Zaha Hadid’s first position is not a complete surprise but still it gives food for thought. Five years after she passed, the Iraqi-born architect remains at the very heart of the discourses on contemporary architecture, also thanks to the (hyper-)activity of her office Zaha Hadid Architects. The announcement of the arrival in Italy of the Hyperloop and the inauguration of Striatus Bridge – a prototype for a 3D-printed concrete bridge, exhibited in Venice as a side event to the 17^th Architecture Biennale – have made headlines in summer 2021.

Hyperloop

It has already been four years since the large retrospective dedicated by New York’s MoMA to Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of organic architecture and the designer of the Kaufmann House and of the first Guggenheim Museum. His fame, though, doesn’t seem to be weakening, probably also thanks to the popularity and the continued success of the New York-based institution.

Guggenheim Museum, image from Domus 832, December 2000

Le Corbusier è il grande sconfitto di questa classifica. Maestro per eccellenza del modernismo europeo razionalista, il progettista della Villa Savoye di Poissy e dell’Unité d’habitation di Marsiglia deve cedere il passo al rivale americano “organico”. Chissà quanta amarezza gli avrebbe provocato, proprio a lui che passò una vita a comunicare le sue opere ancora prima che a costruirle.

View of the exhibition "Le Corbusier, Mesures de l'homme", Center Pompidou in Paris

Pavillon Espirit Nouveau, Paris

Frank Gehry’s architectures are flamboyant and over-the-top just as much as their creator. Since the times of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and of Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the buildings by the Californian architect keep fascinating, shocking and raising debate. Case in point, the Luma Tower, the new shiny headquarters of the Luma Foundation, inaugurated in Arles in 2021, has certainly caused a stir. 

Snow-white, curvy, sun-drenched, Oscar Niemeyer architectures-sculpture have always met the favor of a large audience, even when critics took a distance from the Brazilian master, stigmatizing the reduction of his experimental attitude to mere formalism, style with no research. Niemeyer’s fifth position within this ranking seems to confirm his quintessentially pop inclination.

Niemeyer Centre, Avilès

Extremely prolific and always active in the contemporary debate on architecture and the city, Norman Foster earns a well-deserved sixth place. More that his presence here, what is surprising is the absence of his peer, friend and rival Richard Rogers.

Foster + Partners, Buenos Aires Ciudad Casa de Gobierno, Buenos Aires, Argentina 

Philippe Starck is the very first star in the history of his profession, a skilled designer but also a communicator and a public figure in all respects. Forty years after he started his career, in the heyday of the postmodern age, Starck keeps designing objects that make the news. He also participated in the 2021 Milan Design Week, where he presented the outdoor furniture collection Serengeti for Janus et Cie.. 

ANUS et Cie, Serengeti armchair

Juicy Salif Alessi, 1988

Renzo Piano is in many regards an atypical figure on the scene of world architecture. He stands out for his low-profile approach: he builds high-quality architectures, he actively participates in the debate on the transformations of the built environment, but he gently and decidedly rejects all forms of mediatization of his own self. This old-time moderation hasn’t prevented him from reaching the eight position in this ranking. Over the last few years, a lot has been said and written about his reconstruction of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa.

Morandi Bridge, Genoa

Born in 1852, Antoni Gaudí is the crew’s senior, the most “ancient” of all the architects of the ranking. The public success of the master of Catalan modernism, a declination of Art Nouveau, is tightly connected to the rise of Barcelona, where he lived and built most of his major works, as a tourist destination.

Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona

La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Alvar Aalto has always been the most widely appreciated of the great modernists, also by non-specialists of architecture. Quite easily so: in fact, already in the 1920s he was advocating for a stronger organic relationship between architecture and nature, architecture and its user, while Le Corbusier speculated on machine-à-habiter, basically houses designed as cars. The Finnish master’s research themes are close to the sensibility of our age, engaged in the construction of new links between humankind and the environment.

Bourse de Commerce, Paris

Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi, Venezia

Those years are long gone when, in the 1990s and even later, Santiago Calatrava’s works were amongst the few to actually make headlines, and cities all over the world would line up to secure a snow-white bridge sculpted by the Spanish designer. Calatrava, though, remains a protagonist of internet searches about architecture, even now that other and more colorful architectural icons are under the spotlight.

An architect and a scholar, Neri Oxman is the prototype of the successful contemporary researcher, who manages to profitably combine theoretical speculation and practical applications. With Mediated Matter, her team based at MIT’s Media Lab, she experiments particularly on materials, for instance perfecting organic composites that can replace plastic, such as the Aguahoja.

3D printing on glass

3D version of ancient death masks

The student has become the master. Rem Koolhaas, the behemoth of contemporary architecture, doesn’t make it into the ranking of the 15 most clicked designers, but his former protégé Bjarke Ingels does. The Scandinavian architecture’s enfant terrible has become an adult and is now the prototype of a contemporary star architect. The announces of his projects and realizations follow one another in quick succession: the O-Tower in Hangzhou is amongst the most recent.

Colorful and sophisticated, exotic but soothing, photogenic and ready for Instagram long before the social media platform was launched: these are the works of Luis Barragan. It is not by chance if the Mexican architect earns, though by the skin of his teeth, the last available position of this ranking.

From Domus 889

From Domus 321