Filippo Brunelleschi, the father of Renaissance architecture -- Qavam al-Din Shirazi, architect to the House of Tamerlane -- Giuliano da Sangallo, wood sculptor, architect and student of antiquity -- Sinan, master architect of the Ottoman Empire -- Shah Jahan, Mughal emperor and builder -- Christopher Wren, scientist. architect and engineer -- Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban, foremost military engineer of the 17th century -- Thomas Telford, innovator of cast-iron bridge design -- Karl Friedrich Schinkel, genius and engineer -- James Bogardus, inventor of cast-iron architecture -- Joseph Paxton, landscape gardener and architect -- Victor Baltard, municipal architect of Paris -- Isambard Kingdom Brunel, visionary railway engineer and ship designer -- A.W.N. Pugin, realist and revolutionary -- Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, gothic as constructive will -- John Fowler, renowned developer of urban railways -- Giuseppe Mengoni, architect of Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II -- William Le Baron Jenney, developed Chicago's distinctive skyscrapers -- François Hennebique, symbol of reinforced concrete -- Antoni Gaudi, architect-craftsman with a unique creative style -- Louis H. Sullivan, ornamentalist, skyscraper designer and advocate of an "American" style -- Frank Lloyd Wright, architect of the space within -- Auguste Perret, an aesthetic language and doctrine for concrete construction -- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last great inventor of form -- Le Corbusier, in concrete or stone, wood or metal? -- Konstantin Melnikov, leap into the unknown -- Pier Luigi Nervi, transfigurations of an engineer -- R. Buckminster Fuller, design for the future -- Ove Arup, the outsider and the art of the impossible -- Louis K. Kahn, architect of the poetics of action and construction -- Jean Prouvé, the constructive imagination -- Oscar Niemeyer, radical critic of Modernist orthodoxies -- Eero Saarinen, exuberance and technological innovation -- Frei Otto, innovator of tensile and membrane structures -- Fran Gehry, designer of expressively iconic buildings -- Kenzo Tange, the architect of megastructures -- Norman Foster, invention and innovation in structure and materials -- Santiago Calatrava, a universal designer -- Kengo Kuma, an architecture of materiality and immateriality.

Seven hundred years of architectural innovation make for an international survey of spectacular scope and depth, from the dome of St. Paul's cathedral to the arresting angles of the Sydney Opera House, from the monumental Taj Mahal to Kengo Kuma's attempts "to erase architecture," to fortresses, bridges, and skyscrapers. The contributors include practicing architects and leading academics, and their essays focus on the architects and engineers through history who have shaped and transformed the built environment. More than two hundred illustrations of structures famous, revolutionary, and surprising--including original drawings and prints and modern photography--bring the works to life. Architectural structures both subtle and spectacular have always been designed with an audience in mind, an intent to influence the way we see, think, move, and interact; and the builders themselves can be as fascinating as their creations. Mathematician and visionary, philosopher and ecologist, nationalist, modernist, rationalist, deconstructivist: the characters behind the buildings are many and varied. -- Book Description.

A celebration of the lives and careers of forty pioneering designers provides a global tour of the great structures of the world, from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Sydney Opera House and the Taj Mahal.