A Wisconsin native, Wright revolutionize 20th-century architect, and his midwestern upbringing played a crucial role in shaping his sensibility. Inspired by the low-lying building that dotted the American plains, Wright created the Prairie House style as a reaction the prevailing Victorian aesthetic, which emphasized dark decor, and busy embellishments both inside and out. In its stead, Wright employed clean geometries with an emphasis on horizontal planes. His most famous building, Falling Water (a residence in Bear Run, PA, designed for Pittsburg department store magnate, Edgar Kaufmann in 1935) features stacked rectangular balconies that seem to float over the natural waterfall incorporated into the house. Later in his career, Wright would embrace curvilinear elements, a shift that found its most celebrated expression in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Famously holding to the proposition that “less is more,” German architect Mies Van der Rohe stripped architecture to elemental geometric forms, pointing the way to Minimalism. He banished all traces of ornamentation, using the innate qualities of materials such as steel and plate glass to define the look of his buildings. This approach came out of another credo—form equals function—espoused at the Dessau Bauhaus, for which he served as the last director before the Nazis closed it down. His designs emphasized rationalism and efficiency as the route to beauty, an approached exemplified by The Barcelona Pavilion, built to house Germany’s exhibit for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. In it, you can see that while Mies (the name by which he’s best known) abjured decorative details, he wasn’t adverse opulence, as the liberal use of marble, red onyx and travertine in the structure attests. The resulting masterpiece is only matched, perhaps, by Mies’s Seagram’s tower in New York.

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930.

Louis Henry Sullivan was an Irish-American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School.

One of the few women to have risen to the level of starchitect—and the first ever to win architecture’s version of the Oscar, the Pritzker Prize—Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) was known for futuristic designs that employed curving, swooping lines more suitable for UFOs than buildings. Born into a wealthy Iraqi family in Bagdad and educated in the U.K. (where the Queen would later make her a Dame, the feminine form of address for knighthood) Hadid threw out the rule-book, eschewing the linear geometry usually employed by architects for an Expressionistic style that often appeared to allude to the female form—though not intentionally, according the Hadid herself: When her design for a stadium in Qatar was compared to a vagina, she dismissed the comment as “embarrassing” and “ridiculous.” Though she built extensively around the world, she has only on completed project—a luxury condo in Chelsea—in New York City.

Unlike other architects on this list, Italian architect Renzo Piano isn’t recognized for having a singular style. Instead, his building have been eclectic, ranging from the Neo-Brutalism of his design for the Whitney Museum’s home in the Meatpacking District, to the elegant, light-filled Menil Collection in Houston Texas, which resembles an overgrown version of a mid-century house by West Coast modernist, Richard Neutra. However, his projects often share a certain industrial or technological look (he cut his teeth, assisting Richard Rogers in the design of the Pompidou Center). The Shard in London is his largest building to date, a sharply tapering 95-storey skyscraper made of glass and steel that has become his most recognized creation.

Born in Rotterdam in 1945, Rem Koolhas is one of the most influential architects of his generation, not only as a building designer but also as an architectural theorist. He first came to prominence with the publication in 1978 of his book Delirious New York, an encomium to the city and it’s central role in shaping the 20th-century, both economically and culturally. As for buildings, he is best known for the massive Central China Television Headquarters in Beijing, China, a 44-story möbius-strip of a structure that appears to loop in on itself (the locals refer to it as “big boxer shorts”).

Gaudí spent his entire career in Barcelona, where he built all of his projects, the most famous of which is the 1883 cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, still under construction today. His style was an ornate mix of Baroque, Gothic, Moorish and Victorian elements that often featured ornamental tile-work, and drew upon forms found in nature—an influence that can he seen in the tree-like columns holding up the vast interior of his church, as well as the undulating facade of another of his famous creations, the apartment block known as the Casa Milla (inspired by the multi-peaked mountain just outside of Barcelona called Montserrat). Gaudí’s work would go on to have a tremendous impact on subsequent generations of modernists.

Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Born in Guangzhou, raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but he quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was unhappy with the focus at both schools on Beaux-Arts architecture, and spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier. After graduating, he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and became a friend of the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.

Sir Christopher Wren was one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history, as well as an anatomist, astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist.^[3][4] He was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710.

The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to others in his office, especially Nicholas Hawksmoor. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and the south front of Hampton Court Palace.

The Wren Building, the main building at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, has been attributed to Wren.

Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a founder of the Royal Society (president 1680–1682), and his scientific work was highly regarded by Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.

Daniel Burnham was a Gilded Age architect, who, along with partner John Wellborn Root, built what was called the first skyscraper in 1886: The 130-foot-high Montauk Building in Chicago. Burnham is best known for a much taller Flatiron Building in NYC. He’s also remembered for overseeing the design and construction of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the fantastical fair that became enshrined in legend as The White City.

Charles Ormond Eames Jr. was an American designer, architect and film maker. In creative partnership with his spouse, Ray Kaiser Eames, he was responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the field of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.

This West Coast architect is undoubtedly the most famous in the world right now, thanks to his 1997 design for the Guggenheim Museum branch in Bilbao, Spain. Though Gehry was already well-established in his field as the auteur billowing forms that seem to defy gravity and the logic of conventional construction methods, The Guggenheim Bilbao remains the finest example of a style he’s applied to innumerable commissions, like Disney Hall in Los Angeles and MIT’s Stata Center in Cambridge MA. Clad in titanium, The Guggenheim Bilbao suggests a large ship tied up along the Nervión River. The building is also credited with reviving the fortunes of its host city, the largest in the Basque Country.

Johnson’ role as the founding director of MoMA’s Department of Architect had an enormous impact on the field, making him a gatekeeper who helped to shape architectural trends from 1935 onward. His was also a designer in his own right, though it’s fair to say that he was more of a refiner of other people’s ideas than he was an innovator. Nonetheless, his work achieved iconic status in a number of cases, most notably in the residence he built for himself in 1949. The house is a distillation of Mies Van der Rohe’s approach, and in fact, Johnson himself noted that it was “more Mies than Mies.” A transparent box set among exquisitely landscaped grounds, The Glass House dissolves the boundaries between inside and out, public and private. It’s expansive use of plate glass undoubtedly inspired much of the architect for today’s high-rise luxury developments. Johnson similarly rode the postmodern wave with his “Chippendale” building for AT&T (now privately owned), so called for its broken-pediment crown resembling the top of a classic 18th-century high-boy.