Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items28
1
Frank Lloyd Wright
Born
Skip the skyscraper fantasies and look at his Usonian houses of the late 1930s onwards: single-storey homes for teachers and journalists, built on a concrete slab with underfloor heating, a compact kitchen at the heart and a living room that opens to the garden. The first, the Jacobs House in Madison, cost about $5,500. Wright relied on apprentices from his Taliesin Fellowship to supervise construction, and the open-plan family home owes a great deal to these modest experiments.
More about Frank Lloyd Wright2
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Born
Glasgow's own, and best met at a cup-of-tea scale. The Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, designed for Kate Cranston in 1903 and restored in 2018, show him shaping a whole sequence of rooms, chairs and light fittings around the simple ritual of sitting down. Hill House in Helensburgh does the same for family life. His wife Margaret Macdonald made the gesso panels and textiles that give both their mood, and the work is properly read as a partnership.
More about Charles Rennie Mackintosh3
Eileen Gray
E-1027, her seaside house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin finished in 1929, is a manual on living well in a small space: folding tables, a bed alcove with its own reading light, a guest cupboard that swings open from two sides. Gray had no formal architectural training and designed it with Jean Badovici, who encouraged her into building. For decades credit drifted towards Le Corbusier, who painted murals on its walls without her consent. Visit the restored house and the authorship question becomes plain.
More about Eileen Gray4
Sigurd Lewerentz
Born
A brick obsessive who refused to cut a single brick, so walls, vaults and floors had to be laid out around whole ones with thick mortar joints. St Peter's Church in Klippan, completed in 1966 when he was around 80, is dark, intimate and unforgettable. His last work is even smaller: a flower kiosk at Malmö's Eastern Cemetery from 1969, a concrete box with a sloping roof where mourners buy flowers on their way in. He worked side by side with his bricklayers on site.
More about Sigurd Lewerentz5
Gunnar Asplund
Born
The Woodland Chapel at Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården, finished in 1920, is barely bigger than a cottage: a steep shingled roof on white columns, reached through a gate in the pine forest, built for small funerals. Its calm comes from proportion rather than ornament. Asplund designed the cemetery landscape with Sigurd Lewerentz, and the two shaped one of the gentlest places of mourning anywhere; it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
More about Gunnar Asplund6
Rudolph Schindler (architect)
Born
His Kings Road House in West Hollywood, built in 1922 for two couples, Schindler and his wife Pauline with their friends Clyde and Marian Chace, swapped bedrooms for private studios and sleeping baskets on the roof. Tilt-up concrete walls and canvas sliding doors open each studio onto its own garden room. It is a still-radical idea about shared domestic life, and it set the pattern for the relaxed indoor-outdoor California house. Schindler learned his trade in Frank Lloyd Wright's office.
More about Rudolph Schindler (architect)7
Le Corbusier
Born
The planner of tower blocks also built himself a log cabin. Le Cabanon, the holiday hut at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin he finished in 1952 for his wife Yvonne, measures about 3.66 metres square, sized with his Modulor system so that bed, desk, washbasin and window all fall within reach. It is the most persuasive argument he ever made for how little space a good life needs. The chapel at Ronchamp, small and sculptural, shows the same hand working with light.
More about Le Corbusier8
Gerrit Rietveld
The Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, built in 1924 at the end of a row of ordinary brick terraces, is a small family home whose upper floor can be opened into one room or divided into bedrooms with sliding partitions. Its client, the widowed Truus Schröder, wanted a house that would let her children grow up freely, and she shaped the brief so closely that she is often treated as co-designer. She lived there for six decades. A cabinetmaker by training, Rietveld thought like one: every panel moves.
More about Gerrit Rietveld9
Alvar Aalto
Born
The Muuratsalo Experimental House, the summer retreat Aalto built from 1952 on an island in Lake Päijänne with his second wife Elissa, is a courtyard enclosed by walls patchworked with dozens of brick and tile patterns, a test bed for how materials weather. It is a holiday home first, with a sauna and a boat. His earlier work grew from a partnership with his first wife Aino Aalto, who shared design credit on houses and the Artek furniture that filled them.
More about Alvar Aalto10
Hassan Fathy
Born
Fathy argued that the poor deserved good architecture and that they already had the means to build it: mud brick, and the Nubian masons who could raise vaults and domes without timber formwork. New Gourna, the village he began near Luxor in the 1940s, put that into homes, a mosque and a market, and his book Architecture for the Poor tells the story candidly, including why the project stalled. Its shaded courtyards and wind catchers still teach climate design without machinery.
More about Hassan Fathy11
Luis Barragán
From the street in Mexico City's Tacubaya district his own house, built in 1948, looks like a plain grey wall. Inside, Barragán orchestrates light: a yellow-glazed corridor, a cantilevered staircase without a rail, a roof terrace walled in pink and white so that only the sky is visible. Now a museum and UNESCO site, it is small enough to visit by appointment in small groups. He credited the painter Jesús Reyes Ferreira with much of his thinking about colour.
More about Luis Barragán12
Carlo Scarpa
Scarpa made his name on alterations, shop interiors and one family tomb, and each rewards slow looking. The Olivetti showroom in Venice's Piazza San Marco packs mosaic floors, a floating stone stair and teak screens into a narrow shopfront; the Brion tomb at San Vito d'Altivole turns a corner of a village cemetery into water gardens and interlocking circles. He spent his career alongside Venetian glassblowers, plasterers and metalworkers, and detailed each joint like jewellery.
More about Carlo Scarpa13
Walter Segal
Born
Segal's method let people with no building experience put up their own homes: a timber frame on pad foundations, standard-sized boards and panels bolted rather than cut, no wet trades. He developed it for a temporary house in his own north London garden in the 1960s, and Lewisham Council then let tenants on its waiting list build two streets with it in the 1980s; Segal Close and Walters Way are still lived in and loved. The self-builders, not the architect, are the real authors here.
More about Walter Segal14
Lina Bo Bardi
Born
The Casa de Vidro, the glass house she built for herself and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi on a hillside outside São Paulo in 1951, floats on slim columns among the Atlantic forest, which has since grown up through the courtyard. It was filled with folk objects she collected alongside modern pieces. Her later work, even the large SESC Pompeia leisure centre, kept that human scale: she reused a factory and asked how families would actually spend a Saturday there.
More about Lina Bo Bardi15
Laurie Baker
Born
A Birmingham-born Quaker who settled in Kerala and spent half a century proving that cheap houses could be beautiful. His trademarks are rat-trap bond brick walls that save material and keep rooms cool, perforated brick jalis for ventilation and filler-slab roofs that use broken tiles instead of concrete. He built hundreds of homes, schools and chapels around Thiruvananthapuram, often for families on tight budgets, and trained local masons in his methods, which is why his influence is so visible in the region.
More about Laurie Baker16
Jørn Utzon
Born
After the Sydney Opera House saga, Utzon retreated to Mallorca and built Can Lis, finished in 1972, a cluster of small sandstone pavilions on a clifftop near Porto Petro. Each pavilion has a single job, cooking, sleeping or living, and the deep window frames in the living room are set so that you see only sea and sky. It shows the opposite side of the man behind one of the world's most famous buildings, and it is now run by a foundation as a residence for architects.
More about Jørn Utzon17
Geoffrey Bawa
Born
Bawa's most personal work is a house, a garden and a Colombo terrace. Number 11, 33rd Lane began as four small bungalows he knitted together into a sequence of courtyards and shaded rooms; Lunuganga, his country estate by a lagoon at Bentota, he reshaped over 50 years. Both show his gift for blurring inside and outside in a tropical climate. He worked with a talented team that included the artist Laki Senanayake and the designer Ena de Silva, whose crafts filled his buildings.
More about Geoffrey Bawa18
E. Fay Jones
Thorncrown Chapel, in the Ozark woods near Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was built in 1980 from timbers small enough for two workers to carry along a woodland path, so no heavy machinery would damage the site. The result is a lattice of crossed wooden braces and more than 400 windows, seating about 100, which feels like standing inside the forest canopy. Jones had been an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the chapel is the clearest heir to Wright's organic ideas on a modest scale.
More about E. Fay Jones19
Sverre Fehn
Born
Fehn treated every building as a conversation with the ground and the sky. The Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, opened in 1962, lets the trees on its site grow straight through a roof of thin concrete fins that filter the light into a shadowless northern glow. In Norway, the Glacier Museum at Fjærland and his small villas, such as Villa Busk on its rocky outcrop, show how a modest volume can make a whole landscape legible. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1997.
More about Sverre Fehn20
Glenn Murcutt
Born
Murcutt is the purest case on this list: a Pritzker laureate whose work is mostly houses and a handful of small public buildings, produced for decades from a one-person practice without a big office. His long, thin homes in rural New South Wales, such as the Magney House with its curved corrugated roof, use louvres, verandas and cross-breezes instead of air conditioning, and are designed around the sun's path at their exact site. He often quotes an Aboriginal saying about touching the earth lightly.
More about Glenn Murcutt21
Tadao Ando
Born
A former boxer with no formal architectural schooling, Ando made his name with a tiny terraced house in Osaka. The Azuma House of 1976 fills a narrow plot with a concrete box split by an open courtyard, so the family crosses the open air to reach the bathroom; it is uncompromising, and it insists that weather and light are part of home life. The Church of the Light in Ibaraki, finished in 1989 on a small budget, is a plain room with a cross cut into the wall behind the altar, and it needs nothing else.
More about Tadao Ando22
Peter Zumthor
Born
Trained as a cabinetmaker and long employed restoring historic buildings in Graubünden, Zumthor works slowly and builds little, and almost all of it is small. The Saint Benedict Chapel at Sumvitg is a shingled teardrop on an Alpine slope; the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel near Mechernich was built by local farmers, who stacked 112 tree trunks as a mould, poured concrete around them and then burned the timber out, leaving a charred, tear-shaped hollow open to the rain. Few buildings repay a pilgrimage so well.
More about Peter Zumthor23
Samuel Mockbee
Born
In 1993 Mockbee and D. K. Ruth founded the Rural Studio at Auburn University, sending architecture students to live in Hale County, Alabama, and design and build homes and community buildings for some of the poorest families in the United States. Early projects used hay bales, salvaged windscreens and old tyres; the later 20K House programme refines an affordable home that local builders can repeat. The students' labour is the heart of it, and the studio has continued for decades since Mockbee's death in 2001.
More about Samuel Mockbee24
Terunobu Fujimori
An architectural historian who started designing in his forties, Fujimori makes buildings that look as if they grew: houses with leeks or dandelions planted on the roof, charred-cedar walls and hand-split shingles. His teahouses are the joy, especially Takasugi-an of 2004, perched on two chestnut trunks in his home village of Chino and reached by a free-standing ladder. Friends and a volunteer group he calls the Jomon Company help with the rough handwork, which is part of the charm.
More about Terunobu Fujimori
