyed by Allied bombing…
Eduardo Souto de Moura: stone and landscape
Braga, 2003. Eduardo Souto de Moura — a student of Álvaro Siza — inaugurates the Braga Municipal Stadium: two concrete stands wedged into the granite…
Herzog & de Meuron: material as message
Basel, 1978. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron found their studio. They've been schoolmates since high school.
Jean Nouvel: light as material
Paris, 1987. Jean Nouvel inaugurates the Institut du Monde Arabe — a building with a façade of mechanical photoelectric diaphragms that open and close…
Rafael Moneo: memory as material
Mérida, 1986. Rafael Moneo inaugurates the Museo Nacional de Arte Romano — built above the city's Roman ruins.
Shigeru Ban: paper as structure
Kobe, January 17, 1995. The Great Hanshin Earthquake kills 6,434 people.
Steven Holl: the phenomenology of space
Seattle, 1997. Steven Holl inaugurates the Chapel of St. Ignatius — a university chapel where every light has a specific intention.
Sverre Fehn: the Nordic landscape as architecture
Hamar, Norway, 1973. Sverre Fehn inaugurates the Hedmark Museum — built inside and above the ruins of a thirteenth-century medieval palace.
Toyo Ito: lightness as a program
Yokohama, 1986. Toyo Ito installs the Tower of Winds — a cylinder clad in mirrored panels and lights that change in response to wind and ambient noise.…
Frequently asked questions
What is the "Bilbao effect" in architecture?
The phenomenon where a single iconic building — the original case is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), clad in titanium — relaunches an entire city's image and economy, pushing other administrations to commission spectacular architecture hoping to repeat the effect. Since then it's become a critical term, not just a descriptive one: many argue an isolated formal gesture doesn't actually solve deeper urban problems.
What is deconstructivist architecture?
An approach that deliberately fragments and destabilizes the clean geometric forms of Modernism — volumes that look exploded, non-orthogonal angles, surfaces that collide instead of aligning. Frank Gehry anticipates it in his own house in Santa Monica (1978, chain-link and plywood) even before the 1988 MoMA show that gave the movement its name.
Who are the most influential architects working today?
There's no definitive list, but names that have shaped recent decades in recognizable ways include Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando, Peter Zumthor, and Herzog & de Meuron — with very different paths and languages, from Ando's minimalism to Hadid's digital parametricism.
What is Parametricism?
A design approach that uses algorithms and variable parameters — not a fixed drawing — to generate complex, often curvilinear forms, optimized against specific structural or environmental criteria. It's made possible by digital modeling software and is associated above all with Zaha Hadid's studio.