Ten Designers/Architects

One thing that I found to be very interesting about researching designers was that many of these people were in some other art field before they became architects. It was so interesting to see how this played into their buildings as you could see the different disciplines in their buildings.
1) Frank Lloyd Wright was very good at involving his building with the site that it was placed. The sites were always taken into account when he designed the buildings. A perfect example of this is Falling Water. He made the building reflect the both the rocks and the water of the waterfall. The material his buildings were made out of also reflected the site. I think it is really cool that Wright designed the entire houses down to the doorknobs.
2) Frank Gehry is very different from Frank Lloyd Wright in that respect. While many of Gehry's designs are organic and dynamic and nature, the site of the buildings do not incorporate this aspect. After watching the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry I was able to really appreciate his sculptural-like designs much more than I think I would have had I not seen that document. One of the things that I may love even more than his actual buildings are his drawings. They are so rough and messy and yet the perfectly capture the essence of what he wants to show.
3) Le Corbusier. More than anything what I like about Le Corbusier is that he changed his name because he believed that anyone had the power to reinvent themselves. In addition to being a famous architect, Le Corbusier also was a brilliant furniture designer. interestingly enough, Le Corbusier came up with what he referred to in a book that he wrote that dealt with five points of architecture. Le Corbusier transacted these five points into reality when he built a house in Paris called the villa savoye.
4) Louis Kahn. Part of Kahn's preoccupation with architecture was incorporating human scale into the building. He, like Le Corbusier used concrete to build main parts of buildings. Among other things, he was interested in creating formal distinctions between served spaces and servant spaces which simply meant that he would use spaces such as stairwells as functional spaces.
5) Walter Gropius was a German architect who designed the Bauhaus which was a very innovative building for its time. This building introduced curtain walls or non load-bearing walls on steel frames. After the Bauhaus was shut down by Hitler for teaching "degenerist" art, he came to the United States where he had a very successful career.
6) Eliel Saarinen liked to build buildings that were the culmination of several different syles of art and architecture.
7) Albert Kahn developed a new style for building that had concrete instead of wood in factory walls and roofs.
8) Fumihiko Maki uses a lot of glass and metal in his buildings.
9) Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe is quoted for saying "less is more" and "God is in the details".
10) Aldo Rossi is well known not only for architecture but also for his theory and drawing skills. Rossi believed that cities had to be understood as a whole and that buildings had to be considered in this. He wrote several books that explain this concept.