OLD DOGS, OLD TRICKS | July 25th 2008

Kathryn Rathke

Jonathan Meades has dubbed Zaha Hadid the "First Great Female Architect" in his profile of her in the summer issue of Intelligent Life. Global architecture is a male gerontocracy. Here's a list of the old men behind the best-known new buildings ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

I.M. PEI, 91

Though he was born in China, Pei, now semi-retired, is a thoroughly occidental modernist. He has been a brutalist at the Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell, a sculptor at the tent-like chapel at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and a geometer at the pyramid on the western side of the Louvre.

OSCAR NIEMEYER, 100

Despite his great age the architect of Brasilia is still active, not least in restoring--some would say tarting up--his own oeuvre of buildings that are (or were) sensuous and curvaceous yet geometrically elemental and slightly austere.

CESAR PELLI, 81

Connecticut-based Argentine who dominates the skylines of many of the world's great cities with his towers, among them One Canada Square at Canary Wharf in London, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Some of his more recent work shows the influence of younger architects such as Libeskind.

NORMAN FOSTER, 73

Mancunian peer of the realm. Described by the late Philip Johnson as "the last modern architect"--which turned out to be inaccurate. He was, rather, the first neo-modern architect. An international brand, he is the creator, over the past 40 years, of a vast body of work that stretches from the sublime Millau Viaduct, which he helicoptered in to see for the first time a few weeks before it was completed, to the giant sex toy of the Swiss Re Tower and the dismal bathos of Holborn Circus.

RICHARD ROGERS, 74

Half-Italian peer of the realm and one of the rare architects working at this level whose work is persistently varied. His three law courts, for instance--in Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Antwerp--are in very different modes, linked only by their maker and their severe beauty. While he is still stuck with the high-tech label of the 1970s, his bias is ever more towards the gothic.

RENZO PIANO, 70

Genovese co-author with Richard Rogers of the Beaubourg in the 1970s. Since when he has designed some of the most elegant buildings in the world: a cultural centre in New Caledonia, the Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Osaka Airport, the New York Times Tower. His Amsterdam Centre for Science and Technology is wittingly clunky, a hulk that appears to be half-submerged in a canal basin.

FRANK GEHRY, 79

The one-trick pony's one-trick pony. Canadian-born, California-based auto-plagiarist whose "iconic" deconstructions, three-dimensional logos, and boorish gesticulations look all very much the same and all out of place, whether they have been plonked down in Bilbao, Los Angeles or Seattle.

JEAN NOUVEL, 62

Unusual in this company in that the majority of his buildings are something other than an advertisement for their patron. He is also stylistically versatile: there is no such thing as a typical Nouvel building. His work ranges from social housing in Nimes, to an ingenious hotel on the edge of Bordeaux, to l'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, to the Torre Agbar in Barcelona.

REM KOOLHAAS, 63

Rotterdam-based writer, architect and urbanist who was one of Zaha Hadid's tutors, and her first employer. Made his name in the late 1970s with an eccentric and energetic book called "Delirious New York". His buildings--Seattle Central Library and a new TV headquarters in Beijing--are no less eccentric, or energetic: frantic exercises in counter-intuitive geometries whose components seem bent on misbehaviour.

DANIEL LIBESKIND, 62

Polish-born, American-naturalised. Like Gehry, but without the curves. Libeskind's signature is instantly recognisable because it hardly varies. Possesses a conventional horror of rectilinear structures. His supposedly iconic Imperial War Museum of the North has sloping floors which are intended to simulate the experience of battle. They don't.

SANTIAGO CALATRAVA, 56

Sculptural engineer, architect and builder of numberless "iconic" bridges, all virtually identical. His airports and stations at Lyon, Liege and Bilbao are reckoned hugely original by his many fans who haven't see the work of the mid 20th-century Finnish-American Eero Saarinen. ~ JM