Santiago Calatrava: Drawing Across the Sky

Santiago Calatrava has built more than thirty bridges, and has designed transportation hubs in major cities around the world—including one at New York’s former World Trade Center site, shrouded in controversy and still unfinished—and public projects include an Olympic sports complex in Athens and an extension for the Milwaukee Art Museum. Many of his designs, …

Severely White: Fran Silvestre’s Minimalist Houses and Wind Tower

Based in Valencia, Spain, Fran Silvestre Arquitectos works on a range of projects, including public buildings, houses, and interior renovations. Starkly minimalist, his projects, often with sharp, though not overbearing or unpleasant, angles, are covered in smooth, white materials inside and outside. The Spanish designer’s minimalist approach to houses at first may sound out of …

Pete Bossley’s Architecture for Good

New Zealand–based Bossley Architects, led by founder Pete Bossley, offers a range of architectural and interior design services. The award-winning firm is best known for its work in galleries, museum, residential, and retail spaces, but Bossley’s public projects showcase his practical approach to making architecture for the greater good of society. Bossley believes, at least …

Austrian Brothers Create Winning Designs

Sibling rivalry is not an option for Austrian architects Karim and Rames Najjar. The brothers founded their architectural firm in Vienna in 1999, and have completed “a range of designs from naval architecture to commercial buildings, to villas and their beloved ‘research’ projects,” according to the firm’s profile. Their style can be as varied as …

Antoine Predock: Symbolic Structures

Southwestern American architect Antoine Predock designs buildings that weave past with present and respond to their surroundings. His desert houses helped him to achieve international acclaim, and he credits those early projects, beginning in the late 1960s, with teaching him how to respond to place—there, in the desert, an architect must consider sun, rainfall, and …

Zaha Hadid: The Boundary-Breaking Dame

Boundaries—in design and in life—do not seem to be a concern of Zaha Hadid. The Baghdad-born British architect has been breaking them since before she stepped onto the international architecture scene, and continues to do so with each new idea, from her dynamic sketch-paintings and earliest built works to her upcoming Miami skyscraper. She is …

Gehry’s Landmarks, Big and Small

When a city wants a landmark building that achieves both critical and popular success—which often do not go hand in hand—it might turn to Frank Gehry. He has designed internationally recognized structures around the world, from Bilbao, Spain, to Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, to Los Angeles, California, to New York; and his products range from museum-worthy, innovate …