Urbanism

Philip Johnson · 1984

Oscar Niemeyer · 1970

He didn’t make gardens—he made ecological arguments in gravel, water and leaf.

2010

A failed resettlement project that rewrote the rules of low-cost housing by rejecting industrial materials—and proving that failure can be more instructive than success.

Norman Foster · 1985

Thackara didn’t design things—he designed the conditions where design could matter for sustainability.

Laurie Baker didn’t design buildings — he designed responses to termites, monsoons and cow dung.

Harry Beck · 1931

A prototype that floated, functioned, then failed — not a model for replication, but a record of what happens when design answers urgency without infrastructure.

1970

1979

He designs for decay—and that’s why his gardens last.

2004

Architecture that refuses to choose between memory and function — it keeps the factory’s bones and carves new life into its floor.

2009

1991

Material literacy is not a metaphor — it is brick, hand, and demolition site.

Architecture is not about form — it’s about the functional relationships between behaviour and its environment.

Design is not about making things—it’s about making sense of what already exists.

Unbuilt architecture that built the future — by refusing to fix form before function, or authority before participation.

Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers · 1977

1981

Gustave Eiffel · 1887

Wright didn’t build houses—he built systems for living, constrained by philosophy, not physics.

Joseph Strauss · 1937

The International Style was not invented by architects — it was edited into existence by two men at MoMA in 1932.

Christiaanse treats urban form as a social contract—walkable, mixed, unstyled—but never proves it works beyond assertion.

Tange didn’t rebuild Hiroshima—he reoriented it, using columns, concrete, and an axis as instruments of moral geometry.

Architecture as fieldwork—not fix—but reading, prototyping, and collapsing.

A jury chose Costa’s sketch over detailed rivals — not for precision, but for scalability.

Adriano Olivetti · 1908

Norman Foster · 1999

Renzo Piano’s architecture is not about style — it’s about where you put the ducts.

Associated Architects

Mies van der Rohe & Philip Johnson · 1958

Gates doesn’t make art about place — he makes place into art, then turns it into infrastructure.