Carl Ludvig Engel
b. Germany, 1778;
d. Finland, 1840.

Architect whose solemn scale and elegance, modesty without being plainness, influenced and defined the emerging sensibility within Finnish architecture. His early training was at the Bauakademie in Berlin before he moved to Tallinn in Estonia, where he worked as an architect from 1808 to 1814. His visit to Leningrad in 1815, before settling in Helsinki in 1816, is key to the pocket-Leningrad scale of much of Engel’s Helsinki. He quickly became one of the leading and famous architects in Finland and was appointed Director of Public Housing in 1824. The pattern books prepared during that time were meticulous and had a lasting influence on Finnish planning and urbanism. Though often considered mostly in the Russian Neo-Classical school, Engel’s German origins can be seen to provide an element of balance, certainly a restraint, to the Russian tradition. The Lutheran Cathedral defines the heart of Engel’s Helsinki; at first more restrained, it is centrally planned on a Greek cross with four porticos outside, a quatrefoil inside. The tall dome emphasizes site and scale, a grandeur completed by the Senate Square. Built between 1818 and Engel’s death in 1840, the Senate Square includes the Cathedral, the Senate House (1818-22), the University Building and University Library (1836¬45) and is a perfect example of Engel’s assimilated Neo-Classicism.

List of major buildings / works:
Senate Square, Helsinki, 1818-40.
Military Hospital, Helsinki, 1826.32.
Lutheran Cathedral, Helsinki, 1830-40.
Helsinki City Hall, 1833.
ViurilaRuda (with Bassi), 1840.

Bibliography
J. M. Richards, 800 Years of Finnish Architecture, London, 1978.
N. E. Wickberg, Engel, Berlin, 1970.
A. Salokorpi, Modern Finnish Architecture, London, 1970. RC

Frank Lloyd Wright was the most talented famous architect of the c20; an American with Welsh ancestry. He was inspired by his mother to become an architect. Boyhood summers on his uncle’s farm embued a love of nature. Wright’s first building dates from 1886. In that year, as a young man, he was cited as job architect of Unity Chapel, Helena Valley, Wisc., designed by J. L. Silsbee. From then until his death he produced countless architectural projects; in 1974 it was estimated that some 433 buildings remained extant. His own publication output was phenomenal and he and his pupils, admirers, writers and critics produced about 2000 noteworthy items. Wright became a legend in his own lifetime; his lifestyle and extra-marital affairs scandalized America. He was claimed as the model for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead; it was also rumoured that he was a near communist. He had to fall back on farming as a way of surviving during lean times. The first period of his career was connected to the indigenous Prairie School and followed his short apprenticeship to his Lieber Meister Louis Sullivan of Adler & Sullivan. Wright’s family houses for middle-class businessmen, with “gently sloping rooves, low proportions, quiet skylines”, initiated a spatial revolution, where rooms were not box containers but were volumes overlapped and interpenetrated. In 1909, with his lover Mrs Mamah Cheney (n?e Borthwick), Wright travelled to Europe, where his early work was published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth (1910-11). It had a profound influence on continental architects. In 1913 Wright was in Japan, where he secured the Imperial Hotel commission. It brought him fame when it failed to collapse in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Wright’s own world, however, had collapsed in 1914 in the most appalling circumstances when he was building Midway Gardens, Chicago; Mrs Cheney and her two children were murdered. Apart from the Imperial Hotel he did little work until the textile block houses for the Los Angeles area of the mid-1920s. These include the famous Millard House. Some of the West Coast houses were supervised during construction by his son, Lloyd Wright. A year later he began the most important relationship of his life with Olgivanna Hinzenberg, a Gurdejieff disciple, whom he married in 1928. The second most successful period of Wright’s career followed, with many important houses, including the two Taliesins, Kaufmann’s “Fallingwater” and the Johnson Wax Company offices in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Johnson house, “Wingspread”. Wright believed in and promoted an “organic” architecture and way of life within a framework that was democratic, even at times utopian (e.g. the Broadacre City and Mile High projects, and his “Usonian” houses - a concept of modest dwellings close to earth, for the average American). During his “international” period of the 1930s, he visited the USSR and gave the Princeton and Sulgrave Manor lectures, which effectively summarized his philosophy. In 1941 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. In the post-war period large-scale projects followed, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Marin County Court and offices as well as more houses, theatres, churches, and auditoria.

Frank Lloyd Wright
b. Richland Center, Wisconsin, 1867;
d. Phoenix, Arizona, 1959.

Major buildings /works:
Prairie School houses in and around Chicago, Illinois, including Oak Park (Unity Temple, Own Studio and House (now museum), Fricke, Martin Gale and Cheney Houses etc.); River Forest (Winslow, Roberts Houses etc.) and Riverside (Coonley Residence etc.), from 1890. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1915 (Annexe, 1916). Millard House “La Miniatura”, Pasadena, California, 1923. Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wise., from 1925; Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1937. S. C. Johnson and Son Offices, Racine, Wise., 1934 (Research Tower, 1944). Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr Residence “Falling Water”, Bear Run, Penn., 1935 (Guest House, 1938). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue, New York, 1956. Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, ASU, Tempe, Arizona, 1959.

Bibliography:

F. L. Wright, An Autobiography, London, New York and Toronto, 1932 (new eds. 1943, 1977).
On Architecture, 1941, and The Future of Architecture, 1953 (his major lectures).
W. A. Storer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
R. L. Sweeny, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography, Los Angeles, 1978.
Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1979 (now reissued as Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York).
Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1987.

James Stirling
b. Glasgow, 1926.

Internationally known, controversial and multi-faceted British architect. Stirling trained at Liverpool University (1945-50), where the syllabus was based on Beaux-Arts principles. He began work with Lyons, Israel & ELLIS in London (1953-6) and met James Gowan, with whom he worked in partnership (1956-63). They produced a small number of influential buildings, such as the low-rise flats of Ham Common (1957), whose style, derived from Le Corbusier’s later works and Peter and Alison SMITHSON, started a trend for brick used with exposed concrete. Their major building, the Engineering Faculty building at Leicester University (1959-63), won international attention for its “Constructivist” tower and bold contrasts of industrial red bricks and large areas of glazing. It was to provide the model for a similar concept at Cambridge (1964-7) and Oxford (1966-71). The former sealed Stirling’s controversial reputation and was vilified on aesthetic and utilitarian grounds. At one point it was threatened with demolition but has now been renovated. From 1963 to 1971 Stirling was in practice on his own. He is an active teacher and became well known in the USA from whence he received a number of commissions. There were also a number of quintessentially 1960s buildings such as the Olivetti Centre and some housing at Runcorn New Town. Since 1971 Stirling has been in partnership with Michael Wilford. His later work appears more formalist, influenced by the historicism of Post-Modernism. He has aligned himself increasingly with a populist, somewhat witty form of Post-Modern classicism. His Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, is a melange of arbitrary-seeming modern construction and randomized quotation of historical elements. The design for the Mansion House scheme was more composed, but an unkind critic compared it to an art deco radio. Stirling has always been wilfully experimental, and there is little consistency in his approach or references. Perhaps because of the Beaux-Arts nature of his training he has always admitted to this essential wilful nature of his creative decisions, so that the historicity of his “late work” is no more contrived than the modernity of his former work.

Rudolph M. Schindler
b. Vienna, 1887;
d. Los Angeles, 1953. I

Rudolph M. Schindler, a first-generation architect of Modern Architecture (Modernist) who immigrated early to the USA, where he worked for a time with famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His career outside Europe led to lack of recognition but his reputation was rescued by the writings of David Gebhard and Esther McCoy. They consider Schindler the equal of RIETVELD and the followers of De Stijl. He was educated in Vienna, at the Imperial Technical Institute (1906-11) and the Academy of Arts under Otto Wagner (1909-13), graduating with dual degrees in architecture and engineering. He immigrated to the USA in June 1914 and worked at first in Chicago; this was followed by a significant period with Frank Lloyd Wright (1916-23). He was in independent practice in Hollywood, Los Angeles, from 1921 until his death; Richard Neutra collaborated with him from 1925. Schindler’s early buildings were executed whilst working for others, Hans Mayr and Theodor Mayer (Vienna) and Ottenheimer, Stern & Reichert (Chicago). The experience with Frank Lloyd Wright was not entirely satisfactory but led to Schinder’s detailing and supervising a number of remarkable projects for Miss Barnsdall and others. Schindler also engineered the foundations of the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, which withstood the earthquake (1923). His first key building is the Schindler & Clyde Chase Duplex (1921-2), which was the joint home of the Schindler and Neutra families 1925-31. The working arrangement with Neutra was flexible and clients were shared, hence the contrasting two commissions for the Lovell family, Schindler’s Beach House (1926) in reinforced concrete at Newport Beach and Neutra’s smooth steel-framed Health House (1929). The striking difference between the two designers is in the use of materials; Schindler’s early works were largely reinforced concrete, the difficulty in obtaining adequate workmanship leading to construction with studwork and ply, a cheap vernacular technique in Southern California. Neither concrete, nor ply, nor rendered framing has aged well, and many of Schindler’s buildings need conserving. The principal lesson to be learnt from his imaginative designs is the three-dimensional creation of space regardless of material or technical shortcomings. Schindler achieved a vast production of 330 buildings and projects over 40 years.

List of major buildings / works:
Houses: Schindler & Clyde Chase Duplex, Hollywood, 1921-2;
Beach House for Dr Lovell, Newport Beach, 1925-6;
Oliver House, Los Angeles, 1933; Walker House, Los Angeles, 1935-6;
Lechner House, Studio City, 1948;
Tischler House, Bel Air, 1949-50.
Apartments: Pueblo Ribera Court, La Jolla, 1923;
Manola Court, Los Angeles, 1926-40;
Bubeshko Apartments, Los Angeles, 1938-41;
Laurelwood Apartments, Studio City, 1948.
Offices and shops: Albert Martin Department Store, Los Angeles (with S. A. Marx), 1939-40;
Medical Arts Building, Studio City, 1945.
Designs: League of Nations (with Neutra), 1926;
Translucent House for Miss Barnsdall, 1927;
Lockheed, 27 airplane Interiors, 1938.
Works accredited to Schindler while working with Frank Lloyd Wright:
Concrete Monolyth Home (project), 1919;
Directors House, Olive Hill, Los Angeles, Hollyhock House and Oleanders for Miss Barnsdall, 1920.

Bibliography
Rudolph Schindler, Collected Papers, Los Angeles, 1948.
Reyner Banham, “Rudolph Schindler: A pioneer without tears”, Architectural Design, Dec, 1967.
Reyner Banham, “The Least Appreciated: Rudolph Schindler”, Architects’ Journal, 19 Feb. 1969.
David Gebhard, Schindler, London and New York, 1971.

Deane & Woodward
Established 1851.

Deane & Woodward - Irish partnership which played a key part in the Ruskin-inspired revival of Gothic architecture in Victorian England. The firm of Deane & Woodward was an offshoot from the Dublin-based practice of Thomas Deane, father of Thomas Newenham Deane (b. Cork, 1828; d. 1899). Deane Jr had been educated at Trinity College Dublin before joining his father’s practice in 1850. There he met Benjamin Woodward (b. Tullamore, 1816; d. 1861), who had originally trained as an engineer. His enthusiasm for medieval architecture had led him to change professions; he entered Thomas Deane’s office in 1845. Both Deane and Woodward were made partners in 1851. Their first major building was Trinity College Museum (1852-7), which established the character of Victorian Gothic architecture in line with the tenets of Ruskin. In practice this involved the creation of a monumental building based on a regular, almost classical plan form, with a richly embellished exterior. Deane and Woodward went on to design a number of buildings in Oxford, notably the Oxford Museum (1855-61), the first Gothic public building in Victorian England since the Houses of Parliament. In this case Ruskin was active in the development of the decorative scheme of the building. After Woodward died (1861), Deane continued to practise on his own, mainly in Dublin and Oxford. In 1878 he formed a new partnership with his son, Thomas Manly Deane, who subsequently took over the practice.

List of major buildings / works
Trinity College Museum, Dublin, 1852-7.
Oxford Museum, Oxford, England, 1855-61.
Oxford Union,, Oxford, 1857-9.

Bibliography
Stefan Muthesms, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850-1870, London, 1972. Eve Blau, Ruskmian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-61, Princeton, 1981.

Louis Henry Sullivan
b. Boston, Mass., 1856;
d. Chicago, Illinois, 1924.

List of major buildings / works:
Adler and Sullivan: Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1887-90;
Wainwright Building, St Louis, 1890-91;
Guaranty Building, Buffalo, 1894-6.
Sullivan: Transportation Building, Chicago, 1891-2;
Schlesinger & Mayer Department Store (Carson Pine Scott Store), Chicago, 1898-1904.

Bibliography:
Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, Lippzncotts Magazine, 57, 1896; Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, New York, 1918, 1934, 1947;
Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, 1924, London, 1956;
Louis Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament, New York, 1924.
H. Morrison, Louts Sullivan - Prophet of Modern Architecture, New York, 1935, 1952.
S. Paul, Louts Sullivan - An Architect in American Thought, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962.
H. Duncan, Culture and Democracy, Totowa, NJ, 1965.
R. Twombly, Louis Sullivan, Chicago, 1986.

Sir Christopher Wren
b. East Knoyle, Wilts., 1632;
d. London, 1723.

Sir Christopher Wren - The best-known and probably the greatest of English famous architects. This reputation is earned for his brilliant design of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and the ingenuity of his City churches. Wren was born into a clerical household in Wiltshire. His father was appointed Dean of Windsor in 1634. From Westminster School the young boy spent some three years in London before going as a Gentleman Commoner to Wadham College, Oxford (1649). At Oxford he was soon involved with a group of brilliant scholars, who later formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. Serving as assistant to an eminent anatomist, Wren was at once immersed in new and experimental scientific learning. Astronomy seemed a logical progression for his active mind, and an early interest in working models, diagrams and charts were useful to an eventual architect. Wren’s advancement was ever rapid: Gresham Professor of Astronomy in London in 1657, at the age of twenty-five, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford four years later. In 1663, Wren’s uncle, the elderly Bishop of Ely, asked him to design a new chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge. Architecture was an easy accomplishment to a brilliant scientist. The important Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, with its great painted ceiling, unsupported by columns, followed; then a new building for Trinity College, Oxford (1668), a visit to Paris in 1665 to survey its “most esteemed fabrics” - always there was more work, with its attendant problems. In London the Great Fire of 1666 gave chance for Wren to present a scheme to rebuild the City. Utopian in concept, it was only partly realized. But there was also need for the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the replacement of so many damaged churches. Here lay Wren’s major work for the rest of the c17 and beyond. In March 1669 Charles II had appointed Wren Surveyor-General of the King’s Works (a post held in earlier years by Inigo Jones). This meant the supervision of all work on the royal palaces; because of this increasing commitment to architecture Wren resigned his Oxford professorship in 1673, when he was knighted. St Paul’s was also now involving continual time and thought, with the final “Warrant Design” not being approved by the King until 1675. Furthermore, with only two surveyors to help, there were fifty-two churches in the City of London to design or supervise in some way. Most were on awkward, constricting sites. Each demanded an original spatial solution. All of them were given a fine tower and a soaring thin spire, but each had subtle, and often distinct, differences. Wren died, in his own words, having “worn out (by God’s Mercy) a long life in the Royal Service, and having made some Figure in the world”. He was buried in February 1723 in the crypt of his greatest work, St Paul’s Cathedral, where a monument was later erected to his memory.

Major buildings / works:
Supervision, and sometimes design, of 52 London City churches, c.1670-90.
St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1675-1710.
Royal Hospital, Chelsea, 1682-92.
Royal Hospital, Greenwich, 1696 onwards.

Bibliography:
Stephen Wren, Parentalia, or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, 1750.
The Wren Society, 20 vols., 1924-43.
Kerry Downes, Christopher Wren, London, 1971.
Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Christopher Wren, London, 1982.

Eliel Saarinen
b. Rantasalmi, Finland, 1873;
d. Michigan, 1950.

Eliel Saarinen is a Finnish famous architect who, by preserving a rigour from Art Nouveau and never quite succumbing to the full sentiment, produced exacting structures and restraint ? especially at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan ? which can be seen to pre-empt many of the concerns of later Finnish architects. Eliel Saarinen studied at Helsinki Polytechnic, graduating in 1897, and from 1896 to 1907 was in partnership with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, perhaps the most important practice in Finland. In 1923, he migrated to the USA, where he began another extensive career, designing, and then teaching at Cranbrook. Eliel Saarinen joined in partnership with his son, Eero Saarinen, in 1937. Though Saarinen’s cultural significance is greater than Sonck’s, it is important to see them together in the early stages of the so-called National Romantic movement. Saarinen’s early monumentalism owed more to OLBRICH and the Vienna Secession movement. His work expressed a natural and, we could say, a Nordic refinement of the more fluid Art Nouveau from Europe. But it was never a mere restrained adaptation of, say, Voysey. Material, form and culture played a more solid picturesque and symbolic role in Saarinen’s work. The amalgam of local Finnish farm settlements with the emerging Arts & Crafts elements echoed also H. H. Richardson and Webb (the Red House). The peak of a demanding eclecticism and timely internationalism in this picturesque period was undoubtedly the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair (carried out with Gesellius and Lindgren, 1900). The excess and flair of such borrowing and adaptation, tinged with an untutored symbolism, might also account for some of Saarinen’s later second- thought refinements. Already by 1902, with Hvittrask, a clearer development of the vernacular was achieved, emphasized again by the Helsinki Railway Station project (1904). Saarinen subsequently revised the station; a stronger, cleaner massing occurred, with, however, the beginnings of that systematic heaviness: all front and interior. We get a further clue to Saarinen’s subsequent direction and neat monumentalism in his Chicago Tribune Competition design (1922), which, tough placed second, led him to immigrate to the USA. In 1925 his calm monumental restraint emerged in the Cranbrook project which was to occupy him for years. Saarinen indicated just how well an abstracted classical style could suit the Finnish sensibility. And though this sensibility was interrupted by the arrival of Functionalism in Finland, Cranbrook indicates what is now being seen as a consistent link with the Minimalism and the thematic drive to overcome frivolous decoration seen in the 1960s and 70s. The links back to Asplund and Saarinen should be clear.

List of major buildings / works:
Finnish Pavilion, World Fair, Parts, 1900.
Hvittrask, Kirkkonummi, 1902.
Suur-Merijoki Country House, Viipuri, 1902.
Nordic Bank Building, Helsinki, 1904.
Finnish National Museum, Helsinki, 1910.
Helsinki Railway Station, 1914.
City Plan for Greater Helsinki, 1918.
Tribune Tower, Chicago, 1922.
Berkshire Music Centre, Tanglewood, Mass., 1938.
Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, 1941.
Tabernacle Church of Christ, Columbus, Indiana, 1942.
Civic Centre, Detroit, 1947.

Bibliography:
Eliel Saarinen, The City: its growth, its decay, its future, New York, 1943;
Eliel Saarinen, Search for Form, New York, 1948.
A. Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen, Chicago, 1948.
Hausen, Herler et al (eds) Eliel Saarmen, Otava, Helsinki, 1991.

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Isaac Ware
b. c. 1707,
d. London, 1766.

Isaac Ware was a leading English famous architect of the Georgian era, though his importance derives chiefly from his books, which were enormously influential. A man of humble origins, Ware spent his early years (1721-8) as an apprentice to the highly respected architect Thomas Ripley; he later secured the position of draughtsman with His Majesty’s Office of Works and at his death held the titles of clerk itinerant, secretary and clerk of works. After 1745 his parallel career in private practice proved equally successful and resulted in a series of prestigious projects. His close association with Lord Burlington is reflected in the strict Palladian formality of his facade treatment, but his interiors often exhibit more catholic tastes, including French Rococo and Gothic. The common-sense pragmatism of Ware’s architectural oeuvre is also a characteristic of his written work. His 1738 edition of Palladio’s Quattro Libri gave English readers their first accurate translation of this seminal work, and his encyclopedic Complete Body of Architecture was an invaluable compendium encompassing both theory and practice, lavishly illustrated with Ware’s own designs.

Major buildings / works:
St George’s Hospital, London, 1733.
Chesterfield House, London, 1748.
Wrotham Park, Middlesex, 1754.
Amisfield House, East Lothian, 1756.

Bibliography:
Isaac Ware, Designs of lingo Jones, 1733 (Farnborough, reprinted 1971); A Complete Body of Architecture, London, 1756. Isaac Ware (translator), The Four Books of Architecture - Andrea Palladio, London, 1738.