The Architects

Geoffrey Bawa

The barrister who became the father of Tropical Modernism

Trained first as a barrister, Geoffrey Bawa became Sri Lanka's greatest architect and the father of Tropical Modernism — wedding modern clarity to the courtyards, verandahs and water of monsoon Asia, and dissolving the threshold between building and landscape.

Le Corbusier

The prophet of the machine age who named Brutalism — and gave India the city of Chandigarh

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret reinvented himself as Le Corbusier and twice reshaped architecture — first with the machine-clean Five Points and white villas, then with raw beton brut that named Brutalism. His largest work is the civic landscape of Chandigarh, India.

Louis Kahn

The master of brick, concrete and light who made buildings feel eternal

Louis Kahn returned modern architecture to weight, silence and light. A late bloomer who built his masterworks after fifty, he left two monuments in South Asia — IIM Ahmedabad's brick geometry and his magnum opus, the Dhaka National Assembly.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The father of organic architecture — buildings that grow from their land

Frank Lloyd Wright, the most famous architect in American history, fathered organic architecture — buildings that grow from the inside out and from their site. From the Prairie houses to Fallingwater and the Guggenheim, his philosophy reached India through apprentice Nari Gandhi.

Tadao Ando

The self-taught boxer who builds with concrete, water and light

A former boxer from Osaka who never attended architecture school, Tadao Ando taught himself the craft and became a Pritzker laureate. Working in smooth fair-faced concrete and pure geometry, he builds with the immaterial — light, water, wind, emptiness and silence.

Norman Foster

The high-tech master who made structure, daylight and energy the visible art of the building

Norman Foster, born in working-class Manchester in 1935, became the most refined master of high-tech architecture — expressing structure and services, building light and precise, flooding space with daylight, and tuning each building to its climate, from the HSBC bank to the Reichstag dome and the Gherkin.

Richard Rogers

The architect who turned buildings inside-out — and championed the public city

Richard Rogers (1933–2021) turned buildings inside-out — pulling structure and services to the exterior to free the interior — and made them legible in bright colour. With Renzo Piano he built the Pompidou; he was also a passionate urbanist for the compact, public city.

Renzo Piano

The builder's son who made architecture light — and filled it with light

Renzo Piano, the Genoese builder's son who turned the Centre Pompidou inside out with Richard Rogers, spent half a century making heavy buildings feel light and filling them with tamed daylight. A Pritzker laureate, he outgrew the 'high-tech' label toward craft, place and the piazza.

Kengo Kuma

The anti-object architect who dissolves buildings into wood, light and place

Founder of Kengo Kuma & Associates, Kuma builds an "anti-object" architecture that dissolves into its place. He breaks mass into particles — louvres, lattices, screens — and works in local natural materials, making buildings you feel as atmosphere rather than monument.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Less is more — the master of steel, glass and the curtain-wall tower

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) reduced architecture to almost nothing — a clear steel frame, a glass skin, one flowing universal space — and perfected it. From the Barcelona Pavilion to the Seagram Building, his 'less is more' gave the world the glass curtain-wall tower that now shapes India's corporate campuses.

Alvar Aalto

The great humanist of the Modern Movement — who gave the machine age a soul

Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), the great humanist of modern architecture, softened the machine aesthetic with wood, brick, undulating form and soft daylight. From Paimio's patient rooms to Villa Mairea, Saynatsalo and Artek furniture, he designed everything for the body that inhabits it.

Glenn Murcutt

The sole practitioner who taught architecture to touch this earth lightly

Born in London in 1936 and shaped by the Australian bush, Glenn Murcutt is the world's most celebrated sole practitioner — designing every project alone, by hand. His lightweight, climate-read houses of metal, steel and louvres embody one Aboriginal creed: touch this earth lightly.

Luis Barragán

The engineer who taught modern architecture how to feel — colour, light, water and the wall

Luis Barragán (1902–1988), a Mexican civil engineer self-taught as an architect, made colour, captured light, still water and the blank wall his materials. His emotional, profoundly regional modernism — rose-pink courts, shafts of sun, reflecting pools — won the 1980 Pritzker Prize.