Zaha Hadid (born 1950), Iraqi and female and a short time ago only the creator of fantastic, unbuilt, and perhaps unbuildable projects that existed only a translucent layers of computer graphics and that seemed disassembled, has now become an international architectural star laden with real commissions. (more…)

The architectural styling of a mail office may not immediately seem obvious as an antiauthoritarian gesture. But Rome’s recently restored Ufficio Postale on the Via Marmorata was designed by Italian architect Adalberto Libera, who was one of the leading Italian Rationalist architects of the 1930s and 1940s. Libera played a vanguard role in the development of Italian Modernist architecture, and helped spearhead the Italian Rationalist movement that emerged from the shadow of Benito Mussolini. (more…)

From the moment the design was unveiled, critics and the public swooned, seeing the buildings as an architectonic metaphor for flight: the eagle-like silhouette of its entrance portal basted a beak and talons, while its soaring rooflines mimicked wings in flight. Saarinen, for whatever reasons, professed to be shocked by the notion: “the fact that to some people it looked like a bird was really coincidental,” he protested. (more…)

Gehry’s innovative office complex, located on a former industrial port site in Dusseldorf, Germany, quieted even his most adamant critics. Their argument that his architecture is merely an ecstasy of forms with confetti-like superficiality is countered by this design’s spectrum of pragmatic solutions that make these buildings both economically successful and user-friendly. (more…)

The Chapel of St. Ignatius serves the Catholic Jesuit community of the University of Seattle and is therefore designed to meet their religious requirements. It has a rectangular floor plan, whose first roof – from which all the others start – is a basic horizontal plane which gives rise to a prism whose subsequent changes define each of the dimensions of the chapel. (more…)

Once a decaying industrial city, Bilbao took on new verve with this stunning composition for a Guggenheim Museum on a former derelict industrial site. Gehry’s creation drew 1.3 million visitors to northern Spain in its first year. It also spawned countless imitators worldwide, all of whom sought to emulate its popularity, aptly dubbed the Bilbao effect. Seen in this light, this design achieved immediate cult status and will be remembered as one of the 1990s most influential ad impressive buildings. (more…)