🏗️The Greats

Sinan began as a stonemason and army carpenter, was conscripted into the Janissary corps as a young man, and rose through military engineering before Suleiman the Magnificent appointed him chief architect in 1539. He later ranked his own three greatest mosques like stages of an apprenticeship: Şehzade (1548) he called his apprentice work, the Süleymaniye (1557) his journeyman work, and the Selimiye in Edirne (1575), completed in his late eighties, his masterpiece — finally building a dome that beat the Hagia Sophia's after decades of trying.

When Brunelleschi won the 1418 competition to complete Florence Cathedral's dome, he proposed building it without centering — the wooden scaffold every other mason considered essential for a span that size — and refused to explain how. Vasari records that when rivals doubted him, Brunelleschi challenged them to stand an egg upright on marble; when they failed, he cracked its base flat and stood it up himself, saying that anyone who had seen his dome model would know how to build the dome too.

In 1934, client Edgar Kaufmann owned a favourite waterfall on his Pennsylvania property and expected a house designed with a view of it. According to the often-told studio account, Wright had done no drawings when Kaufmann called to say he was arriving to see them; over the roughly two hours it took Kaufmann to drive from Milwaukee, Wright sketched the design for Fallingwater — built directly over the waterfall rather than facing it — essentially complete, and it was this version that was then built.

Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier's showcase of pilotis, ribbon windows and a flat roof garden, leaked from the day the Savoye family moved in; Madame Savoye wrote letter after letter about rain through the roof terrace and her son's recurring bronchitis from the damp, and it took years of disputes to get proper repairs made. The family was later forced out during the Second World War, and the house nearly faced demolition before France's Ministry of Culture saved it as a listed monument in 1965, the year Le Corbusier died.

Tange was a young architecture professor, not yet forty, when he won the international competition to design the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in 1949, four years after the atomic bombing and with much of his own prior work destroyed in the firebombing of Tokyo. He aligned the cenotaph, the eternal flame and the ruined Atomic Bomb Dome on a single sightline through the park, turning an act of mourning into the axis the entire design was built around.

Hadid's international breakthrough was winning the 1983 competition for The Peak, a leisure club on a Hong Kong hillside, with a shattered, dynamic painting-like design unlike anything else submitted — but the project was never built, and for years critics treated her as more painter than practical architect. Her first major building, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, only opened in 1993, a full decade after The Peak, once new modelling software and construction methods could finally realize the geometry she had been drawing by hand all along.

For the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP, opened 1968), Bo Bardi suspended the entire museum volume between two giant red concrete beams spanning 74 metres, lifting it clear off the ground and leaving the site beneath it as open civic space. She insisted the empty plaza she created underneath stay open and unprogrammed, and it has hosted markets, protests and gatherings for decades since — a piece of urban generosity built directly into the structure, not added around it.